On Bear Mountain

  “It’s a long way,” he admitted.

  She swallowed hard. “But we’ll be fine. And the bears will be fine, too. And after we do this, everybody will know that we’re a man and a woman. Not idiots.”

  They drove very slowly, carrying their precious cargo away from Bear Creek.

  • • •

  He was not the same man. Quentin knew that, even if the change was too new to be examined. A foundation had been put in place but needed more time to settle into its full strength. Still, he had a deep sense of focus and structure that suddenly felt right. I want to wake up like this every morning, he thought. With her.

  “I need to go back to the house before Arthur gets up,” I whispered. I was already half dressed when Quentin stirred and opened his eyes. Dawn had begun to seep through the tent’s translucent canvas. “If I go now, he won’t realize I spent the entire night with you. You come to the house in a little while and eat breakfast with us. All right?”

  He sat up, exposing an irresistible expanse of darkly haired chest and stomach. I trailed a hand down the center and he grasped it, tugging. “Get back in bed and give me thirty more minutes,” he ordered in that gruff, seductive voice men have when they’re sleepy and aroused.

  Sisterly duty warred with womanly need. Both won. I unbuttoned my flannel shirt, watching him watch the movement of my fingers. “Give me fifteen minutes,” I countered with a seductive voice of my own, “and make it as good as thirty.”

  When I finally returned to the house I found two items Arthur had laid prominently on the kitchen table, as a message. One was a magazine picture of several black bears. The other was The Incredible Journey. It lay open on my table, just as Arthur had left it at the beginning of the year, in Atlanta.

  I raced upstairs to confirm that my brother was not in his bed, then, bile rising in my throat, I shoved his bedroom window up and yelled for Quentin, the tenants, the whole world, to come and help me find him before something godawful happened again.

  • • •

  “Bear tracks. Big bear. Little bear. I’m picturin’ a mama and cub.” The sheriff’s tracker squatted over the pawprints that led up the dirt road and disappeared behind the imprint of the truck’s rear tires. “Arthur led ’em up here and got ’em in the truck somehow.”

  Janine spoke loudly and with growing horror. “And then Esme drove out of here with the truckful of bears?” Deputies, forest rangers, Tibers, and neighbors were crowded around us on the road. Mr. John had collapsed with chest pains when he discovered that Esme was missing in the middle of the night. He’d been taken to the hospital. Janine looked as if she might explode. She whirled toward me. “My cousin is somewhere in these mountains on a public road driving a four-ton vehicle with bears in the back.”

  I looked at her wearily. “Quentin and I searched the main roads heading north out of the county right after I called the sheriff. Esme and Arthur made it that far with no problem. I’m sure they’re driving slow, and it’s just a matter of spotting them.”

  “What makes you think they’ve gone north?”

  “He’s taking those bears to higher ground. That’s the only direction he’d go.”

  “But you have no idea when he and Esme left. They could be halfway to Virginia by now! Or down a ravine where no one’s noticed the wreck yet!”

  That mental image, which I’d been trying to avoid, weakened my knees and sent the blood rushing from my head. Quentin caught me by one elbow and steered me out of the crowd. “The sheriff’s organizing his own search. He’s already called for help in other districts. There’s nothing else we can do here. We need to get on the road again and look for ourselves.”

  “Quentin, I don’t have a clue where he’d take those bears.”

  “We’ll figure it out. Your brother’s methodical. He has his patterns, and so does Esme. Come on.”

  We climbed into Daddy’s truck. I called to Liza out the open passenger window. “We’re going to find Arthur.”

  She ran over. “How?”

  I shook my head. “Patterns.”

  • • •

  Several hours later we’d traversed the length of two main routes that led across the rugged mountains between Tiberville and North Carolina without seeing any sign of the convoy truck. “Esme would never take a highway, or the interstate,” Quentin said. “She’s not that brave.” He swung the pickup into a convenience store lot and refilled the gas tank. I got out.

  I leaned against the truck’s hood scouring a map of the mountains I spread there, while I gulped a carton of milk Quentin forced on me. He leaned over the map, too, and began tracing lines with his fingertips. His eyes narrowed in concentration. How does Arthur think? How does he hold his world together? What connects his spaces?

  I pounded a fist on the map. “There are too many back roads into these mountains.”

  He pushed my fist aside and planted his fingertip on Tiberville. “Help me find Bear Creek on this map. Does it show it?”

  “No, but I have a county map that does.” I retrieved that map from beneath the truck’s seat and spread it on the hood. Quentin bent over it, pulled his knife from a trouser pocket, opened the blade, and used it as a pointer. “This is the creek, this blue line?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “All of Arthur’s landmarks direct him back to the creek. He’s shown me his method when we walk in the woods. It’s how he never gets lost on the farm. He can get lost anywhere else, but not there. He uses the creek like a compass.”

  “I don’t understand your point.”

  He traced the curving line north to the map’s edge. “Bear Creek doesn’t originate in Tiber County?”

  “No, it comes from a spring in — ” I halted, thinking. My heart raced. I pulled the county map aside and frantically searched the larger one. I gasped and planted my finger on a spot far from where we were. “A spring high in the Bear Mountains.” I looked at Quentin. “And Arthur’s been there before.”

  He kissed me on the forehead. “Patterns. Let’s go.”

  • • •

  “Yeah, I noticed that big ol’ Army truck in the woods back yonder when I got here this morning,” the grizzled proprietor of the Bear Mountain Grocery told us. He spoke through a wad of chewing tobacco as he shuffled a box of computer disks atop his store counter. His laptop computer, perched on an antique barrel with Lula Brand Stone Ground Grits still visible on its side, displayed the bloody screensaver for some violent, medieval video game. “I was planning on calling the law to look into it,” he mentioned as he continued sorting his CD-ROMs, “but I hadn’t took the time, yet. Too busy playing a few rounds of Dragon Quest with a network of ol’ boys up in Canada.”

  We told him the truck belonged to Quentin, and we’d be back for it later. “I thought it was part of some kind of Army maneuver,” the store owner called as we walked out. “’Cause the Army brings their Ranger boys up here to train.” He guffawed. “I get their schedule from a feller down in Florida who sneaks a peek at the camp commander’s e-mail.”

  I pointed to a narrow, rutted trail heading up the side of the mountain. “Take that jeep trail,” I told Quentin. He steered Daddy’s ancient, protesting truck up a path that left the paved road and all pretense of normal travel behind. We crested a plateau and the road vanished. Around us was nothing but forest. A deer path no wider than our shoulders led off along a shoulder of hills. “This is as far as we can drive. Now it’s about a six-mile walk due east to the site of the spring. It’ll take us a good two hours.”

  “Let’s go, then.”

  We hiked east. The December day was cold and clear, the temperature only in the low forties according to a thermometer I’d noticed outside the store. We were in some of the highest mountains in the state, too, and when we cut across exposed ridges a brittle wind hit us. We both wore thick jackets and gloves, but I had to cover my exposed ears with my hands. In contrast to our grim and hurried mood, the views were serene and stunning, the mountains falling asleep for t
he winter under their mantle of gray and evergreen.

  The morning was gone and the sun was heading west by the time we entered the deep glen I remembered. In the center, canopied by the graceful green fingers of tall firs, a spring bubbled among jumbled boulders. The air was damp, clean, and cold. Ferns, sheltered from the frost, gently brushed our legs as we walked. The mountains’ steep namesake ridges rose around the glen as if it were the center stage of a theater. It was a perfect place for elves and bears.

  Arthur and Esme clambered down from a rock and ran to us, smiling. The bear and her cub ambled along after them. “Why did you do this?” I asked as they threw their arms around us.

  “We wanted to show people we could do something important,” Esme explained. “I drove and read the map and Arthur remembered how to follow the trail here!” It was amazing to realize that my brother had gone on this adventure and even now looked very relaxed about being so far from home.

  “I’m a man of the world,” he proclaimed. Then, with a joy that only outcast creatures can know, he said simply, laying a hand over his heart, “I won’t be lost anymore.”

  A shiver of pride and excitement crested down my spine. Granny Annie has finally found her little boy and brought him home. After all these years.

  • • •

  The four of us sat on a rock ledge beside the spring, watching the mother and cub. Arthur sighed. “Granny Annie will still be living on Bear Creek, up here. It’s her home. And she’ll be safe from the bad Tweens.”

  Quentin said quietly, “Brother Arthur, I know I scared you yesterday.”

  Arthur looked at him sadly. “You’re building a Bear you don’t even like. But you shouldn’t kill it.”

  “I know. Maybe I’m not meant to build your Mama Bear a friend.”

  “Maybe not.” He paused, his mouth trembling. He took Esme’s hand and clutched it for support. “I can live without Mama Bear, if she needs to go to New York.”

  Done. After all we’d gone through, he sat proudly at the head of Bear Springs, having rescued our bear legacy on his own and put an end to months of uncertainty. Quentin could go, now. Buy the Iron Bear and take it to New York. Never come back. I froze inside and couldn’t make myself look at Quentin’s face.

  “Am I still Brother Bear?” Quentin asked him quietly.

  Arthur nodded. “You’ll always be Brother Bear.”

  The bear and cub lay down beside the spring. Esme said, “This is a good place for bears, isn’t it?”

  I recovered enough to carry on as if the strangest victory didn’t taste like defeat. “They’ll be fine. They have lots of water, lots of oaks full of acorns, and meadows covered in blackberries. There are caves near here, too.”

  Arthur looked at them sadly. “I wish we could visit them.”

  “You don’t have to. Granny Annie will always be watching over us. That’s what Daddy told us, and he was right.”

  Tears crested in his eyes, but he nodded. “And it’s easy to follow the creek home when you’re lonely.”

  In the poignant silence that followed, Quentin looked at me and said, “That’s what we need to do, sometimes. Just go home.” I had no idea how he meant that. I was dying inside. He put an arm around Arthur. “Let’s get back to the rest of the world before they decide we’re all lost.”

  Esme shook her head. “We’ve been trying to leave, but the bears won’t let us.”

  Arthur nodded vigorously. “They keep following us! I been trying to talk ’em out of it for a long time, but so far they don’t understand that this is their home, now.”

  “I told them they already ate all the cookies from my knapsack,” Esme explained. “And I even put it on top of that big rock over there so they’d stop thinking about it.” She squealed as the cub suddenly clambered up that rock and headed straight for her sack. He flopped down with the bag between its paws and began chewing on some bulky object inside. “My little gun’s in there!” Esme cried. “He could get hurt!”

  “It’s not loaded,” I soothed.

  “Yes, it is! I didn’t think I’d have to shoot anybody, but I thought I might need a few bullets.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Quentin said. The cub lay on the rock directly in front of us. He wrestled with the knapsack and gnawed the loaded revolver. Quentin rose to his feet slowly. “Everybody up — don’t startle the cub — and move out of the line of fire.”

  I pulled Esme to her feet, while he urged Arthur. “Run, over there,” Quentin said, pointing. Arthur grabbed Esme’s hand and took off. Quentin whirled toward me, deliberately putting himself between me and the cub as he reached out to grab my hand. Too late. Fate, destiny, or simply the doomed chances in our combined legacy had finally found us.

  The bear cub bit down just so, and the gun fired.

  Quentin staggered but didn’t fall. I heard the bullet zip by my left arm, and I saw the right side of Quentin’s jacket move as if a hand had slapped it from inside.

  Esme screamed. She and Arthur dropped to their haunches and held each other. Quentin and I traded a look of stunned disbelief. His expression conveyed dark wonder, at first. So this is how it’s meant to happen. He reached inside his jacket and brought his hand out, covered in blood. “I should have known I’d be shot by a bear,” he said.

  I launched myself at him, snatching the jacket open and uttering a garbled cry as I saw the neat hole and its bloody apron in his flannel shirt, just below his rib cage. The bullet had hit him in the back and passed all the way through.

  “Sit down,” I ordered, and it scared me when he did so without arguing, his knees buckling. I slid an arm around him to keep him from falling. We slumped on the ground together. My mind blank, all I could think of was Put pressure on the wound, a tidbit I recalled from every shoot-’em-up novel I’d ever read. I unbuttoned his shirt and gagged when I saw the small, pulsing wound on his right side. When I reached around his back I found blood there, too, and when I looked I found the entry wound on his right side, as neat as a hole bored into metal. I leaned into him with a hand pressed tightly to each spot.

  His eyes were half shut. The pain had hit. Arthur crawled over to us. There was blind terror in his stare. “Brother Bear,” he whispered. Behind him, Esme moaned and sobbed. Quentin scowled at him. “Brother Arthur! Get up off your knees. Get up. Don’t forget everything I taught you. You’ve got to be a man, remember?” Arthur wobbled to his feet. He trembled and looked at me wildly.

  “Go back to the store where you left the truck,” I told him. “Walk as fast as you can, but don’t forget to pay attention to the trail — don’t get lost. Tell the man at the store that we need help, and show him where we are on the map. Esme, you help him. I know you two can do it, together. I’ll take care of Quentin. Now go. Go!”

  He whirled and ran to Esme, helped her to her feet, and they disappeared down the trail at a trot. My ears still rang with the gunshot, but now the electric drone of fear joined it. Quentin and I were alone. Only seconds had passed in that convulsive moment of time. Breathing hard, Quentin said, “You should go with them. They’ll get lost.”

  “No. He’ll find the way back, and he’ll get help. He couldn’t have done it six months ago, but now you’ve taught him how to take care of himself — now he’s pretending to be you, and that part of him is going to take care of you.”

  “I’m telling you, you better leave me and go help him — ”

  “I’m not leaving you. Have some faith.”

  “I don’t like the way you believe in things at the moment,” he said.

  I wouldn’t admit that I had visions of Arthur panicking and Esme sinking into total hysterics, both of them lost, wandering, while Quentin lay at the start of the Bear Creek waters, his blood slipping down that path to the ocean, some unimaginable fate bleeding him to death to ensure the futility of Riconni and Powell destinies. I felt his blood seeping between my fingers already, and I kissed him desperately.

  Even the bears had disappeared.

  CHAPTER 24
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  I helped him walk to a high meadow nearby, where I could build a fire. He lay down on a bed of leaves I pushed together and put on a good show of comfortable lounging, drawing up one knee, draping his left hand atop his stomach. Neither of us said much. Admit nothing worse can happen, and it won’t. “Stings a little,” he lied, when I asked him how badly he hurt. His face was white, his teeth clenched whenever I caught him unawares. When I touched him, his skin was too cool.

  I pulled off my coat and then my wool shirt, which I cut apart with a pocket knife. As I bound him around the middle with long strips of the material, he pretended to admire my thin undershirt. “Hey, no bra the next time I get shot.” His voice was strained.

  “I’ll strip and dance naked if the distraction will stop your bleeding.”

  “I’ll take you up on that when I feel better.”

  I pulled a rotten log to his feet. “Prop your feet up. It does something good for your circulation. I can’t remember what.” I could barely remember my own name, at that point.

  “Keeps blood going to the heart,” he supplied. “Why don’t you get a fire going, and then hike out of here? I’ll be fine. See if you can catch up with Arthur and Esme.”

  “Because the fire won’t last without me tending it.” And neither might you, I didn’t say.

  I put my coat over him but he pushed it aside. “You’ll freeze. Put that back on.”

  “I’m moving around, and I’m perfectly warm. Who’s the nurse here?”

  “I’m the one who knows why blood flows downhill. Now put on your coat and get that fire started, and get out of here.”

  I dropped to my knees beside him and took his face between my hands. “Goddammit, will you stop saying that? Do you want to be left alone?”

  “I don’t want you to watch me die.”