Breakup Page 6

  It didn’t help when Kate jammed on the brakes and no one was wearing a seat belt.

  “What—” Mr. Baker started to say.

  There was an audible gasp from Mrs. Baker, and Mr. Baker looked around to see a grizzly explode out of the brush onto the road, catch sight of the big red truck, apply its own brakes by application of hindquarters to the surface and slide to a halt six inches off the front bumper.

  “Big one,” Kate observed, trying to sound a little bored and succeeding, she was pleased to note, fairly well.

  Mr. Baker swallowed audibly. Mrs. Baker might have whimpered. Neither was in any state of mind to hear the breathless quality in their fearless guide’s voice. A casual glance over her shoulder reassured Kate that Mandy’s .30-06 was hanging on the gun rack in the back window as usual. Good to know.

  The bear was a female in the prime of life, with a thick, glossy brown coat, loose around her body after her winter nap. In the very short space of time granted for reflection, Kate estimated the bear’s weight at approximately seven hundred pounds.

  Picking herself up briskly out of a puddle of slush, the bear let forth a roar of outrage, lowered her head and charged with a force and speed unpleasantly reminiscent to Kate of the previous morning. All seven hundred pounds hit hard. A high-pitched scream sounded from Mrs. Baker. “Oh my God!” cried Mr. Baker, and a grim Kate, who had automatically thrown out the clutch when she slammed on the brake, held on to the steering wheel with both hands as the truck skidded back at least four feet.

  The grizzly roared and rammed again. The truck slid back again, but the second ramming was less enthusiastic, and this time Kate had managed to shift into second before the bear hit, so the backward motion was only three feet and change. The grizzly bawled defiance a third time, reared up on her hind legs and made one swipe with a paw at the front bumper, which resulted in a screech of tearing metal. She placed her forepaws on the hood of the truck and did a violent push-up. Her claws left parallel grooves behind on the brand-new truck’s brand-new paint job. The whole front end sank two feet, the shock absorbers groaning beneath the strain, and bounced back up again, so that Kate’s head nearly ricocheted off the ceiling. As he was a foot taller than she was, Mr. Baker’s did.

  Kate heard his curse as if from a great distance. Time seemed to have decelerated somehow, as if they and the bear were passing through deep water, the weight of it slowing action as well as reaction. There was no time to be afraid, but there was all the time in the world to observe. This bear was a beauty, standing eight feet or so at the shoulder. Her hump was the size of a small mountain, well formed and mature. There were dark red stains around her nose, mouth and throat, indicating a recent feeding, in which case Kate couldn’t see what she had to be so cranky about. The silver tips of her coat caught the rays of the morning sun.

  There were no signs of a cub, which would have gone a long way toward explaining her throwing down the gauntlet to a top-of-the-line Ford four-wheel-drive, one of the few mobile things in the Park that outweighed her. She reared up on her hind legs again, front legs curving in classic confrontational stance. Kate examined the claws revealed thereby with detached interest. Shreds of something pale were caught between the claws of the right paw.

  The bear gnashed her teeth at them. The clicking sound of incisor upon incisor was clearly audible inside the cab. It sounded just like an axe chopping wood, in fact just like yesterday’s visitor, only louder, more solid and somehow infinitely more threatening. Someone whimpered.

  The bear gave a fourth and final bellow, dropped to all fours, whirled and charged headfirst through a thick stand of mountain hemlock, which proved less unyielding than the Ford’s front end. The green branches crashed together, and as they quivered to an indignant standstill in the grizzly’s wake, time returned to its normal steady passage.

  It was quiet in the cab of the truck for quite a while. At last Mr. Baker stirred. “What,” he said, striving for an even tone despite the beads of sweat popping out on his forehead, “may I ask, was that extraordinary creature?”

  “That?” Kate said, and had to clear her throat. “Oh. That would be your basic brown, or grizzly, bear. Ursus arctos horribilis. An omnivorous North American mammal with a plantigrade gait. Plantigrade,” she explained kindly, “means it uses the entire sole of its foot in walking. Homo sapiens is also a plantigrade mammal.” It was difficult to shake off the pedant, Kate discovered, once she got hold of the scruff of your neck.

  “Indeed.”

  “It’s warming up,” she added, “so they’re waking up.”

  Mr. Baker refrained from remarking on the superfluity of Kate’s last statement and turned to his wife. “Are you quite all right, my dear?”

  Mrs. Baker shifted in her seat. Her voice was thin but steady. “Ms. Shugak, don’t you think we should, perhaps, drive on?”

  “Certainly,” Kate said, because the West Coast has its end to hold up, too. She let out the clutch and set off once again up the road to the mine, only very slightly grinding the gears. “The indigenous population of this area is largely Athabascan, but there has been a good deal of immigration from other parts of the state over the years—”

  A mile later the road mercifully ended in a cluster of shabby clapboard buildings, all painted the same fading red with white trim. Kate parked the truck in front of what had been the old mess hall and they got out to look at the view.

  It was sensational. The overcast had cleared and they were fifteen hundred feet up, with the blue-white peaks of the Quilak Mountains at their backs, stretching southeast to northwest, uncompromisingly beautiful and, Kate was pleased to see, effortlessly outhaughtying the Bakers. “Prince William Sound is that way,” Kate said, pointing south. “And this”—a sweep of arm indicated a wedge of area that stretched from horizon to horizon—“is the Park. This valley is pretty much the Park’s center, and where most of the people in it live. Just around that bluff, you can’t see it from here, is a little plateau, we call it the Step. That’s where Park Headquarters is. And see the glaciers?”

  It would have been hard to miss them. There were half a dozen in sight, beginning with the Kanuyaq, a sheet of translucent blue ice a hundred feet tall that formed the head of the Kanuyaq River. Water opaque with gray glacial silt roared downstream at the base of the cliff on which they stood. The glacier calved as they watched, an immense shard of blue-green crystal detaching from the main body of ice to fall ponderously into the river. A few seconds later the Crack! boom! crash! splash! reached them.

  The swift-moving surface of the river swelled into a wave that slammed into both banks at the same time. It uprooted a clump of small alders and washed out a boulder the size of Gibraltar, rolling it downstream as if it were of no more consequence than a glass marble.

  Even the Bakers seemed impressed. “Spectacular, really,” said Mr. Baker.

  It was better than nothing, and Kate had begun to shepherd them toward the mill when Mrs. Baker said, “Why, who is that, do you suppose?”

  Kate heard a sobbing kind of shout and turned to see a man stumble out from behind what had been the company store. He fell practically at their feet. “Help me,” he said, clawing at Kate’s legs. “Help me.” He fell forward, gasping for breath.

  She knelt and took hold of the man’s shoulders. “What is it, mister? What’s wrong?”

  “My wife, my wife!”

  “What about your wife?”

  His voice rose to a scream. “My wife! My wife!”

  “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 houses! Help her!”

  The memory of the grizzly female they had encountered on the road up flashed through Kate’s mind. The hairs prickling 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 out of a hundred they’d pass 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. Her 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 cluster 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 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 cluster 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. Bears 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, bloody 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.

  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 snatched 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.”

  Six

  GEORGE PERRY GROUND-LOOPED 50 Papa on a short final into Niniltna.

  Two circumstances 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 pass had missed and which the left front tire on 50 Papa had the misfortune to catch 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 Air Force flight instructor if only it hadn’t been performed at zero altitude.

  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 passengers 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 light-headed, thought that Mandy might not notice the dented bumper 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 ass.

  Foo
lishly, 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 passenger 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 enough to knock her on her butt. It wasn’t gasoline, it was vomit. She took a couple of deep, gasping breaths, muffled 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.

  “Never a dull moment,” Kate agreed.

  A rustle and the snap of a buckle came from the seat behind him. “No!” George said. “Ben, don’t—”

  But Ben did, releasing the buckle on his seat belt. He fell heavily on his head and shoulders against the ceiling of the fuselage. A cry of pain and some futile thrashing around followed, after which George contributed some acerbic commentary, because he now could not slide his seat back to get out. Matters did not improve when Ben threw up again.

  “AUUGHHHH!” said George. He braced his feet up against the dash, reached for the lever and shoved with all his might. The seat slid back and hit Ben in the butt. Ben tumbled backwards in a corkscrew somersault into the pile of U.S. Postal Service mail sacks that had been piled on the floor in back of his seat and were now piled on the ceiling. It was too much for him and he threw up for the third time.

  George braced himself on one arm, popped his harness buckle and was outside and on his feet a moment later. Thin-lipped and furious, he addressed the area in language suitable to the situation. George was an ex-helicopter pilot who had learned his trade under fire in Vietnam and perfected it on the TransAlaska Pipeline before deserting the rotor for fixed wing and starting an air taxi in the Park. He was also one of five ex-husbands of Ramona Halford, the right-wing state senator representing the area of Alaska that included the Park, which all by itself had been an education in expletive deleted.