Heartbroke Bay (29 page)
Authors: Lynn D'urso
Hans waggles a cup at Hannah to signal for more coffee. “Yep. Tied her to a tree and shaved her head. Then tarred her.”
“Jesus Christ!” yelped Dutch. Hannah imagines the smell of hot tar on flesh and feels nauseous.
“What’d he do that for?” rumbled Harky.
Hans placed the cup on the table and spread both hands flat. “Well, I guess he didn’t like the way she was going off with the field hand.”
Something inside Hannah quivers at the smirk in her husband’s voice. “How was he punished?”
“Punished?” Hans wrinkles his forehead to simulate puzzlement. Michael stiffens in his chair.
“Yes!” demands Hannah. “For what he did to his wife?”
Hans motioned for Dutch to pass the bannock. “Hell, he wasn’t punished,” he replied casually. “She was the one. She’d been with another man.”
That afternoon Hannah and Michael recline on the beach, embracing to the sound of the tympanic surf. When they walk back to their clothes, panting and brushing the sand from each other’s skin, they find pressed into the damp grit alongside their garments the fresh tracks of a bear. And atop Hannah’s skirt are three feathers: two black and shining primaries from a raven’s wing and a single gray quill from a gull.
October 1 (or thereabout)Dear Diary,What remarkable changes come in the course of our lives. I hardly feel myself to be the same woman who married so impulsively just a year ago. Never could I have imagined myself to be in this position: in this wilderness, becoming rapidly rich beyond my wildest expectations, an adventuress of a sort I cannot believe.It is apparent that we must leave soon. The snow is halfway down the mountains, but the gold comes so well now that the men only discuss departing in the abstract, as if winter will stay its arrival until we have recovered every last gram. They work like Trojans and eat like bears. It is nothing to consume two entire salmon, perhaps twelve pounds or more of food in a single meal. Fortunately, there have been many fish in the streams, and it has been a simple matter for Michael to catch enough to feed us by using a gaff attached to a long pole to snag them from the pools. However, their numbers seem to be declining recently, and the meat of those remaining is becoming quite poor in quality. I fear for when even these are gone. Yet when I attempt to discuss our departure with Hans, he only replies that we must remain until we have “enough.”
The castaways wake to the glitter of frost. Each leaf and blade of grass is coated in gleaming crystals. In the rivers, the strength of the salmon is at an end and the fish lie gasping in the shallows, spent and dying from the effort of consummation.
Severts shoulders a canvas sack, the shotgun, and his fish gaff before bidding the men good-bye, then whispers to Hannah as she gathers wood from the pile behind the cabin that he longs to be with her.
“My work,” she replies in a low voice, shaking her head. “It is too neglected.” But she makes a promise for tomorrow as he turns to go.
A mile from the cabin Michael pauses beside a shallow stream and inspects the salmon gathered there. The bodies of those remaining are marked with bars of red and green. The tattered edges of their fins and tails fall away in loose patches. The surviving males have become hook-jawed and fiercely toothed from an inner alchemy of raging hormones that contort their bodies into single-minded fighting and mating machines. The females, too, are ragged and beaten from the battle of procreation. White fungus eats at their skins, and the lifeless remains of their brothers and sisters float in stinking shoals along the banks.
Michael watches carefully, hoping to spot a new arrival still fit for eating. Upstream, a splashing louder and more insistent than the thrashing of dying salmon draws his attention to the narrow throat of a falls. At first he sees nothing except the water tumbling over a collection of large, light-colored stones. When one of the stones appears to move, he wonders, then stares. Standing with its back to him, the round, full body of some animal feigns the shape of a boulder, then raises its head, becoming a bear. Stepping into a shaft of sunlight, the fur along its back glows gold, the color of pure bullion.
The bear grabs at a salmon, plunging its snout into the water and batting with its paws. When the flurry of action is over, a fish as long as Michael’s forearm struggles in its jaws. Holding its prize aloft, the animal walks splashing and sloshing from the river.
“Jesus, Joseph, and Mary,” Michael whispers. “Dutch wasn’t lying.”
The creature’s hide is yellow in the sun. A crucifix of storm-colored fur marks its shoulders. Black eyes and snout stand out against a blond ruff around its face. It is a beautiful creature, and as it sets itself to tearing at the salmon, its skin ripples with the play of great muscles.
Replete from weeks of gluttony and belly-rolled in fat, the bear is intent only on the finest, oiliest parts of the salmon. Slitting open the belly with one ivory-colored claw, it releases a flood of pearly orange eggs, slurping up the caviar with rapid darts of its tongue. Next it nibbles at the head, tilting its face delicately to one side to bite at the brains. As it gnaws, Michael imagines the sound of cartilage crunching.
The bear moves, repositioning itself to pin the salmon to the ground with one broad paw. Beads of water flicker in the golden light along its bulging belly. Its shoulders are the color of polished bronze.
Droplets of mist from the waterfall tingle against Michael’s face, carrying his scent away from the bear. He steps slowly and carefully closer, raising the gun. The white noise of the river covers the sound of his tread.
“Whatever you’re worth, you beauty, you’re mine.”
A squeeze of the trigger splits the light and the mist with gunfire, and Severts feels the weapon kick. A pattern of buckshot slams the bear’s side, erupting a burst of shining water from its fur. Leaping cat-quick and hunchbacked into the air, it falls to the ground, snarling and snapping at the pain in its side.
The report of the shotgun seems to extinguish the murmur and chatter of the river; roosting eagles and foraging gulls explode into a thunder of wings and cries. Thrashing furiously, the wounded animal bites at itself and screams, piercing the air with a bayonet shriek of pain. The tortured wailing staggers Michael back, stopping his heart, and from the deepest place of regret he moans, “Oh God, what have I done?”
Desperate to stop the cries, he raises the shotgun and fires the second barrel, missing and blowing clots of moss and dirt from the ground.
At the second shot, the bear flails to its feet and springs for the underbrush. Trees shake and limbs break as it fights through the thicket, running for its life.
Frantic, the empty shotgun naked in his hand, Michael throws his pack to the ground and tears at the flap for more ammunition. Thumbing shells one at a time into the breech, he fumbles to reload. Trembling, he sits back on his haunches, gripping the gun in both hands, and listens to the diminishing cries.
As he sits frozen on the bank of the river, time passes in an unmeasured gap. The air is heavy with the smell of decaying fish, and the birds do not return. The forest closes in around the damage done by the fleeing bear.
After a while, a raven drops from the sky into the green gulley formed by the trees on either side of the river. The
whoosh-whoosh
of its heavy wings wakes Michael from his stunned reverie, and he rises to his feet, stroking the wooden stock of the shotgun to gather courage.
It’s probably dead
, he tells himself.
Dead of its wound
. Then he sets out on the blood trail to recover the meat. And a hide more precious than gold.
whoosh-whoosh
of its heavy wings wakes Michael from his stunned reverie, and he rises to his feet, stroking the wooden stock of the shotgun to gather courage.
It’s probably dead
, he tells himself.
Dead of its wound
. Then he sets out on the blood trail to recover the meat. And a hide more precious than gold.
For the first part of the morning, drops of blood show dark and drying against the green of the forest, and he follows slowly, pausing often to peer into the brush, fearing an ambush by the pain-maddened bear. As the day grows longer, the blood trail grows fresher, until the drops and streaks began to glisten among the leaves.
In late afternoon, he finds where the bear lay for a moment behind the trunk of a fallen tree. There are crushed ferns, sticky with blood, and a rank smell in the air. Somewhere just ahead a Steller’s jay shrieks; his pulse thunders into his ears. He freezes, unable to force himself ahead.
Better wait a bit, let it lose more blood.
Better wait a bit, let it lose more blood.
A kettledrum sound rumbles up from the ground, vibrating into a drumroll that begins to shake the log he leans against. The earth dances and jerks beneath his feet, rolling in a succession of small waves until the branches overhead appear to shiver, then whip back and forth as the earthquake builds into a series of sharp, hard jolts that nearly knock Michael down.
The tremor is over before his already-overheating fear of the bear can build into a screaming panic. Gripping a branch of the fallen tree, he stares wildly about, certain an attack of some variety is coming.
A minute passes, then five before his heartbeat begins to calm and reason returns. “An earthquake,” he tells himself aloud. “It’s over.” And as if to convince himself further, “No harm done.”
He considers abandoning the hunt, but remembering the exotic shine of the bear’s fur, imagines it his, and considers what its sale might bring.
That money’s mine,
he says to himself.
No partners to split with this time.
And he starts down the trail of blood again.
That money’s mine,
he says to himself.
No partners to split with this time.
And he starts down the trail of blood again.
The trail leads inland, between steep hills and up draws, climbing toward a ridge that looks down on the glacier. As the land rises, the air becomes colder. The ground grows hard and frozen underfoot.
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