Wau-au-au … gh-gh-gh!
Already she was catapulting onto her hind legs, digging in with her forepaws, wrenching up sand and grass as she righted herself and twisted about in her turn. Angrier perhaps that she had not crushed the puny creature in that first grand charge. Just the way she had had to deal with any male she encountered ever since that day in early spring when she had emerged from her den with those two young cubs given birth and suckled during the last of winter’s rage suffered on this north country.
Waughgh!
Leaping across those last ten feet, the sow cut off the light, cut off all air as she dropped out of the sky onto the trapper scrambling like a crab to get out of her path. He landed on his back as everything went black, went suffocating.
Scratch cried out as she reared back suddenly and smacked him with a monstrous paw, as if he were no more than a bothersome badger she was trying to dig out from beneath a rotted log. The fire around his lungs was so great, it felt as if his ribs had been torn loose from his chest as he was hurtled to the side on the sandbar.
Waugh!
Again she bellowed as he blinked grains of sand from his eyes, dragging his cheek off the ground, finding her resting on all fours a few yards away, turned to look at her cubs. Calling to them noisily with those jaws, that curving muzzle drawn back to expose the rows of monstrous yellowed teeth.
The moment the two cubs started his way, Bass shoved onto a hip, his chest refusing him a deep breath, his back burning, hot one instant, icy cold the next as the wind slashed across it. If he could run now, he might stand a chance of getting to the rifle a heartbeat before she got to him. Just spin around as he cocked the hammer, fire as she settled upon him again—
Then he knew it was too late already. That flicker of time’s candle to consider what to do and how to do it had already cost him his chance.
Just take her with his own bare hands.
When she spotted him rising to his knees, coming shakily to his feet, she wheeled fully on him. Then twisted her head to locate her cubs the moment before they bounced against her.
Enraged, her hump hair stiffened. The sow batted the first aside, backhanded the second, sending them both sprawling away toward the cutbank, yelping and whimpering as they tumbled to a stop, licking at their bruises. Then she slowly turned on the trapper, wobbly on his two legs.
He tried to blink the sandy grit from his eyes, clear the dry shreds of cobweb from his head as she flexed her back, shifted her feet, planting them squarely as she rose on those huge, haunches. Then she too stood on hind legs. And windmilled at the air with those long, deadly instruments, her claws bared, glinting in the last rays of the sun.
Just take her with his own bare hands.
And for the first time he realized his hands were not empty.
In the terror of her first strike, he must have gripped on to what he had been holding with the might of a trap’s jaws. In his left hand remained that chunk of willow limb a little thicker than his own thumb, already sharpened at the end.
And in his gritty right hand was the bone handle attached to that curved, ten-inch blade of Mexican steel.
Tottering on her hind legs, the sow lumbered forward, closing those last few yards, towering over the puny human by more than a foot in shaggy, silver-tipped height. Sawing her arms back and forth, she pounced the last two steps and blacked out the sky once more as her awful roar deafened all sound from his ears.
His back burned anew as she clutched him into her with one great paw, burying his face in her chest. Lunging with all he had in that weakened left shoulder, Titus sank the sharpened end of the branch into her thick hide, sensing the point pierce that heavy layer to plunge on into the muscle, shoved on past bone. He felt her jerk as the willow spear went home, driven deep within her lights.
Knowing in that next instant it was not enough to kill the she-brute.
Again she raked at him, and again. Her shaggy forearms only brushing, bruising, battering his shoulder blades and the small of his back as she struggled to rake him with her claws—but she held him too close to get at him. Too close, right there against her: smothered, trapped against the beast that was about to finish him off.
Gagging, Bass could smell nothing but the rank odor of her damp hide, the milk going sour at her two shriveled dugs.
Knowing by this time of the season she was likely giving up nursing the two cubs, teaching them instead to feast on plants and small animals, ants and that meat of whatever big game presented itself to them.
Meat. Four-legged or two. Including a hapless trapper.
As he felt her crush his chest with a fiery pressure, the sow straightened to full height, dragging his feet off the ground, shaking him helplessly against her great stinking mass. He dangled in her grip, his legs flopping like one of his sister’s sock dolls.
How he needed a breath of air. Just one breath more. Sensing his supper rise against his tonsils, Bass gasped, sickened by the dank sour-milk odor of her as he drew back the butcher knife and plunged it into her chest.
Too low!
But instead of drawing it out, with both hands clamped around the wet, sticky, warm handle, he sawed the blade to the side savagely. Hearing her grunt with each new plunge of the blade within her gut.
Feeling the rumble of each of her battle cries, feeling each of her painful groans as they reverberated within her chest and rattled against his cheek, he even sensed her cries shake the handle of that weapon he gripped with white knuckles. Then he himself echoed the sow’s dull roar that shuddered beneath his eye pressed deeply against her stinking fur.
The bear hooked a claw around his hip and raked back. He felt the sudden cold as the legging gave way and the breechclout with it—his hide laid bare to the bone across the top of his hip.
He heard a shrill cry coming to him in the midst of that muffled, dark hole of her massive being where she had herself wrapped around him—just as surely as if she had swallowed him whole. And he realized that inhuman cry was his.
Then, as the cry faded, Scratch heard a new, strange sound.
One thunderous thump echoed through her body, and he listened to her whimper like her cubs when she had batted them aside in fury. Pulling back one mighty arm from the grip she had on him, Bass could suddenly see shafts of rosy alpenglow, slivers of trees and brush suspended against the sky overhead. And smell glorious air.
He shoved back against the other paw for leverage and yanked the knife free of her. Swinging it up in a short arc, Bass buried the long blade right below her jawline. She nearly shook him free, nearly tore his grip from that bloody handle as she shivered and whipped her head from side to side to rid herself of the torment.
Scratch attempted to saw the knife to the side but encountered bone. Instead he yanked the weapon free once more, rocked back, and plunged it in. Back out and in again. Out once more, just enough to give himself some leverage against that grizzly foreleg that gripped and raked and pummeled him—then back in with all the strength he could muster. Sensing his will seep out of him with each new thrust. Turning, twisting, screwing the blade brutally an instant before he jerked it back out.
Waugh-gh-gh-gh!
With her roar garbled by her own blood, Bass felt the beast falling, pitching forward with him beneath her. Helpless, he twisted and screwed at the knife’s handle as his face was buried again. Sealing out all light, suffocating him. Shutting off the rest of the world.
She had swallowed him whole.
The grizzly had won, and now she was devouring his soul. Not just what wreck was left of his body. But feasting on his very spirit. Like an evil specter come lunging out of a ragged tear between his world and its own—lunging through to devour him and drag his soul back to its world of eternal despair.