Better to be dead than seized and hauled back through that crack in the sky by this evil spirit.
Suddenly he felt his leg being pulled, yanked. The wounded, bloody hip yelped in pain as his ankle was twisted brutally.
Certain it must be the cubs, feasting on his flesh now that their mama had killed him. Believing these last few seconds of his life would be even more torture than those last painful moments of their battle—for now he realized he had lost to this demonic creature. Now he knew the cubs were going to gnaw on his bones, and the sow would ultimately drag his soul back to where her evil seed was whelped.
Of a sudden he felt the cold air slap his face, sneak in to tickle his bare flesh where the long, curved claws had raked the buckskin shirt to ribbons at his back. How cruel the breeze was to brush over the riven muscle across his hip. So cruel to tease him with its cool, fresh breath here the moment before he would breathe his last, the moment before his heart would stop and he would be no more than wounded soul.
Knowing he had lost and was now a captive of that evil beast come through the sky to his world seeking new prey.
She was picking him up, seizing his head, peeling his upper body out of the sand, ready to hurtle with him back across the grass and the sandbar and through the willow, back to where she had emerged right out of the twilight, right out of the air itself…. He blinked at the sand tormenting his eyes—how he wanted to stare this beast in the face, look it in the eye as she seized dominion over his soul.
One last look—
“Mr. Bass!”
Swimming right above him, the great creature’s face spewed its fetid breath down across his cheeks. Hot breath—unlike the cool touch of the evening breeze.
“Mr. Bass!”
A dream this was. Feeling himself shaken by the creature, believing it was all part of the great evil to see McAfferty’s face swimming above his.
“Arrrghgh!” Scratch groaned, flailing his arms helplessly at the beast.
His arms were quickly pinned and the face came right over his once more. Shaking his shoulders. “Mr. Bass—it’s Asa! Asa!”
Again he tried to fight the evil of its lie.
“For the love of God, Mr. Bass … the bear is dead! We killed it. I killed it. God knows you killed it too.”
Somehow he managed to sputter the word, “A-asa?”
“Yes. It’s Asa, Mr. Bass. Praises be to heaven for your deliverance!”
Whether it truly had been heaven’s intervention as Asa believed, or it had been the two rifle balls McAfferty deftly fired into the base of the sow’s head at close range, along with those savage blows the white-hair delivered with Bass’s own tomahawk found beside that pile of unpeeled willow limbs … there were times in those next few days when Scratch wasn’t all that sure he was grateful for that divine deliverance.
As much pain as the simple act of living on brought him, it might well have been better to go under then and there to that sow grizzly.
Had it not been for his fear of losing his mortal soul to something monstrously evil, something he knew he could never fathom—simple man that he was. Were it not for his fear of a life everlasting wherein a man whimpered helplessly before the great unknown … he might well have given up and crossed over that last divide in those next few hours.
“Damn, but this ain’t good,” McAfferty muttered again and again as he hovered over him on that sandbar, down on his knees inspecting Scratch’s wounds up and down. “This … this ain’t good. A bear … chewed up like this … it ain’t no good, Mr. Bass.”
He had passed out with the pain when Asa had attempted to free his other leg from under the grizzly’s carcass. Then he came to again, groaning in pain to find McAfferty pulling off his capote to lay over him.
“Damn them evil abominations gathered round us!” Asa growled.
Titus closed his eyes and listened for a moment as McAfferty trotted away up the sandbar, moving off from the cutbank in a hurry; then all was quiet.
It was full dark by the time the white-head nudged him awake as gently as he could, snagging Bass under the armpits and raising him off the sand, painfully dragging Scratch a matter of yards to the crude travois he had hurriedly constructed back at camp from some strips of rope and rawhide and a buffalo robe. Despite the curly softness of the thick hair, Bass felt the hard pinch of the hemp rope beneath his ripped and torn flesh at his back, across his hip, behind one ear as Asa laid him out on the Crosshatch web and pulled a blanket over him.
Without a word Asa went thin-lipped with determination, then turned aside as Bass’s eyes fluttered closed and he passed out again. How merciful unconsciousness can be at times, giving a man relief when he has reached a point where he can no longer bear up under the pain. How blessedly merciful.
In those next few days he tolerated the brutal bathing of his crusty, grit-coated wounds, as well as surviving the constant chatter from the partner who had saved his life this second time. Now he was beholden to McAfferty. No longer were they square. Bass listened to what he could of the man’s preaching, to his praying over him, to his rambling fire-and-brimstone cant.
“‘And I will lay sinews upon you, and will bring up flesh upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath into you, and ye shall LIVE!’”
And in the midst of those terrible days Scratch heard Asa try to explain to them both what that run-in with the sow meant in terms far too theological for a simple man like him to understand, much more metaphysical than anything he had ever heard Asa McAfferty preach before.
“You done right with that she-bitch of a grizzly.”
He kept his eyes closed. “Right?”
“Leave’d your knife in ’er.”
“Damn! You’re hurtin’ me—”
“Gotta keep some of these here wounds open,” McAfferty interrupted unapologetically, “or they’ll grow shut with the p’isen inside.”
“What p’isen?”
“’Nough evil already around us for a man to worry over that you don’t wanna have evil shut up inside ever’ one of your wounds, Mr. Bass.”
“Asa.”
“Yeah?”
“I … I took the knife out.”
“Knife was in ’er when I pulled you free,” Asa grumbled as he continued his ministrations with that water he heated at the edge of the fire. “That’s all that counts. Leave the knife in the bear: it’ll bleed ’em out inside.”
“Leave the knife in,” Scratch repeated, his puffy lips so swollen and dry from fever that they had cracked. “Leave knife in.”
Bass remembered how day after day it seemed the man talked of nothing much more than the same topic. Instructing his wounded partner on the two places where you could place a lead ball certain to kill a grizzly.
“There be jest two places where a nigger can put his ball into a devil beast such as that to know his lead’ll do the trick certain. One be just under the ear. T’other—why that be just back and down of the front leg, Mr. Bass. Where the evil heart beats in that beast. Hide so damned thick, can’t allays count on the ball going in nowhere else to any account. I killed that she-bitch with two balls to the head, just under her ears. And I finished her off with your tomahawk. Nearly got her head cut clean off afore she fell over with you still wrapped in her arm.”
In addition, the white-head muttered in and out and roundabout, speaking of that Ree medicine man who wore a grizzly’s head for his own powerful headdress, wore a cluster of grizzly claws around his neck, even performed his incantations with his two hands stuffed inside a pair of dried and shriveled grizzly paws, which he swiped at the air to invoke the bear’s spirit when he came to demand McAfferty’s Bible. Came to steal Asa’s personal medicine.