Grizzly (7 page)

"Wait a minute," said the other. He went over and stroked Tex's neck. To Tom, as if they were old friends, he said, "Listen, pal, we planned on this trip for months. Why don't you just forget you found us here? We know our way around in the woods. We're not afraid of your bear."

"Sorry," said Tom. "I can't do that."

Henry took out a twenty-dollar bill and rolled it around his finger.

"Maybe this might help loosen up your memory?"

Tom stared at the camper for a long moment, his jaw tensing with anger. Then, without a word, he dismounted, walked over to the tent and pulled up one of the corner stakes by its rope. The tent collapsed like the skin of some giant green creature.

The two campers gaped at the ranger.

Tom remounted his horse. "Mister," he said softly, "You just broke camp. And you've got exactly fifteen minutes to police up this area and get down the trail."

He waited to see if there would be an argument. There wasn't any. Henry slipped the twenty-dollar bill into his pocket furtively and turned to his partner.

"Come on," he said loudly. "You heard the man. We don't have all day."

Kelly Gordon's office at the ranger station was simple and almost militarily neat. The desk was old, of battered wood. The chairs were even older, and did not match each other. One file cabinet was taller than the other. The office looked exactly like what it was—a collection of furniture scavenged from various other offices.

The narrow screened windows fronted on a vista of trees and mountains that would have been breathtakingly beautiful if anyone in the office had ever bothered to look through them. But this was a place for business, not sightseeing, and right now, Kelly was all business.

Speaking into the telephone, he raised his voice. "Okay, I read you. Mr. Scott is not in the office. That's no surprise. He's never in the office. He's always out in the woods wearing one of his cock-eyed costumes. But this is an emergency. Use your radio to connect me with him."

He waited for an answer, and didn't like it when the voice of a young man said, "I'm sorry, sir. I can't do that."

Kelly said, "What are you saying? That you can't connect me with Scott, or you
won't
?"

"Technically I could," the voice replied. "But Mr. Scott left strict instructions. He wasn't to be contacted unless it was a major emergency."

"Sonny," Kelly said grimly, and now his voice fought to hold down the anger that wanted to spew out. He lost the battle. "You just listen to me. We brought in the bodies of two young girls who were eaten to the bone by one of our animals. So don't throw snow about 'major emergencies.' This qualifies as one, and if you don't get me Scott on that radiophone in the next minute, you're going to be standing in the unemployment line tomorrow morning."

The voice hesitated. "I didn't know. I'm sorry, I'll try to raise Mr. Scott. Hold the line."

"That's better," said Kelly. "I'll be here."

As he waited, the door to his office opened and Allison came in. He gave her a little wave.

Her return gesture was slow. "Hi," she said.

"Are you all right?" he asked.

"As right as I can be on a strict Valium diet."

"You didn't eat?"

She sat on the corner of the desk. "I don't think I'll eat for maybe another year. Or sleep. I kept coming awake with their faces staring at me—"

Her voice was on the verge of trembling. She brought it under control by finding something else to talk about. She pointed at the big map of the park on the wall. It had several red and blue-headed pins stuck in at different locations.

"What's with the pins in the map?"

Kelly said, "The red pins show where we found the girls. The blue ones are places where I think our animal may have gone off to digest his meal."

"Animal? Then you still aren't sure it was a bear?"

He said, "Nearly sure. But there's still the faint possibility that—" He broke off the sentence, said into the phone: "Yes?"

The other voice said, "I'm ringing Mr. Scott now."

To Allison, Kelly said, "Sit down, this'll only take a minute.'' Into the phone: "I'm holding, son. Keep on ringing until he answers."

The voice said, ruefully, "Yes sir. But I hope you explain to him that you made me do it. Mr. Scott's not going to be very happy about this."

"Don't worry," Kelly promised. "I'll get you off the hook."

Few modem humans have ever seen a herd of bighorned elk close up with the naked eye. If the whitetailed deer is considered nervous and shy, the elk is a wild-eyed paranoid about his privacy. Where many of the park animals had become accustomed to humans, and even tolerated them, the elk left the paths of man strictly alone.

The small herd here in a high altitude clearing were miles from the nearest road, and not even a foot trail came anywhere close to this place. Still, the huge buck who led the herd kept his head turning, his wide nostrils sniffing the air for alien scent. The does and young calves grazed while he kept watch.

Once, his great head lifted and he stared, with his four-power binocular vision, at a shape that stood near the edge of the clearing, just within the forest. He sniffed, but the acrid scent of man did not soem present. For a moment he waited, alert to any movement that might be hostile.

But none came. Satisfied that the furred thing within the trees was not an enemy, he lowered his head again and grazed. But one eye was always turned toward the forest.

The bundle of furred hides stirred slightly. The movement did not go unnoticed by the elk, but it did not alarm him.

Within the hides, strapped around him like a giant deer pelt, a man smiled. His lips moved soundlessly. A lip-reader would have seen the word, "Good" formed on them.

Then a harsh "Beep" shattered the calmness of the quiet clearing. The elk herd reacted by freezing all motion. For a fraction of a moment, they became living brown statues, poised for flight, yet avoiding movement that might attract a preying eye.

The man inside the hides mumbled a curse and made a grab for the two-way radio in its holster strapped to his belt. He was too late. The harsh "Beep!" came again.

This time, the elk herd was energized into frantic movement. The buck leaped first, covering more than twenty feet from a standing start. The rest of the herd followed him, and in seconds the clearing was empty and still.

Arthur Scott threw off his fur hides and yanked the offending radio from its holster. He whipned up the antenna, pressed the transmit button and shouted, "What the hell is the matter witla you, Barney? I gave you strict orders not to contact me. Do you know what you've —"

The young man's voice said, "I'm sorry, but Kelly Gordon said it was an emergency. He insisted—"

"Oh?" snarled Scott. "Kelly
insisted
? Well, put him on, I'll insist him!"

"I'm on," said Kelly. "Listen, Scotty, we've got ourselves a problem—"

"You've got a problem," Scott yelled into the radio. "Do you know what you just blew for me? A whoIe week's work!"

Kelly tried to cut in, but Scott kept shouting. "I had me a family of elk. I've been on their trail all week, moving with them, damned near living with them. I've seen behavior that—"

"Damn it, will you shut up and listen?" Kelly finally managed to say. "We've had a bear kilIing."

"That's the end of my elk this season," Scott went on. Then what Kelly had said sank in. "We've had a
what
?"

"Two women were killed late yesterday. Up in R-Four. I think it was a bear. And that means it was probably one of
our
bears, Scotty."

"Nonsense," said Arthur Scott into the radio. "None of our bears would attack unless they were really provoked. Even then, they'd probably maul, rather than kill. Besides, our bears are all up in the high country."

"Tell that to Kittredge," Kelly said. "He's holding you and me responsible. He as much as came out and said we faked the bear move, that we didn't really move them up there at all."

"That man is an idiot," Scott said calmly. "He's more of a paranoid than my herd of elk."

"Be that as it may," Kelly said, "We've got to come up with some action and some answers. So forget your elks and get your tail down here on the double."

"Okay," said Scott. "End transmission."

"Ending transmission," said the young man's voice.

"You do that thing, sonny," Kelly said. He hung up the phone.

Allison asked, "Who's Scott?"

"A hot-shot naturalist who's been temporarily attached to the park. He's working on some kind of long-term study of the wildlife here. He's really good. He sprays himself down with some kind of gunk to kill the human odor, and wraps himself up in a bunch of deer hides. Next thing you know, he's right there in the middle of an elk herd, eating grass with them. As for bears, there's not one in the whole park Scotty doesn't know personally."

Allison managed her first laugh since the events at the cabin the evening before. "You're kidding."

"Not a bit. If you're serious about going through with a photo book on this mess, you'd do worse than to follow Scotty around for a while. I've never met a man who knew more about animals, or could get along better with them."

She studied him. Somehow his face today was different. Perhaps it was the double tragedy up the mountain; perhaps just a sleepless night. But he had lost much of the carefree quality of adventure that had first attracted her. She didn't know which Kelly she liked better; yesterday's or today's.

She said, "You guys really love what you're doing up here, don't you? It's more than just a job."

"It had better be," he said. "Nobody in his right mind would work for what they pay us."

"Why do you?"

"Some of the younger guys like it because it's a good summer job, a way to be outdoors and get paid for it. A few of them are nature freaks, they think they're all that stands between what we've got here and

total destruction of the environment."

"Neither category fits you."

He gave a short laugh. "I guess I came up here to get back in touch with basic realities."

"But you stay while the others go home after a summer or two."

He shrugged. "Let's say that the reality up here is habit-forming."

"Sometimes people acquire one habit to break another one."

He nodded. "I'll buy that. After I got back from the war, I went off on a tangent for a while. Acquired the wrong values. The wrong people."

"Oh? Was one of those acquisitions a wife?"

"Was she ever." He went over to the steaming Silex.

"You want some coffee?"

"Thanks."

He poured two cups and gave one to her. He stood, looking out the narrow window, sipping at it. "I had a lot of habits that needed breaking. And coming up into these mountains was one way to do it."

"What about her?"

"She's doing well, I hear. In fact, she was doing well when I met her. She's happy."

"Is she beautiful?"

He nodded. "And rich. One of the directions I went off base was in wanting money. She had it and was willing to share. That simple."

Allison warmed her hands on the coffee cup. "It's never that simple."

"Let's say we were both mercenaries. Out for something the other had. We devised little face-saving methods of avoiding that cut-and-dried a description. I was getting set up in the real estate business, and that takes time and money. I had the time, and she had the money."

Allison looked away. "I see."

He put down his cup. "Do you? I don't think it's something you can really understand until you've been through it yourself. Remember, we weren't two stockbrokers trading in futures. We thought we had a good thing going. But it turned sour, or maybe it always was, and it took me five years to find out. By then, I was making a good buck with my agency, and I guess it was the realization that I really didn't
need
her in the same way that triggered the decision that I didn't need her at all."

"Very noble of you," said Allison, stiffly. "How about her? Did she need you?"

"She thought she did. That's more or less the same thing, isn't it?"

"But you left her anyway?"

"No. Give me some credit. I didn't leave. I simply behaved like a heel. I pretended I was having an affair.''

She raised an eyebrow. "
Pretended
?"

He made a rueful grin. "That's all, baby. In fact, it's all I was capable of. Because those five years had done something to me that you read about in all those magazine articles about sex therapy. I was as impotent as the harem eunuch."

She rolled her eyes in mock despair. "Now he tells me!"

He chuckled. "Oh, the problem's all gone. In fact, it went away just a week or so after she filed for divorce."

"So the phony affair worked."

"Not on your life. In fact, it turned her on. She started wearing her sheer nighties again and taking perfume showers."

"And?"

"And nothing. So I sold out my holdings, donated the whole pile to charity, and enrolled in Ranger school. It was a master stroke. She was turned off instantly, and headed for Reno."

Allison shook her head slowly. "You lie in your teeth," she said. "Why?"

"Why do you think?"

She considered that for a moment. Then she stood and came closer to him.

"I think what you're trying to do is turn
me
off."

He looked down at her. "Why would I do that?"

"Because you're afraid. Because you were hurt, and you're afraid of being hurt again."

"Nobody wants to get hurt."

"No," she said. She touched his face. '"You don't have to be afraid, Kelly. We come in all shapes, sizes and colors. Just because your first order from the catalog didn't fit isn't reason to give up. Try another page."

"Maybe I will," he said.

Their bodies were close together.

Later, he would not remember who reached out first. All he could recall was their pressing together in a greedy embrace, and the little nibbling kisses she gave him that gradually subsided into a warm, deep one that left him trembling as he pushed her away.