It went true, into the bear’s side right behind his left foreleg.
The bear let out a grunting roar and half raised itself to a standing position; then it fell back, trying to grab at the arrow or to bite it. Joe Mack stood up and too eager, missed his second shot. The arrow barely grazed the bear, which wheeled about and saw Joe Mack. With a roar, it started for him. He let go his third arrow as the bear leaped over a log. For an instant the bear’s throat had been clearly visible, and this time his aim was good, but the bear kept coming.
Wheeling, he grabbed a limb and hoisted himself up. The bear lunged against the tree, his long claws raking Joe Mack’s leg, ripping his pants and pulling the moccasin from his foot.
Joe Mack climbed higher and then looked down. The bear was clawing at the tree, breaking the lower dead branches in a fury to reach him. Joe Mack notched another arrow, and as the bear started to climb, he shot the arrow down the wide red maw into the bear’s throat.
Its shoulders were already covered with blood from the previous wound, but it clawed after him, shaking the tree until Joe Mack was hanging on desperately. Choking, the bear tried to climb. Joe Mack prepared another arrow but lost it when he had to grab wildly at the tree to keep from being shaken loose.
He clung to the tree, getting a good grip on a higher branch and pulling himself up.
The bear’s efforts seemed to weaken. It dropped back on its haunches and then reared again as Joe Mack moved.
Then it fell back, struggled to rise, and finally lay still. Joe Mack waited, watching. At last, very carefully, he crawled down the tree. He poked at the bear with the end of his bow. There was no reaction.
First he retrieved the dropped arrow and then the one buried in the bear’s side. Arrows were hard to come by and would be needed. Then he looked carefully around.
The land about was bleak and harsh. A small stream raced among the rocks nearby, a little ice along its fringes. The pines were ragged and storm torn, growing sometimes from the naked rock.
From under straggling birches he gathered dry sticks and built a small fire, concealed by the trees around. Then he went to work on the carcass of the bear.
It was a long, tiresome job, and his strength was not what it had been. He peeled back the hide and began gathering the fat, taking the best cuts of meat. Over the fire he roasted some, eating it as he worked.
What he would have given for a good cup of coffee!
A cold sun was disappearing behind an icy ridge. The wind crept down the canyon and prowled among the trees, finding leaves to rustle and branches to rattle in the cold. Joe Mack worked on into the night, warming his cold hands by the fire, building a rack on which to dry meat and smoke it. Clearing a flat place he staked out the great hide and began to scrape it clean of fat and fragments of meat.
Out in the night, a wolf howled. From somewhere further off, another replied. They smelled the bear’s fresh blood, and they would be coming. He stood his bow and his arrows close at hand. Firelight flickered on the pines and the stark, bare branches of the birch. He warmed his cold fingers. Would he ever be warm again?
He built his fire up, and when it had burned down he moved the ashes and lay down upon the warm earth. Then he slept a little, awakening in an icy dawn. The water of the creek was so cold it made his teeth ache, but he drank and drank again.
The wolves were not gone. He glimpsed them from time to time, swift gray shadows among the trees, waiting for what they knew would be theirs. “I will leave some,” he said.
Later, standing beside the bear’s skull, he rested a hand upon it. “I beg your pardon, Bear. It was with no anger that I killed you. I needed your meat. I needed the fat from your ribs.”
He roasted more meat and ate it, and ate great pieces of the fat. This he would need to survive.
At last he began gathering what he could carry of the meat, packing away what he had smoked and dried. He worked on the hide and finally gathered it up to carry along. It would be heavy, but now he could be warm, warm.
On the third day he went away, leaving the bear’s head in a fork on the tree, and the carcass for the wolves. He walked away between the raw-backed ridges that gnawed the gray sky, away from the ragged pines where his bear skull rested, and downstream toward a warmer land.
Two days later, gaining in strength, he found a landmark — a gash upon a tree, a thin gash only, with a smaller above it — and he hesitated. He was close then, close to the people of whom Yakov had spoken. Beside a stream he sat to wash the wounds left by the bear’s claws. They seemed to be healing nicely. In a still pool he saw himself in the water. His hair was ragged and wild, and his clothes were soiled from travel. The day was warm, so he took time to wash and dry his shirt, to brush out his hair and shake his sheepskin vest clear of the leaves and twigs it had picked up in passing through the woods. As was the case with most Indians, he had little facial hair, so shaving was rarely a problem. The few hairs growing on his chin he could pull out if they bothered him.
He washed his face and hands, then checked his gear. Yet he did not move on. Should he, or should he not try to find the people of whom Yakov had spoken? He knew no one here, could trust no one. Whenever such a group got together there was always one who was an informer or who would sell out for a privilege or some benefit to himself or herself. Yet he needed shelter, and they would have shelter. Obviously they were surviving the cold, and with them he might have a better chance.
He had lost count of the days since escaping from the prison.
There was no more time. He must find a place in which to last out the winter, and certainly in this vast land, with its miles of forest and tundra, with its bleak mountains and rocky gorges, there had to be a place.
Still he shied from the refugees of whom he had heard. How could they exist free of the law? How support themselves? How remain undiscovered? Was there official connivance? Would he, a much sought man, be welcomed?
A pale sun hung in a gray sky, a faraway sun, dimmed by distance. The forest was dense, the mountains visible only through occasional breaks. He saw deer, and once he saw the track of a large cat.
A tiger? There were many of them south of here in the Ussuri River country and in the mountains along the sea. How far south was he? The growth had changed a little. Again he saw the faint scars on a tree, but he saw no human tracks. This path was rarely used.
His moccasins made no sound on the pine needles that covered the path. Here and there leaves had fallen from other trees, but he avoided them. They rustled when one walked through them, crackled when dry. This was not the forest of Idaho, Oregon, or Washington, but it was a forest, and now he was at home. He had meat and a warm robe he would trim to the size he wished, and he would find a place in which to await the spring with its bright and running waters.
He smelled the smoke first, just the faintest, most intangible of odors, and he paused in mid-stride, moved under the trees, and waited, listening, scenting the wind.
It was a moment before he caught it again, and then he moved away, more slowly now. He was dipping down into a grove of aspen now, aspen most of whose golden leaves had fallen, littering the forest floor on which he walked, paving it with a scattering of leaves like gold coins.
Somewhere before him there was a fire, wood smoke from that fire was what he had smelled. A fire meant people, life, something dangerous to him.
Ghostlike he moved among the trees, stepping over deadfalls, avoiding the path. From time to time he hesitated, waiting for his senses to pick up some scent, some sound. He heard nothing.
It was there quite suddenly, an odd-looking shelter among the trees, smoke coming from a squat chimney, a door open and a woman’s voice, her tone cold, level. It was a tone of dismissal, and he needed no language to understand.