Десмонд Бэгли - Landslide

There were at least six of them that I could see when I sorted out their comings and goings. They were walking in and out of Matthew’s cabin as though they owned the place and had broken into Clare’s cabin. I presumed they were searching it. I wondered how they had known I was there and concluded that they must have had a watcher staked out, and it was the lights in Clare’s cabin when I had a bath that had been the tip-off.

I cursed myself for that piece of stupidity but it was too late for recriminations. When a man gets hungry and tired he begins to slip up like that, to make silly little mistakes he wouldn’t make normally. It’s by errors like that that a hunted man is usually nailed down, and I thought I’d better watch it in future.

I bit my lips as I focused the glasses on a man delving into the engine of Matthew’s pick-up truck. He rooted around under the hood and pulled out a handful of spaghetti — most of the electrical wiring, judging by how much of it there was.

Matthew wouldn’t be going to Fort Farrell — or anywhere else — for quite a while.

The weather turned nasty. Clouds lowered overhead and it rained a lot, and then the clouds came right down to ground level and I walked in a mist. It was good and bad. The poor visibility meant that I couldn’t be spotted as easily and the low clouds put that damned helicopter out of action. Twice it had spotted me and put the hounds on my trail, but now it was useless. On the other hand, I was wet all the time and daren’t stop to light a fire and dry out. Living constantly in wet clothes, my skin started to whiten and wrinkle and it chafed where rubbed by folds of my shirt and pants. I also developed a bad cold, and a sneeze at the wrong time could be dangerous.

Howard’s staffwork had improved. He had me pinned down in a very small area, not more than three square miles, and had cordoned it off tightly. Now he was tightening the noose inexorably. God knows how many men he was using, but there were too many for me to handle. Three times I tried to bust out, using the mist as cover, and three times I failed. The boys weren’t afraid to use their shotguns, either, and it was only by chance that I wasn’t filled full of holes on my last attempt. As it was, I had heard the whistle of buckshot around me, and one slug grazed me in the thigh. I ducked out of there fast and retreated to a hidey-hole where I slapped a Band-Aid on the wound. The muscle in my leg was a bit stiff but it didn’t slow me down much.

I was wet and cold and miserable, to say nothing of being hungry and tired, and I wondered if I’d come to the end of my tether. It wouldn’t have taken much for me to have lain down and slept right on the spot and let them come and find me. But I knew what would happen if I did. I had no particular ambition to go through life crippled even if Howard let it go at that, so I dragged myself wearily to my feet and set off on the move again, prowling through the mist to find a way out of this contracting circle.

I nearly stumbled over the bear. It growled and reared up, towering a good eight feet, waving its forelegs with those cruel claws and showing its teeth. I retreated to a fair distance and considered it thoughtfully.

There’s more nonsense talked about the grizzly than any other animal, barring the wolf. Grown men will look you straight in the eye and tell you of the hair-raising experiences they’ve had with grizzlies; how a grizzly will charge a man on sight, how they can outrun a horse, tear down a tree and create hell generally with no provocation. The truth is that a grizzly is like any other animal and has more sense than to tangle with a man without good reason. True, they’re apt to be bad-tempered in the spring when they’ve just come out of hibernation, but a lot of people are like that when they’ve just got out of bed.

And they’re hungry in the spring, too. The fat has gone from them and their hide hangs loose and they want to be left alone to eat in peace, just like most of us, I guess. And the females have their young in the spring and are touchy about interference, and quite justifiably so in my opinion. Most of the tall tales about grizzlies have been spun around camp fires to impress a tenderfoot or tourist and even more have been poured out of a bottle of rye whiskey.

Now it was high summer — as high as summer gets in British Columbia — and this grizzly was fat and contented. He dropped back on to four legs and continued to do what he had been doing before I interrupted him — grubbing up a juicy root. He kept a wary eye on me, though, and growled once or twice to show he wasn’t too scared of me.

I stepped back behind a tree so as not to cause him too much alarm while I figured out what to do about him. I could just go away, of course, but I had a better idea than that because the thought had occurred to me that an 800-pound bear could be a powerful ally if I could recruit him. There are not many men who will face a charging grizzly.

The nearest of Matterson’s men were not more than a half-mile from this spot, as I knew to my cost, and were closing in slowly. The natural tendency of the bear would be to move away as they approached. I already knew they made a lot of noise when moving and the bear would soon hear them. The only reason he hadn’t heard me was that I’d developed a trick of ghosting along quietly — it’s one of the things you learn in a situation like I was in; you learn it or you’re dead.

What I had to do was to make the bear ignore his natural inclination. Instead of moving away, he had to move towards the oncoming men, and how in hell could I make him do that? You don’t shoo away a grizzly like you do a cow, and I had to come up with an answer fast.

After a moment’s thought I took some shotgun shells from my pocket and began to dissect them with my hunting knife, throwing away the slugs but keeping the powder charges. In a little while I had a heap of powder grains wrapped up in a glove to keep them dry. I bent down to dig into the carpet of pine needles with the knife; pine needles have a felting effect when they get matted and shed water like the feathers on a duck, and I didn’t have to dig very far to find dry, flammable material.

All the time I kept my eye on brother bear, who was chomping contentedly on his roots while keeping an eye on me. He wasn’t going to bother me if I didn’t bother him — at least that was the theory I had, although I coppered my bet by choosing an easily climbable tree within sprinting distance. From one of the side pockets of the pack I extracted the folded Government geological map of the area and a notebook I kept in there. I tore up the map into small sheets and ripped pages from the book, crumpling them into spills.

I built a fire on that spot, laying down the paper spills, lacing them liberally with gunpowder and covering the lot with dry pine needles. From the fire I led a short trail of gunpowder for easy ignition, and right in the centre I embedded three shotgun shells.

After listening for a moment and hearing nothing, I circled around the bear about one-sixth of a circle, and built another fire in the same way — and yet another on the other side. He reared and growled when he saw me moving about but subsided when he saw I wasn’t coming any closer. Any animal has its ‘safe’ distance carefully measured out and takes action only if it feels its immediate territory infringed on. The action will then depend on the animal: a deer will run for it — a grizzly will attack.

The fires laid, I waited for Matterson’s boys to make the next move, and the bear would give me warning when that was coming since he was between us. I just stood cradling the shotgun in my arms and waited patiently, never taking my eyes off the grizzly.