PAUL

Paul follows the bear. Steadily the trail rises up an incline, and ahead, in scattered glimpses seen through the treetops, he sees a sheer canyon wall. The trail is messy with tracks and piles of lumpy excrement—decorated with berry skins—evidence of the bear’s frequent passage, and Paul tramps through them both. The thorns of prickly ash carry clumps of fur in them. Here and there a stump or a log appears to have gone through a shredding machine, torn apart by claws in search of grubs. He kneels next to one and stares into the woods as if they were a mirror and listens for a time, waiting for a grunt, a snap, some noise that will indicate he is not alone. Nothing. In the log, in a hole burrowed by a woodpecker, he spots a cache, some pine nuts, a highbush cranberry. He digs out the cranberry and pops it in his mouth, a little sweetness on his tongue, before spitting out the seed and moving on.

On a rise, the ground flattens out and the pines give way to a twenty-foot wash of broken basalt that has come loose from the cliff side in big and small pieces like some vast gray puzzle shaken from its board. Beyond it lies the cave—in a half-moon shape—as tall as Paul and twice again as wide. Blood leads into it, like the tacky trail left by some enormous red slug. He searches for movement but discerns only a short expanse of cave wall that slopes sharply downward before darkness overcomes it.

The smell—a heavy, oily smell—hangs in the air like a shambling presence. He brings a hand to his nose to guard against it. He stands there, his eyes fast on the cave, waiting for a decision to come to him. A chill wind blows through the gulch, momentarily dragging the smell away from him and making the pines send out a roaring whistle. Just as quickly, it stops, as if the forest has taken a deep breath.

He lifts his right arm over his head and stretches it out and lets it back down, and then does the same with his left. He snaps his neck sideways and it makes an audible pop. Readying for a fight.

It won’t be his first. When he was a teenager—at the Deschutes County Fair—among the shooting galleries and dunk tanks and horse stalls and pigpens, there was a ring of sawdust with a sign next to it that read Bear Wrestling. In the middle of the ring prowled a big black bear with a leather muzzle. The bear was chained to a stake. For a dollar, you could wrestle it. If you pinned it for ten seconds, you won a stuffed animal, a sack of caramel corn. Paul watched several men—thick-necked ranch hands—try to grapple the bear down, all of them reduced to screams, some to tears, as the bear overcame them. He had a plan. He would walk out there and punch the bear as hard as he could in the snout, as if it were a dog or a bull, something that he could teach to submit. He remembers the crowd of people surrounding the ring, laughing, hollering him on, as he approached the bear at a sprint. It rose on its haunches to greet him. He swung and struck the bear in the nose. Which served only to piss it off. It loosed a pained roar and wrapped its shaggy arms around him and dropped him flat with six hundred pounds of hair and muscle and stink pinning him. The muzzle pressed against his face. It was laced leather and he could see the teeth snapping on the other side of it, less than an inch from his nose.

He laughs at the memory and feels a little braver. From his pocket he pulls a book of matches and studies it in the palm of his hand. The Pine Tavern, it reads in green lettering. He imagines the whine of his son’s voice next to him. “What are you going to do?” he would say.

“I’m going to smoke it out,” Paul would say to his son, to no one.

“You’re crazy. And then what? What are we going to—”

“We’re going to kill it. That’s what we’re going to do.”

There is no response. Because he is alone. He retreats down the trail, swinging his head left, then right, until he spots what he is looking for, a rotten pine whose branches sag and whose bark hangs grayly off it like an ill-fitting coat. A woodpecker flies from a cavity in the tree when he approaches it. He grabs at a low-hanging branch and it sheds many browned needles when he yanks at it and finally tears it from the trunk. The crack makes him startle and he clicks off his safety and lifts his rifle and holds his breath, certain the bear will come lumbering from the cave and curl a clawed paw around him and drag him down into a darkness that carries the thunderous aroma of wet fur and animal shit and blood both old and new. It is the smell of something wild—and right now, in his mind, it fills the world and becomes the only smell.

But the darkness of the cave remains uninterrupted. Still, the idea lingers—and seems even to intensify—when he moves slowly forward, his steps uneven over the rocky surface. One hand grips his rifle, the other the branch. His head feels hot and his hands feel cold and stiff and doomed to a slow response when he needs their action.

Ten feet from the cave he kneels and lays down both the rifle and the branch. He removes a match and scratches it into a flame. The flame gutters, growing blue and then vanishing in a black puff as the wind drags it from the matchstick. He strikes another and cups a hand around it. The flame dances as he lowers it, but, shielded from the wind, it hugs the match and then the branch when he touches it to the tuft of needles where it flares and makes a noise like torn fabric. A blue-yellow color sputters and crawls along the branch.

He snatches up his rifle and then the flaming branch and rises from his crouch and charges the cave entrance. At the last minute he hurls the branch inside and turns to run unsteadily along the cliff wall before circling back to where he first stood, observing the cave.

His heart is like a hot hammer in his throat. The cave glows orange. Shadows play across its walls. It is the kind of place witches would gather, stirring their cauldron, speaking the darkest prophecies. He is glad Graham is not here to see the stuff of nightmares. All the rest of the world falls away, his attention singular, so that when a flock of geese passes closely overhead, he notices them only vaguely, their honks sounding like music from another realm, the way the distant ring of a buoy no doubt sounds to an exhausted swimmer pulled far from shore by the riptide.

At any moment he expects the bear to explode from the den, the smoke swirling around it like a wreath. He is ready to fire. But he is ready to run, too.

A minute passes. Then another. And still the bear does not come. The flames have died out. Smoke still billows from the cave but weakly, like steam pluming from a gray-lipped mouth on a winter’s day. He sighs and starts forward, this time with the intention of entering the cave.

He no longer moves with the caution he exhibited earlier, his rifle in his hand but gripped carelessly, an umbrella on a sunny day. At the cave entrance, he pauses and looks back over his shoulder. Then he descends into the smoky dimness.

He gropes around in the smoke, the embers offering some light but not enough. His feet clatter against rocks and his hands claw at the ground until they discover something damp, a collection of bones and blood, the remains of Boo. He scoops up what he can. He has by this time held his breath to the limit. His lungs demand air and he breathes in a great gasp of smoke and begins to cough, at first hesitantly and then miserably as the burn overtakes his throat and lungs.

He staggers from the cave, hacking, clutching to his chest a skull with some spine still attached to it, a gruesome sculpture upholstered with patches of hair. He pets the remains and they smear away against his hand. He is crying again. There is nothing violent and shuddery about it, not like that embarrassing moment with his son. Tears are simply leaking down his cheeks.

Boo listened to him, never rolled his eyes or whined at commands, always greeted him with slobbery kisses and a wagging tail. His loyalty was unconditional. If only humans were more like dogs, Paul is certain he would have loved more of them in his life.