CHAPTER 21
Dutch McCrae jerked his head up from his drunken doze, his broad, bearded, sweaty face bronzed by the dancing firelight. “What was that?”
“Holy moly—that was loud!” said Pinkerton Leech Davis, looking around warily.
Again, came the bugling cry, echoing across the night, the echoes dwindling as they chased each other toward the star-filled sky.
“It’s back,” Nathan whispered dreadfully beside Angus.
Slowly, Angus reached back for his Spencer .56, pumped a cartridge into the chamber, and rested the long gun across his thighs.
Dutch turned to him. “That’s him, ain’t it? He’s back.”
“Easy,” Angus said. “He won’t come near the fire.”
The horses whickered edgily, pulling at their picket line.
While the others stared, frozen with terror, into the murky darkness beyond the fire, a darkness alive now with an even darker specter, Angus reached forward and chunked more wood on the fire, building up the flames, glowing cinders spiraling as they rose toward the pine boughs.
Another bugling cry, even louder than before, vaulted across the night.
Beside Angus, Nathan gasped, stiffened.
“He’s huntin’ us,” Dutch said, his dark eyes wide as ’dobe dollars, his broad, lumpy chest rising and falling sharply. “Sure as donuts an’ coffee—he’s huntin’ us.” He turned to Angus. “Ain’t he?”
Angus didn’t say anything. There was no point in pouring more proverbial fuel on the fire of the man’s fears. Fear had brought Dutch near the edge of desperation, and you just never knew what such a man might do. Like people lost in the wilderness—sometimes they shed rationality and did the opposite of what they should do. Angus didn’t like having to contend with the bear . . . another damn bear! . . . and Dutch, too.
“Ain’t he, Jackson?” Dutch said, turning to the head Pinkerton sitting to his left. “He’s huntin’ us.”
Jackson turned to him. “Shut up, Dutch. Keep it together.”
Another screeching wail of ancient, savage fury rolled across the night, sucked straight up out of the sky as though by some unseen god. Another followed, louder than the previous one. Now Angus could hear thrashing, snapping sounds off in the darkness, straight out ahead of him, beyond the horses.
“Oh, hell,” Dutch said, rolling his head around as though to loosen the muscles in his neck. “He’s comin’ closer. He’s huntin’ us, sure enough, an’ don’t you go tryin’ to tell me this fire is gonna keep him away, Buchanon!”
One of the horses whinnied and reared, craning his neck to peer into the darkness behind him.
“Easy, easy,” Angus told them, raising his voice, pushing off the ground with his hand, rising with a grunt, old knees creaking. “Nate, you stay here. I’m gonna try to settle the horses.”
“Don’t go far, Gramp . . . I mean, Angus.”
Angus glanced at him in vague surprise at the moniker he’d clipped, obviously embarrassed by it. Nate had never called him anything but Angus before. Holding the Spencer in his lone hand, the rear stock clamped under his arm, he strode around the fire and out to where the horses were whickering and skitter-stepping, pulling at their halter ropes tied to the taut picket line strung between two large aspens. The aspen leaves made faint scratching sounds as a slight, vagrant breeze toyed with them.
Save the blows and whickers of the nervous horses and the leaves, the wheezing, crackling of the fire behind Angus, the night was eerily silent.
“Easy, fellas,” he said, running his hand down the snout of Nate’s steeldust. “All is well. He won’t come near the fire.” At least, I don’t think he will, he silently, begrudgingly added to himself.
He could hear the bear thrashing around in the brush up a rise maybe seventy yards away, if he remembered correctly from his survey of the area before dark. The thrashing was growing gradually louder.
Another bugling wail.
The horses leaped together like puppets joined by the same string.
Behind Angus, Dutch said, “Damn!”
The big man gained his feet unsteadily, drunkenly, and glared at Angus, pointing angrily. “Don’t you tell me this little bitty fire is gonna keep that bruin away, old man!”
Nate cast his wide-eyed, frightened gaze from Dutch to Angus, as though he wanted reassurance, too.
Angus turned to Jackson. “Keep him quiet.”
Jackson turned to Dutch. “Sit down, Dutch. Sit down and keep your damn trap shut!” He reached into his saddlebags for a bottle, tossed it to the big, bearded man standing to his right. Dutch caught the bottle against his chest, looked down at it in hushed surprise. Slowly, he sank back down against his saddle.
Angus stepped out away from the horses. Judging by the continuing thrashing, snapping, and crackling sounds, the bear had moved to Angus’s right. It seemed to keep moving in that direction. Angus could hear it grunting and blowing, growling deep in its chest, stopping occasionally to loose another of those bone-splintering menacing bugling cries of ancestral fury. Angus wondered what had spawned such hatred.
Had he and his trail partners intruded on territory the bruin had claimed as his own? If so, he’d claimed a broad territory. Angus and the others had ridden a good way since the first time they’d seen the beast in the brush near the top of the ridge.
Maybe it was after the horses.
Or . . . and this was even more troubling:
Had the bruin acquired a taste for human flesh?
Angus knew that some bears did. Human flesh was a delicacy that, once acquired, they could not resist.
The thought tied a knot in his guts, made his mouth go dry.
“Ah, hell, I think he’s over there now!” Dutch yelled as he twisted around to peer into the darkness behind him.
Again, the horses stirred. They all stared in the same direction, the same direction in which Angus found himself staring now, as were the others around the fire. The thrashing sounds told him that the beast had circled the camp and was now to the west of it. Also, judging by the sounds, he was moving closer.
Gradually, but surely . . .
Angus moved out away from the horses, walking around the camp to the west side of it. He strode out into the darkness. He took two more steps, feeling as though he were swimming out in a dark ocean away from the safety of an anchored boat. He stopped, shouldered the Spencer, and fired into the darkness from where the thrashing was now coming.
He dropped to a knee, racked another cartridge into the Spencer’s action, and fired another round, then another.
That evoked another screeching, bugling, grating roar that seemed to infect the entire night, the entire world with the sheer, spine-splintering menace of it.
Angus fired again and again until he’d fired all seven shots, the big-calibers gun’s roar replacing the horrific cries of the grizzly.
Another bugling cry, more thrashing.
Only, now the thrashing sounds were dwindling. The bear was moving away, likely up the western ridge. Angus held the Spencer under his arm, listening to the fading sounds of the bruin’s retreat.
They faded to silence.
The silence was heavy. Complete. All Angus could hear was the ringing in his ears from the shots he’d fired.
He used the rifle to lever himself to his feet. His legs were stiff from fear. Beneath the ringing in his ears, he could hear his knees popping. His ankles ached. He ambled back to camp. All three men and Nate stood with their rifles in their hands, gazing expectantly at Angus.
“The damn thing gone?” Jackson said.
Angus nodded. “I may have hit him—I don’t know. Normally, a fifty-six would take down a bear . . . even a grizzly. But this one—” He shook his head as he entered the camp and walked over to a log against which he’d propped his saddle. “Not sure about this fella. Reminds me too much . . . too damn much . . .”
With a sigh, he sat down on the log, rested the Spencer across his thighs, withdrew the spring assembly from the butt plate, and began refilling the tube with fresh shells from his cartridge belt.
“Of last year’s bear . . . Grandpa?” Nate said, haltingly, looking at Angus as though wondering how the moniker would register.
Angus smiled at him, tenderly, nodding slowly. “Yeah . . . like last year’s bear.”
“Well, if we can’t kill it,” Dutch said while the other two Pinkertons retook their own places around the fire, “what the hell we gonna do if it comes again?”
“Time we became good God-fearin’ men, I reckon,” said Leech Davis with a dry chuckle, sipping from his coffee cup.
“Oh, we can kill it,” Angus said. “The fifty-six will kill it. I just need a heart shot. I wounded him before, an’ that’s likely why he’s so mad. Given time, he’d bleed to death . . .”
“If he doesn’t kill us first,” Jackson said, staring into his own coffee cup as though looking for the answer to their travails and finding none.
“Let’s just hope he wanders away an’ dies,” Angus said, shoving the loaded tube back into the Spencer’s stock and flicking the steel locking latch home. “That’s most likely what he’ll do now. You fellas get some sleep. I’ll keep watch.” He glanced at Nate. “You, too, boy. Try to get some shuteye.”
Nate gave a stiff nod, casting his wary gaze off into the darkness where they’d last heard the bear. He sank low against his saddle and drew his blankets up to his chin, gazing skyward.
He was still uneasy, of course. As was Angus. None of them were likely to get much sleep, but he wanted the others to try. They needed to be rested for the next day’s trek higher into the hills. He was as wide awake as he’d ever been. No way he was going to get any snooze time in. He hadn’t felt this uneasy since the war, when he and the other men in his platoon had sat up late without a fire, listening for Union snipers who had tried to pick them off one at a time.
It was to one such sniper Angus had lost his arm.
Before he’d passed out, he’d shot the bluebelly out of the tree where he’d hunkered like a damn, Springfield-wielding monkey and done a wicked, little rebel dance over him. Next thing he knew, he was on a surgeon’s table having his arm sawed off without benefit of anything but whiskey— raw, Smoky Mountain distilled white lightning. He couldn’t drink the stuff anymore. He preferred his own malty, dark ale to which no bad memories clung.
He refilled his coffee pot from the pot sitting on a flat rock in the fire ring. He looked up at Dutch, who remained standing where he’d been standing when Angus had returned to camp—at the edge of the firelight, gazing out into the darkness, holding his Winchester in both hands across his belly.
“Dutch,” Angus said. “Lay down, get some sleep. I’ll keep watch.”
Dutch turned to him, gave an angry chuff. “Yeah . . . right.”
He tossed down his hat, leaned his rifle against a rock to the right of his saddle, then sank down into his bedroll. He picked up the bottle Jackson had tossed him, popped the cork, and took two deep swallows. Angus heard the bubble rising and falling as the man’s throat moved as he drank.
Dutch sighed, returned the cork to the bottle, and turned over on his side, giving his back to Angus.
Angus turned to Nate, who lay gazing up at the stars. Angus knew he wasn’t seeing the stars. He was seeing that big bruin running up the slope toward him, getting bigger and bigger before him, muscles rippling, long fur jostling in the wind. Eyes large and flat with all the savage indifference of the vast, cold universe, which cared nothing about men or beasts or anything else except feeding itself. When a beast like that comes running at you, the world quickly becomes Godless.
“Angus?”
Angus sipped his coffee and looked down at Nate lying in his blankets to his right. “What happened to Grandpa?” He smiled.
Nate blushed. “I was just trying it out.”
“I thought it came out all right.”
“Did you?”
Angus shrugged a bony shoulder.
“All right, then—Grandpa?”
“Yes, son?”
“When that bear was running after Dutch an’ me . . . on that slope . . . I could have shot him, but I froze.” Nate looked at Angus, eyes deeply troubled. “It was like my finger turned to stone. I couldn’t pull the trigger.”
Angus ruffled the boy’s hair. “It happens. Don’t worry about it. You’re young. You’ll outgrow your fears. Some of them, anyway, though just between you an’ me, I’ll never outlive the fear of a bruin like that one!”
“You afraid, Angus?”
“Only a fool wouldn’t be afraid, boy. The trick is not to let your fear get in the way of what needs to be done. Believe me, that’s some trick. It takes experience, practice. Try to get some sleep now. I’ll keep watch. You’re safe.”
“All right. Good night.”
“Good night, boy.”
Angus sat on the log, sipping his coffee, occasionally adding wood to the fire, keeping it built up.
Only one of the other men was snoring. That was Leech.
Neither Jackson nor Dutch McCrae were asleep. Or, if they were, it was a restive sleep, both men moving around as though to get comfortable. Finally, the whiskey must have done its work, for about an hour after he’d turned in, Dutch started to snore albeit intermittently between mutterings. Nate lay on his side, facing Angus. Angus thought he was asleep. At least, he didn’t move around much. He was giving it a good try, anyway.
Angus smiled.
Grandpa . . .
That made him think of Hunter and Annabelle. He wanted nothing more than for his son and daughter-in-law to start dropping little Buchanon urchins all over the Box Bar B while Angus still had enough wits about him to enjoy the rascals, to bounce them on his knee, lift them onto ponies and to lead them around the corral. If he was lucky enough, maybe he’d even live long enough to give the oldest one his first rifle and to teach him how to shoot it.
He wouldn’t be able to take him up here, however, into his beloved mountains.
He had little doubt this would be his last trek into these vast, mysterious, majestic reaches.
Yes, still vast and majestic despite their bear problem. It didn’t ruin the trip for Angus though he wouldn’t doubt if the Pinkertons decided they didn’t really need to hunt down their quarry as badly as they’d thought, and elect to head back to lower, safer ground.
Angus wouldn’t hold it against them.
They weren’t used to this sort of thing. Hell, Angus had gotten used to it last summer—far too used to it—and his blood was still frozen in his veins, his marrow turned to lead in his bones. Still, the wild was a mystery. A beguiling one at that. One he lived in dread of finally having to turn his back on for good, of having to restrict his adventures to his upstairs bedroom back at the Box Bar B headquarters . . . to his memories.
A bugling cry caromed across the night. It was like a clenched fist that nearly knocked Angus off his log. He dropped his coffee cup and, old heart racing, reached for the Spencer.