Part 5 (1/2)
”What about your wife!” Kate bellowed, shaking him. ”What happened?”
”Bear,” he said, pointing back in the direction from which he'd run.
”Grizzly attacked us. She's on the roof. Help her!”
”The roof of what?”
”One of the houAs! Help her!”
The memory of the grizzly female they had encountered on the road up flashed through Kate's mind. The hairs p.r.i.c.kling on the back of her neck, she cast a quick look around, saw no bears and stood to haul the man bodily to his feet. ”Help me get him into the truck,” she snapped at Mr. Baker.
Together they got him into the truck, Mrs. Baker close behind. Kate reached for Mandy's rifle. ”You two stay here with him,” she said, checking the chamber. ”I'll go round up the wife.”
”Ms. Shugak-” he began.
”Stay here!” she barked. Without waiting for a reply she pivoted on one heel and headed down the road between the mine buildings at a trot, head up, eyes alert, a fine sweat of nervous perspiration breaking out along her spine. She had the edge on vision and weaponry but the bear would have the edge on smell, size, strength, quickness and claws. She knew who she'd have put her money on.
Bears were odd beasts, she reminded herself; ninety-nine times 56 out of a hundred they'd pa.s.s ten feet in front of you, ignoring you, at most roaring a challenge or faking a charge to satisfy honor.
Yesterday morning at the creek had been the exception, the young male she'd run off from the meat cache far more the rule.
And the female with the stained muzzle? In which category did she belong?
Kate checked the safety a second time. It was still off. Good. She held the rifle in front of her, right finger inside the trigger guard. Always prepared. She and the Boy Scouts.
She cursed the couple who had picked this day to come up to the mine, cursed them for making her a hero, cursed herself for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and cursed them again for evidently coming unarmed into a region well known for its active bear population. Just the summer before, a grizzly had taken an eight-year-old boy in Skolai.
Didn't people read? Didn't they watch the news? Did they think all bears were funny and cuddly like Baloo? Like Charles II, Walt Disney had a lot to answer for.
The road turned right up the hill behind the mill. She followed it, mouth dry, into the cl.u.s.ter of houses the mine owners had provided for the manager and the senior staff and their families, ones with real running hot and cold water, electricity and plumbing. There were plenty of places all over America in 1911 that didn't have as much, but in 1911, with the price of copper what it was, money was no object, and Morgan-Mellon-Astor-Carnegie-Guggenheim- whoever had wanted to keep their upper-echelon employees happy and productive. The lower-echelon employees, i.e., the ones who got the copper out of the ground and loaded it on the railroad cars, stayed in the bunkhouse farther down the side of the hill and shared the bathroom with ninety-nine others.
The houses were small affairs built of the same faded, peeling red clapboard as the main buildings. There wasn't anyone on the roof of the first house in line, and the soft, slushy, rapidly melting snow hid what tracks there had been. She didn't hear the growl of an infuriated grizzly, either, and she was listening for it pretty hard. All that was audible was the roar of the Kanuyaq River, loud 57 enough to drown out the sound of an approaching bear until it was right on her.
”Lady?” she called. ”Lady? I've got a gun, I'm here to help. Your husband's okay. It's safe to come down now.” She walked forward.
One house. Around a corner and another. A cl.u.s.ter of scrub spruce and a third house, a fourth and a fifth without incident.
”Lady?” she called again, and cursed herself again, this time for not asking for the name. ”Lady, can you hear me? My name is Kate Shugak.
I've got a rifle. Don't be afraid, you can come down now.”
A sixth, a seventh, an eighth. The road wound around the ninth and Kate halted abruptly.
The woman lay in the middle of the road, soaked to the skin from the rapid melt of a winter's worth of snow, staring sightlessly at the sky.
Or she would have been, if she'd had any face left.
Her left arm was missing below the elbow, as was most of her belly and thighs. Betrs were notorious for exerting the least effort for the most result and went for the soft meat and the viscera first. The arm had most probably been lost in trying to fight off the inevitable.
Blood was everywhere, the salty copper smell of it strong in her nostrils, and the melting snow had kept it bright red, redder than the fading walls of the little house in the background. The resulting slush had mixed with the dirt track beneath and the area was a sea of churned-up mud in which the paw prints of a very large bear were prominent. The muddy, b.l.o.o.d.y prints led into the brush on the downhill side of the road.
She couldn't move.
This could have been me, she thought.
If I hadn't moved fast enough, gotten up the bank when I did, this could be me lying here. If the brush hadn't slowed her down coming after me, if Mutt hadn't been barking, if her cubs hadn't been bawling for her.
This could have been me.
58 She could almost see herself, sprawled on her back in the little swimming hole, sightless eyes staring up, the dark blood drifting out of the backwater to be s.n.a.t.c.hed into the swift, midstream current and washed downstream, into the river and the gulf beyond. How long before anyone would have known, if ever?
Her hands cramped, making her aware of how hard she was gripping the rifle. She swallowed and forced herself to move forward, focusing fiercely on one of the clearer prints, in which a puddle of reddish water was already beginning to form. About six or seven hundred pounds, she estimated, standing six to eight feet.
The pink shreds in the grizzly's claws had been human flesh.
She looked away, at the fading wall of the house, long strips of paint peeling from its sides, and swallowed hard. Dimly, her own words echoed in her head. It was that hundredth bear you had to watch out for.
She heard a sound behind her and spun around, rifle at the ready, to find Mrs. Baker retching emptily on one side of the road. Mr. Baker, white to the lips, was patting her shoulders soothingly.
”Oh great,” Kate said before she thought. ”Mandy is going to kill me.”
59.
George Perry ground-looped 50 Papa on a short final into Niniltna.
Two circ.u.mstances contributed to this unfortunate occurrence.
One, there was a fourteen-inch rut halfway down the icy surface of the 4,800-foot airstrip, which the latest grader pa.s.s had missed and which the left front tire on 50 Papa had the misfortune to eaten precisely at touchdown.
Two, Ben Bingley was barfing down the back of his neck at the time.
Kate drove up with the Bakers and the bereaved husband in time to see the red and white two-seater pull sharply to the left, losing its center of gravity just long enough to lean over and catch the ground with the tip of the left wing. Newton and inertia took care of the rest as the plane completed a snap roll so perfect it would have brought tears to the eyes of an 60 Air Force flight instructor if only it hadn't been performed at zero alt.i.tude.
In short, the plane flipped over and pancaked flat on its back. Under the beneficent rays of the spring sun, the surface of the airstrip had been reduced to a foot of packed snow, submerged beneath an inch of water, providing a marvelous surface for a nice long gliding slide.
Five-zero Papa slid very well indeed, on a direct line heading for Mandy's truck as it pulled to a halt in front of the post office. It was a combination skid and spin; in fact 50 Papa was going around on its back like a slow top for the second time, the ripping sound of tearing wing fabric clearly audible to the stupefied witnesses in the cab of Mandy's truck, just as the plane ran into them. Kate looked down, fascinated, as one wing slid smoothly between the front and back tires, and looked up just in time to see the wheel of one landing gear hit the top of the driver's- side door with a solid thud that shook the cab and rattled the pa.s.sengers in it, although not as much as the grizzly had done earlier.
The window bowed inward but did not break. There was the unmistakable groan of bending metal, though. Kate, a little lightheaded, thought that Mandy might not notice the dented b.u.mper and the clawed finish and the need for a front-end alignment on her brand new truck after all.
Her second thought was to wonder how full the Super Cub's tanks were, one of which was at present resting directly beneath her a.s.s.
Foolishly, she grabbed for the handle and shoved. The door, the right gear of the plane jammed solidly against it, unsurprisingly did not budge. ”Out!” she roared. ”Out! OUT! OUT!” Mr. Baker fumbled with the pa.s.senger door and stumbled to the ground. Kate, not standing on ceremony, shoved Mrs. Baker and the husband out after him and scrambled out herself to run around the truck. She sniffed, tense. No smell of gasoline.
She went around to the Cub's right side and squatted to fold up the door. A smell hit her in the face like a blow, powerful 61 enough to knock her on her b.u.t.t. It wasn't gasoline, it was vomit.
She took a couple of deep, gasping breaths, m.u.f.fled her face with a sleeve and spoke through it. ”George, are you okay?”
George looked at her, still suspended upside down in his seat harness, bits of brown something spattered across the back of his head and neck.
”I hate breakup,” he said.