I was pretty sure that the warmth of the partial sun, my body heat, and the engine would thaw the ice shelf underneath me enough that I could dislodge my leg. I just had to find some way of passing the time.
I stared at the book on my chest.
I was going to have to get pretty desperate to start in on that.
Cord never shot an arrow from itself
That sped away athwart the air so swift,
As I beheld a very little boat
Come o’er the water tow’rds us at that moment
Under the guidance of a single pilot
Who shouted, “Now art thou arrived, fell soul?”
“Phlegyas, Phlegyas, thou criest out in vain
For this once,” said my Lord; “thou shalt not have us
Longer than in the passing of the slough.”
As he who listens to some great deceit
That has been done to him, and then resents it,
Such became Phlegyas, in his gathered wrath.
My Guide descended down into the boat,
And then he made me enter after him,
And only when I entered seemed it laden.
I thought about the first time I’d read the epic poem in the old Carnegie library that was now my office. I’d had a draconic English teacher, Betty Dobbs, who had drilled us to the point that I’d had to go to the Durant Library to discover new ways of deciphering the text.
They used to keep a fire burning in the small, marble fireplace in the winter months, and there was a long oak research table that you could sprawl your books onto. The copy they had was a beautiful old tome, the Reverend Henry Francis Cary translation with illustrations by Gustave Dore. The thing had a weight to its presentation that had you believing that you were truly glimpsing hell in a handbasket rather than the moonings of a banished, heartbroken Florentine.
Contrary to popular belief, there aren’t that many descriptions of hell in the Bible, and the majority of images most people carry around in their heads are from the fourteenth-century poem, which means that our contemporary view of hell is actually from the Middle Ages.
A depressing thought, to say the least.
I had gotten to the eighth canto and was amazed at how much history and politics there was in the thing, observations that most certainly passed me by when I was sixteen.
I marked my place by dog-earring a page and placed the book back on my chest. My eyes were tired, I had a headache, and it had begun to snow again. I’d had an eye operation a few months back that had been an unqualified success, so I was pretty sure my headache was from the bump on my forehead and the gasoline fumes and not from my eye.
I pulled the cell phone from my pocket, took it out of the bag, held it up, and looked at the two words. I turned it off, dropped the thing in the Ziploc and back in my pocket, and pulled my glove back on.
The clouds were so low, it felt like I could reach out and touch them, so I tried-my black gloves looking even darker as they rose up to the steel afternoon sky. It was getting colder, and my hopes for thawing out enough space for my leg were taking a hit. I drew my other leg under the four-wheeler and tucked the book away.
I was about to pull my hat over my face and take a little nap when I saw the horn button on the handlebars of the Arctic Cat. It was a feeble hope, but a hope nonetheless.
I pushed the button with my thumb and listened to the extended and herniated beep of the horn. I waited a moment and then tried it again, this time bleating out three shorts-three longs-three shorts. I continued the SOS pattern until I noticed a difference in the tone, indicating I was killing the battery.
I pulled up the balaclava, went ahead and put my hat over my face, tucked my arms into my body, and rolled to my left in an attempt to get as much cover from the machine as possible.
Definitely a noise.
I’d been lying there half-asleep in my little snow cocoon when I thought I’d heard something, and this was the third time I’d heard it-a snuffling, huffing noise from up on the ridge.
The wind was now howling through the swaying trees, and I was loath to poke my head out, but I was damned if I was going to be eaten and not know what it was that was eating me. Brushing away the inch of snow that had fallen, I pushed my hat off and peeled back my goggles. It was brighter, but other than that everything looked the same.
The dead convict had been partly covered over by the falling, blowing snow, but up on the ridge the wind was stronger, so it was an uneven mantle. I glanced up and down the hillside, but there was nothing else there.
I was just about to put my hat back over my eyes when I heard the snuffling and what might’ve been a grunt or growl. I reached down for the Colt and kept a weather eye on the ridge.
It was then that the dead man disappeared.
I blinked to make sure I’d seen what I’d seen, and I had. One moment the man’s corpse had been there hanging over the hillside with only the bottoms of his legs hidden, and the next, something had yanked him by them, and he was gone.
Moser had to be at least two hundred pounds. No wolf could’ve done that, and I doubt a mountain lion could’ve either.
Bear.
Had to be a bear; no other animal up here had the power to grab a full-grown man by the legs and simply snatch him away into the air.
I did some pretty damn fast calculations about hibernation and the feeding habits of bears, both black and grizzly. It was May, and the bruisers had had ample time to get up and look for something to eat. They were known to eat their fill and then bury the rest in a shallow grave for later-another comforting thought. I figured the convict meal, the prevalent fumes of gas, and the proximity of the machine might save me an eventual confrontation, but I could also be wrong.
I pulled the. 45 from my holster and brought it up aimed in the direction of the shuffling, huffing, and breathing. I half expected to hear the sounds of flesh rendering and bone crushing, but it grew silent again.
I kept the pistol pointed toward the ridge, my eyes drawn to the left by the whistling flakes. Something moved to the right, precisely where the convict had vanished. It was only a shadow, but it was a very large one, much larger than any man and much larger than any black bear.
The massive head was incredibly wide, and I could just make out the pointed ears on top and the huge hump at its back. It turned in my direction, and it was then that I saw the muzzle of the gigantic beast sniffing. I listened to its lungs tasting the air for me.
With his skull three-quarters of an inch thick, it was doubtful that I’d do any real damage to the monster, but at least it might dissuade him.
Slowly the big, ursine head swiveled until it was looking directly at me, and it was then that I fired. I saw a chunk blow off the side of its head and take part of an ear with it, and the big beast disappeared almost instantaneously.
There was no howling, no growling, nothing.
I lay there with my aim still on the ridge and hoped that the monster had decided to go with the buffet and was dragging the dead man off to a comfortable dining spot. I still couldn’t hear anything but the wind, so I waited.
I was unsure how long I lasted with my arm like that, but then it kind of dropped of its own accord. I listened to myself breathe, but over the wind I couldn’t hear anything other than my still-pounding heart.
I figured the bear was gone, and whether he’d taken the dead convict with him was his business. Keeping the. 45 on my chest, I lodged my hat up to block the wind and reintroduced my neck into the collar of the North Face. My eyes were trying to close, but my mind kept prodding them with a stick. It was in just one of those instances that I thought I might’ve heard something again, and my eyelids shot open.