When the Legends Die (31 page)

Why had he come back, anyway? Because he saw a bear that he thought was a grizzly and got the idea that he had to kill it. Why? Because he was Killer Tom Black and wanted to forget that he was an Indian, that’s why!

He laughed at that, a snorting laugh of derision. Killer Tom Black, the Indian who was a devil-killer, was just newspaper stuff, publicity. All right, so he had killed a horse or two. So he had a grudge—a lot of gravel in his craw, as Dr. Ferguson put it—and he took it out on the broncs. He made a reputation and he lived up to it, gave the crowds what they wanted. But that was all over now, over and past. He had got that out of his system. Now he was going back and ride for points, for money, and wind up his career in a few more seasons with a record they would be shooting at for a long time to come.

He felt the rain trickling under him again, and the smoke in his eyes, and he reminded himself that he wasn’t in the arena or anywhere near it. He was right here, in this miserable camp, waiting for the cold rain to let up so he could go looking for that bear again. And the whole thing seemed very stupid. The more he thought about it, the more he felt like a fool. He had lived with everything that bear represented for a long time. He could go on living with it, he decided. As soon as this rain stopped he would dry his gear, pack up, and get out of here.

With that thought, a decision made, he felt more at ease. He built up the fire again, found a dry spot to sit, and dozed in the warmth. When he wakened in midafternoon the rain had begun to slacken. Another hour and it had eased to a drizzle and the sky had begun to clear.

He needed more wood. He picked up his ax and started to leave his shelter, and his eye was caught by a movement down at the stream. He stopped, looked again, saw a doe and two fawns come out of the brush. The doe sniffed the air, swiveled her big ears, curious. She was looking upstream. He carefully laid down the ax and picked up the rifle, got the doe in the sights. She was not fifty yards away. He fired, killed her with one clean shot. The fawns whirled, lunged into the brush, and he took his knife and hurried down the slope to bleed the doe, smiling to himself. He had been hungry for red meat, for venison, and here it was, practically in his frying pan.

He bled the doe clean, then butchered out one loin and took it back to his camp, exulting. He chopped dry wood from the dead pine, built up his fire, cut a slice of venison and set it to cook. He hung his blanket where it would catch some of the fire’s heat, hoping to dry it out before he tried to sleep in it.

The venison cooked with a tantalizing odor. It had been a long time since he had eaten venison. Finally it was done enough. He put it on his tin plate, cut another slice and set it to cook, and began to eat. The first few mouthfuls tasted wonderful. Then the taste began to change, he didn’t know why. He put more salt on it, and that helped. He finished the first slice. The second slice was ready, but he left it in the frying pan. Something was bothering him, and he was angry at himself for being bothered. Finally he exclaimed aloud, “I didn’t sing the deer chant, either!” He said it defiantly, then was silent, abashed and somehow sorry he had said it. He took the second slice onto his plate, cut into it. It was too done, but he ate it, telling himself that at least he wasn’t wasting cooked meat.

When he had finished he looked at the rest of the loin and decided to cook enough of it to last him on the trip out. It wouldn’t spoil if it was cooked. Not so quickly, anyway. So he fed the fire and cooked several panfuls of slices and wrapped them and stowed them with his other supplies. By then the drizzle had stopped and the first stars were out in an open patch of sky off to the north. His blanket was still damp, but he rolled up in it and went to sleep, knowing he was going to get out of here in the morning.

He had a restless night with bad dreams, mostly about his mother and the old tales, that he refused to remember the next morning. He got up, shivering in the chilly dawn, cooked a breakfast of pancakes and the last of his bacon, closed his pack and was ready to go. He looked at the venison hanging in the tree, more than half the loin he had taken from the doe, and he took it down and left it on the ground, where the carrion eaters would soon dispose of it. Then he went along the hillside half a mile before he turned and followed the easy trail beside the creek, not even allowing himself to look at the doe’s carcass.

The brush was dripping but the air was clear and crisp, as always after a rain. A few degrees lower and it would have been frosty. He thought of frosty mornings at the lodge his father had built, when his mother sang at her work and taught him little songs about the yellow leaves and the hoarding squirrels and the fawns that had lost their spots. Some of the words came back to him now. He could smile at them, remembering, because he was going away from here and probably would never come back. Then he came to a place where he could look off to the southeast and see Horse Mountain, shimmering in the clear morning air, and his mind went back to the frosty morning when he went down the valley from Bald Mountain and the charred ruins of the lodge and met Benny Grayback and the old man called Fish, waiting there at the foot of Horse Mountain to take him back to school. That was a bitter memory. He put it away from him.

He went down to the creek bank again, pushing that memory from him, and came to a place where the creek made a small mud flat. He went around it and started on, and turned back. His eyes had seen something that his mind had missed. He went back and looked again. It was a bear track there in the mud flat. It was full of water from the rain, but it was a big track. Then he saw other tracks, all of them full of water. They had been made during the rain, yesterday.

He looked around, crossed the creek, and in the soggy soil of a game trail he found another track, a track clean enough to show the long triangular sole mark, the round prints of the five toes, even the claw marks, all five of them. No, only four claw marks. It was the mark of a hind foot identical with the print he had seen on Horse Mountain.

He went on up the slope, finding a sign here, another there. A quarter of a mile and he found a stump that had been ripped apart, and beside it was the mark of a forepaw, the rough halfmoon of the palm, the round heel print, the round toe marks and their claws’ prints. There was no doubt now that this bear was not a cinnamon. No cinnamon bear ever had such paws or such claws.

The trail wandered, zigzagging back up the mountainside, down through the gullies, doubling back on itself. It wasn’t more than thirty-six hours old. He forgot time until it was midafternoon and he was hungry and the pack straps were cutting into his shoulders. He went to a nearby rise and took his bearings. Off to the southeast was Horse Mountain. To the northeast was Bald Mountain. He was on the first bench of Granite Peak, and the only sensible thing to do was to find a camp site, spend the night, leave his pack and pick up the trail again in the morning. Then stay with it till he ran the bear down.

He worked his way along the bench till he came to a place where a small creek bubbled across an opening with a thicket of lodgepoles pines at the back and a clear view to the east. The kind of camp site he should have chosen in the first place instead of squatting down there on West Fork in the rain. He picked a spot close beside the creek and sheltered by the pines. He cut poles and slung his tarp for a roof, quickly laid up stones for a fireplace, gathered wood and built a fire. He set coffee to cook, opened the packet of cooked venison and put a slice in the frying pan to warm up. It didn’t taste the way it had tasted fresh, but it was meat, food. He ate while his blanket, still damp, steamed in front of the fire. Then he smoothed a place for a bed, rolled up and slept, dog-tired.

The sun wakened him the next morning. He made a quick breakfast, stowed the remaining venison in a small pack, put everything else except his knife and rifle under the tarp, and went back to where he had left the trail yesterday. It was a cold trail and for the first hour he wondered if he could follow it at all. Then his eyes began to sharpen and he saw little signs that he had missed the day before. A broken bush here, a scuffed patch of gravel there. By afternoon he was able to lay out a line to follow, for the bear had stopped wandering at random and was going somewhere. He forced himself to stop thinking like a man and began to think the way a bear would think. It hadn’t made a big kill since he had been on the trail. It was getting hungry for something more than grubs and squamash and chipmunks. It would go down into the valley and kill a deer. Go where the deer were, anyway. He laid out a line and followed it, and knew he was right. Going down the long slope he came to a pine tree with a low branch where the bear had stopped to scratch its back. A few white-tipped hairs were still caught in the rough bark. He would have missed that sign yesterday. Now he saw it. And a little later he found a small aspen that it had bent down and walked along to scratch its belly, breaking the brittle branches along one side.

Then it was dusk, and he made a cold camp, ate some of the meat. He didn’t like the taste, or the smell of it, but he ate. Then he found a clump of low-hung spruce and crawled in among them and spent the night. The next morning he ate more of the meat, and went on. The trail led down across the valley to Los Pinos Creek. Following the bear’s trail up the creek he began to have stomach cramps. Then his head felt light and he began to sweat. He had to stop and rest, and when he started on again the cramps were worse. He retched and vomited twice, cleaning out his stomach, and felt better. But before he went on he opened the packet of meat. It had begun to stink. He retched at the smell, and he threw the meat away. Then he found a serviceberry bush and chewed a few twigs. The taste cleaned out his mouth enough and cleared his nose so that he could go on.

Half a mile upstream and he found a mud wallow the bear had used the day before. From there the trail left the stream, and that afternoon it led him to the lower reaches of Bald Mountain. He thought he had lost it there, but just before dark he found a big pine where the bear had torn off strips of the outer bark to get at the sweetish cambium layer beneath. The tooth marks were still clear and the scar oozed fresh resiny sap.

He made another cold camp that night, going without food. The next morning the trail led him onto Bald Mountain’s first bench. There, just before midday, he found where the bear had waited beside a deer run. It had made no kill, but it was hungry for red meat. Near by he found where it had slept, and there he found fresh scat it had made that morning. He knew he was getting close.

Early afternoon and he found where it had made the kill. It had hidden in the brush beside a deer run until four deer came along—a big doe, a smaller doe and two last spring fawns. They came to where the bear was waiting and the bear made its rush and struck down the big doe. The whole story was written unmistakably in frantic hoofprints, broken brush, a gout of blood still drying into the dust, in spatters of blood and loose deer hair on leaves and brush where the bear had dragged its kill up the mountainside.

He followed the trail, wary now, every sense alert. It was only a few hours old. Less than a hundred yards up the mountainside he came to an opening among the trees and saw the cache. The bear had eaten its fill, then crudely hid- den the rest of the carcass under a heap of scratched-up dirt and leaves.

Cautiously he made his way around the edge of the clearing, feeling every step, making no sound. The bear was sleeping not far away, gorged. When it had slept off its first big meal it would return and eat again. Halfway around the clearing was a tumbled heap of huge boulders that had lodged there in some ancient slide. Moving like a shadow, he searched among them, making sure the bear wasn’t there. Then he chose a hiding place among the rocks and settled down to wait. The cache was in clear sight, nor thirty yards from the rocks. His rifle would be deadly at that range.

A
T FIRST THE SUN
felt comfortably warm, but as the rocks caught and reflected the heat he began to feel scorched. His head began to ache and his eyes to burn, and his mouth felt parched. Thirst became a torture. He kept thinking of a small creek he had passed just before he found the place where the bear had made its kill. He should have drunk his fill then, but he didn’t. He was hungry, too, but his belly didn’t really demand food. He hadn’t eaten since the previous morning, when his stomach had refused to keep the bad meat, but he had chewed twigs and a few dry berries, sucking but not swallowing them. He could fast, but thirst was a torture. He put a few pebbles in his mouth to suck on, but that was little help.

Then he began to feel the cramping of his muscles, the tension of lying in one position. He tried to stretch his legs and made a noise among the dry twigs that had lodged among the rocks, and lay still again, enduring the aches.

The afternoon slowly passed. Nothing came to the cache but a few magpies. They ate and squawked and flew away. Then the shadows crept across the opening, the sun slid down behind the shoulder of the mountain and the quick chill of early autumn evening began to make itself felt. The rocks still held the midday heat, but as the first stars appeared a cold breeze flowed down the mountainside like a chilly mist. He edged closer to the rocks to share their warmth.

Night came, full darkness. He tried to remember where the moon stood in its cycle, whether it was early or late, and knew that he hadn’t really seen the moon in a long time, didn’t even know when it came to the full. And knew that was wrong, since a man should have a sense of time, a friendship with die moon, the sun, the earth. He looked up and saw familiar stars. At least he hadn’t forgotten the stars he once knew.

He waited, staring at the dark, shadowy mound of the cache. Nothing was there, nothing that moved. Staring at it, his eyes wearied, lost their focus. He looked at the trees, the clear line between earth and sky, at the stars beyond, forcing his eyes to see. The chill made him shiver and he hugged the rocks, and the warmth soothed him. He was very tired. He dozed, jerked himself awake and fought the drowsiness. He tried to shift his position, crackled the dry twigs and lay still again. He drifted into sleep.