Linwood Barclay - Lone Wolf

“Did he attack you? Did he go after you and Leonard?”

“We must have been in shock for a second, I guess we must have just stood there. And I noticed, I saw that one of the bear’s ears was clipped, like it was sort of torn off.”

I thought back to what Timmy Wickens had said. That the bear they’d seen, the one Morton Dewart had supposedly gone after, had a torn ear.

Orville picked up on that, too, glanced back at me and shook his head.

“Then what happened?”

“We both turned and started to run. I went one way, Leonard started off in another. I shouted to him, I said, ‘Come on! The road’s this way!’ But then I wondered, maybe he was right, maybe the road was the other way. All I could think to do was keep running, and hope to Christ I was heading for the road, and not deeper into the woods. I glanced back once, tripped over something and scraped myself up a bit, figured the bear would be right on me, because they say you can’t outrun a bear, but you can’t think of anything else to do, you know?”

“Sure,” said Orville, nodding, lots of sympathy. His two buddies, their rifles drawn, were scanning the woods. One caught his rifle on a tree branch and stumbled back. “Was the bear right behind you?”

“No. So I figured it must have gone after Leonard, and I started calling out for him, going back the way I’d come. I was screaming till I nearly lost my voice, but I didn’t see any sign of him, or the bear. Jesus, this is terrible.”

“It’s okay, Mr. Spooner. Did you ever find him?”

“No, no, I never did. I found my way back to the highway, maybe a quarter mile down from where I’d left my truck, ran down to it and went back to the camp, figuring I could get more help, that we could come back and find Leonard.” Impulsively, he shouted, “Leonaaard!”

Then we all started doing it. “Leonard!” I shouted. The two hunters called out, even Lawrence cupped his hands around his mouth and called. We were all shouting at once, and then, as if on cue, we all stopped.

No one answered.

This was, I was pretty sure, the same part of the woods Leonard had led me into when he wanted to show me where he was going to build his dream.

“He got him,” Bob said, shaking his head. “The bastard must have got him.”

He stopped, looked around. “I’m pretty sure it was around here where we encountered him,” Bob said. He pointed to the right, raising his arm halfway, as if he wasn’t totally sure. “I think I went this way, and Leonard”-he pointed in the other direction-“went thataway. We should probably look over there.”

We all kept fairly close together, the six of us, maybe twenty to thirty feet apart, looking down and up and from side to side. Up by the highway, we could hear the wail of an ambulance.

Lawrence moved in close to me, whispered, “I thought you said on the phone there was no bear. That that other guy was killed by dogs, you thought. That that Wickens guy had the dogs kill him for some reason.”

“Yeah, well, that was kind of one of the theories I was tossing around.”

“So now it looks like you dragged my ass up here to go after a real bear. I have to tell you, that’s really not my area. You want Grizzly Adams.”

“I thought he liked bears.”

“Fuck, I don’t know.”

“Listen, there’s more to what’s going on up here besides the bear,” I said, pointing my finger into the air in front of me. “Even if Dewart was killed by a bear, it doesn’t change all the other stuff.”

“Yeah, well, I’m sure you’ll bring me up to speed later.” Lawrence ducked under a pine branch. “Your dad, he’s fun.”

“I think he was hoping you’d be a bit swishier.”

“Maybe later I’ll do some show tunes.”

Bob and Orville had pulled farther ahead, then stopped. Bob was looking around, seemingly bewildered. I was thinking maybe, once that ambulance arrived, they should have a look at him while we kept looking for Leonard. Bob might have suffered injuries he wasn’t even aware of.

“Hello?” From the road.

My heart stopped. Leonard?

We all looked back, and saw an ambulance attendant in the distance. “We haven’t found him yet!” Orville called back. “Soon as we know, we’ll give you a shout!”

Lawrence and I had wandered a bit off to the right of everyone else, where the ground gradually sloped up through the trees. I remembered this climb. It led up to the cliff, which overlooked the area where Leonard had talked about putting in a fake whale for kids to play in.

When we got to the top, Lawrence said, “Whoa.”

It was a sharp dropoff down onto jagged rocks and then more forest below. Lawrence nudged me in the shoulder and pointed.

Down at the bottom, off to the left, was the twisted body of a man.

“Oh shit,” I said. “Hey!” I shouted. “Over here! Over here!”

Everyone came running, Orville in the lead. When he reached the edge, he reeled back a bit, like he thought he was going to fall over. Lawrence pointed.

“We have to find a way down there,” Orville said.

I looked off to the right, where the ground appeared to slope down less precariously. “That way,” I said.

Orville shouted back toward the highway. “Back here!” In the distance, a muffled “Coming!”

Lawrence was well ahead of everyone else, hopping over fallen limbs, skittering down the edge of the hill, his arms out for support. He got to Leonard Colebert about ten seconds ahead of the rest of us and was kneeling over him when Orville rushed up.

“Don’t touch him!” he said.

Leonard Colebert’s body lay flat, on its back, on the forest floor, but his head was twisted nearly 180 degrees, like he was looking over his shoulder when he hit the ground, and his neck stayed that way. His eyes were open and blank. The fall had torn his down-filled jacket, and his pants had slipped partway down his butt.

It seemed apparent to everyone that he was dead, but he still looked in a lot better shape than Morton Dewart did when he was found.

“Oh my God,” Bob said. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

No one said anything, but everyone was nodding.

“Why isn’t he, I mean, he doesn’t look like the bear got to him, does it?” Bob said.

Orville was shaking his head, looking back up the hill. “My guess is, he was running, looking behind him to see if the bear was gaining, went right off the cliff before he even knew it was there.” Orville paused. “All things considered, it was probably a lot better way to go.”

I couldn’t argue with that.

One of the two hunters with Orville pointed to Leonard Colebert’s partially dropped pants. “Look,” he said. “The guy was wearing a fucking diaper.”

His friend giggled and said, “I guess, if I ran into a bear in the woods, I’d wanna be wearing one of those, too.”

Someone put in a call to the local general practitioner/coroner, my good friend Dr. Heath, and being the oldest of all of us out there, even if Dad had been with us and not stuck back up there on the highway, he was offered some assistance navigating his way down the steep hill to examine Leonard Colebert and declare him officially dead. I offered my arm, but when the doctor saw who it was attached to, he pulled back and clung to someone else, a gesture Lawrence Jones didn’t fail to pick up on.

Lawrence said, under his breath, “How many days you been up here? And how many people have you already managed to piss off?”

“You don’t know the half of it,” I said.

The ambulance attendants didn’t mind accepting my help, and that of others, getting Leonard’s body, once it was on the gurney, back out to the ambulance. It took a good ten minutes to carry him up the hill and through the woods to the road. Dad was out of the car, leaning against it without his crutches, watching the action.