The griz moved away. The man didn’t breathe. The griz ambled to the elk. The man ran for a tree, jumped into the low branches and scrambled up the trunk. Looking back he saw the griz squat leisurely beside the elk and start to eat.
Clouds sifted across the sun; the snow turned gray, lifeless, the long-limbed conifers shorn of light. The grizzly finished eating the elk guts and with a shake of his jaws ripped a rear leg from the body and chewed it down, bones crunching like tinder.
The light thinned, seeming to rise up the mountain and fade into the sky. The grizzly dragged the elk’s body into a spruce thicket, swished his huge muzzle back and forth in a drift to clean it, sat to scratch behind an ear with a rear paw, stood, shook himself and slowly wandered uphill till he was a far golden tinge between the aspen trunks.
The man slid down the tree, grabbed the Winchester and ran downhill toward a northwest-draining valley with deep drifts between the scattered lodgepole pines.
Panting, he halted to look back but the griz wasn’t coming. He realized he didn’t know this valley, but if he climbed the left side and headed southwest he should find camp.
He rubbed at his neck but there was no blood, just soreness where the grizzly’s lips had abraded it. He felt less fear, deeply moved and alive. The drifts underfoot felt weightless. Thank you, he told the grizzly. Thank you for letting me live.
Ahead of him trees had been snapped off, shattered; he worried maybe the grizzly had done it. No, this was a wide gouge in the forest as if a huge boulder had smashed through it.
It scared him though he didn’t know why. And because it scared him he went closer.
A crashed plane lay on one crushed wing, nose buried in the snow, the other wing raised toward the sky as if in supplication, the propeller twisted and the tail torn half off.
The man edged forward and peered in the shattered windshield expecting to see death, but both pilot seats were empty. In the rear behind them were two long dark wooden shapes he realized were coffins. One coffin had cracked open and snow had drifted over it.
As he backed away he saw tracks: human, heading downhill. Strides wide apart, no blood, a person moving fast, practically running from the plane.
He followed the tracks to the bottom of this valley where they dove over another ridge into the lower forests of lodgepole, aspen and spruce toward distant Highway 191, the road from Bozeman to West Yellowstone.
Whoever had made these tracks needed no help. He hiked back up the valley and climbed through the dark timber toward the next valleys and camp. He was tired now, the late afternoon sun bouncing off the white drifts and icy trees glared into his eyes; his legs were leaden, his feet wet and numb. He thought of what he’d tell Steve and Curt in camp: this plane, the grizzly, the dead elk.
Motion ahead made him flinch – the griz? No, a lynx staring at him with yellow slit eyes. It hissed and trotted away on wide fluffy feet. It scorned me, he realized. But how could it not? We’re destroying their world, and they know it.
It began to snow, tiny glittering flakes against the blue sky.
Didn’t matter. Soon he’d be sitting round the fire with Steve and Curt, warmed not only by the flames but by this special companionship, guys you rarely saw but with whom it was a joy to be. To like and respect them as they do you. A brotherhood, almost.
In a way it was these ten days of hunting he looked forward to most, every year.
He crossed wearily over the crest into the next valley, and across that up through another steep slope of firs and aspens, the snowflakes tumbling faster, darkening the trees.
A bullet smashed into the aspen beside him as a rifle roared uphill. “Stop!” he screamed. “Don’t shoot!”
His voice echoed away through the forest of ridges and cliffs; chunks of ice fell from branches down his neck.
“Zack!” a voice yelled uphill. “That you?”
“Steve? You nearly shot me!”
“You aren’t supposed to be here!” Steve came running downhill rolling clods of snow before him.
“You shot at me.”
Steve threw down his rifle and dropped to his knees, head in his hands. “Holy shit! I thought you were the elk I was tracking.” He stood, wild-eyed. “Christ, you weren’t supposed to be in this valley. That’s how we divided things up this morning.”
“You can’t tell an elk from me?”
“You were coming through dark timber where there’d been an elk a minute ago. I thought you were him –”
Zack lowered his gun. “Damn!” he spat, fierce in some way he didn’t understand; more than being shot at, it was fury at the type of person who made these mistakes. Not like Steve.
“I’m truly sorry, man,” Steve was saying. “I’m gonna regret this all my life.”
Zack nodded, not mollified. There was no way to explain or forget.
“Really sorry, man.” Steve repeated. “Really sorry.” He jacked the empty cartridge out of his gun and put his thumb over the breech to keep another from entering from the magazine. He took a bullet from his pocket and shoved it down into the breech.
“Forget it.” Zack said. For some reason he didn’t want to mention the bear and the plane but did anyway.
“A crashed plane?” Steve stared uphill. “Why didn’t you say?”
“With two coffins in the back.” Zack glanced at the aspen trunk smashed by Steve’s bullet. “Let’s get to camp and tell Curt. That’s where I was headed.”
A hesitant smile crossed Steve’s rangy, lean face. “You call 911?”
“Uphill’s like here, no coverage.”
“Weird there’s no bodies. Coffins? Spooky.” Steve slung his rifle. “Can you show me?”
Zack leaned against the aspen. “What for?”
“Hell of a pilot, to survive a crash landing up here.”
“We need to tell Curt.”
“It’s what, half mile away?”
“A mile. At least.”
Steve brushed new snow from his shoulders. “Let’s do it. Or I have to follow your footprints all the way down the valley where you tracked that pilot, then up again to wherever the plane is. And by then it’ll be all covered with snow.”
As they climbed the ridge in last light toward the plane, Zack could not stop thinking how close it had been, that bullet hitting the aspen.
I could be dead now.
NEW SNOW half-covered the plane, giving it a sepulchral air in the deepening darkness.
“Holy shit!” Steve circled it, wiped aside snow to peer in the windows, leaned his rifle against the smashed tail and climbed the fuselage.
He tugged open the starboard door till it pointed straight up like a broken cross. “How the pilot got out.” He dropped feet-first into the cabin, checked the instruments and squirmed over the seats toward the coffins.
“Don’t worry,” Zack called. “They’re already dead.”
Steve reached the broken coffin with the snow atop it. But where had that come from, Zack wondered: there was no break in the fuselage where it could have drifted in.
Steve licked a finger, touched the snow and tasted it. “Snow!” he called.