Thomas Perry - Shadow Woman

When they rounded the slope at the foot of Hudson Glacier she began to feel stronger. If she was maintaining their lead, then for a while the slope of the mountain would be between them and the rifle.

They turned northward, moving along the ridges, staying high, where there were plateaus with dead grass and stunted trees. The north wind picked up as the sun moved westward, blowing hard into their faces and making their progress slower.

At two o’clock, she heard the dogs again, and they seemed to be closer. She turned, but she could not see them. She said, “Ready to run again?”

As she ran into the wind, her steps were shorter, as though the air were catching her in midstride and pushing her back. She and Pete leaned into it, trying to stay low, but before long they were just scrambling over rocks and climbing up steep grades, buying each yard with too much of their strength.

At four fifteen, when Jane had Mount Custer on her left and Herbst Glacier on her right, she looked back and saw the man. He was little more than a small vertical line of darkness against the horizon. She could see two more spots of darkness ranging ahead of him, low to the ground. Jane took out her binoculars and found him.

She watched as he stopped, then sat on the ground with his knees bent, fiddling with something. At this distance she could not resolve any of the details of his face. Very deliberately he raised both arms in front of him at once. The gesture seemed oddly familiar. When his head cocked to his right, she shouted, “Get down!”

They both dropped to their bellies, then heard the whip-crack sound as the bullet broke the sound barrier above their heads. Jane counted seconds, listening for the report of the rifle, but it never came. He still had the silencer. She lifted her head a little and saw the man running.

“Let’s go,” she said, and pulled herself to her feet.

She and Pete ran together, side by side. She heard the whip-crack again, and this time she saw chips fly off a boulder ahead of her as the bullet ricocheted into the sky. There seemed to be no hope. Each time they ran, he would shoot. Each time they stopped to hide, he would run closer.

“We’ve got to get out of the open,” she said.

“Agreed.”

They ran to the west, moving diagonally down the slope of the mountain. As soon as they reached the first stand of scraggly pine trees, the shooting stopped. Twice Pete let his momentum build up, tripped, and rolled, then stood and ran again. They ran until the sun was beyond the western mountains and the dim afterlight threw no shadows. They stumbled into a long, narrow valley meadow with thickets of berry bushes as the light began to fail.

The bear was a hundred feet away, busily rooting on the ground, snuffling and grumbling to itself. Jane stopped. Her mind seemed to explode into fragments that scurried in several directions at once, looking for a way out. She knew immediately that the enormous tan animal was not a black bear. Its back had a big hump on it, and the profile of its face was flatter, with the snout turned slightly upward. Jane remembered the warnings on the little flyer she had picked up at the park entrance.

Grizzlies stayed in the high altitudes in the remotest areas of the park, and if any place was more remote than this little trough between two mountains, then it couldn’t be reached by a human being. There wasn’t even enough animal traffic to make a path in the weeds. She could see the thicket was full of berry bushes. The bear seemed to be finishing off a low branch, and now it raised a paw and swatted the next one to shake the berries loose. That reminded her of another problem. This was the time of year when they were voracious, trying desperately to fatten themselves for the winter. Never hike at dusk. That was the part that had been printed in bold letters.

In her peripheral vision she could see Pete slowly reaching into his pack for the pistol. She touched him and shook her head. Then they began to walk toward the far end of the narrow valley. It seemed hopeless. A bear could outrun a man. This bear was hungry. The gun Pete was still searching for would be about as much protection as a fly swatter if a bear like this one decided to come for them. Nobody even knew what made a bear decide to amble away one time and attack another time, but there were theories. Suddenly she remembered the rest of the warning. This was the reason no dogs were allowed in the park.

She whispered, “Keep going. Don’t run, don’t stop.”

He looked alarmed. “What are—”

She pushed him forward, and he kept walking. She was aware of each pace he took as he moved farther away from her. Jane slowly turned her head to look back at the way she had come, then across the field to the far end. She carefully chose the spot where she would make her stand.

The bear stopped eating the berries, shook its wide, shaggy body, and raised its head to stare directly into her eyes. She did not know if she was held in the huge animal’s gaze for a few seconds or a minute. The bear’s undistracted intensity brought back to her phrases from stories her grandfather had told. Bears could read minds. Probably in the Old Time, the listeners would all have known what it was like to stumble on a bear in the forest. They would have nodded their heads, maybe chuckled nervously at the memory of this stare. It was said that if he knew your real name, you couldn’t escape him, and to her it felt as though he were probing her mind for it now. The stories were proof that what was happening was unchanged since the beginning of time. There was only one bear, and one small woman walking through the wild country.

The bear sniffed the air and smelled her fear. It took one step toward her, then another, tasting the breeze. She could see its ears move back and its face elongate, and she knew what was about to happen. There would be no chance to run, no way to fight. Her only chance was the one that had existed since the first Nundawaono woman and the first bear. Nothing had changed. Those who lived, lived by their wits.

Jane knelt in the grass, slipped off her pack, and watched the bear erupt into its charge. It surged forward with growing speed. As she fumbled in her pack, she watched the progress of his huge, powerful body across the field of dry grass, and said aloud, “Is it the truth, Nyakwai? Are the old stories true?” She whispered, “They had better be.”

Her hands shook as she tore open the packets of honey and peanut butter, raisins and dried meat, then dropped them into the plastic bag with the garbage.

The bear was almost on her when she sprang to her feet. As Nyakwai always did in the stories, this one reared back on its hind legs. It seemed to Jane to be eight or nine feet tall as it towered over her, its thick, powerful forelegs opened wide to grasp her in its claws and hold her while it gnawed through her neck.

Jane flung the plastic bag of food and garbage hard at the bear’s chest. As they always did, Nyakwai’s lightning-quick animal reflexes clapped his big paws together and caught the bag between them, his long claws digging through it into the pungent mess it held.

Jane pivoted and sprinted for the far end of the field. She judged it was a hundred yards of open grass before the ground again rose into rocky outcroppings and sheltering trees. By the time she had finished making her estimate it was eighty.… Now it was sixty. She clenched her teeth and pumped her arms, making her toes dig in and tear at the ground with each stride. Forty.… Thirty. Just before the trees began, she glanced over her shoulder, then kept running.

In the stories, the trick was to get the bear to catch a small log, and then quickly swing a war club down on the top of its skull. But this bear was still in the spot where she had left it, peacefully rooting deep in the plastic sack, lapping out the fatty meat and peanut butter, the sweet, sticky honey and the crumbs of biscuits.