Chapter
SEVEN
He didn’t know the time but somewhere in the middle of the night he awakened suddenly. He had come to rely on his senses and he knew something had changed to snap him awake that way and he lay with his eyes wide in the dark, listening, smelling, trying to see.
He did not have long to wait.
There was a soft rustle, then a whoofing sound and the whole wall of the shelter peeled away from the rock as if caught in an earthquake, away and down and Brian—still in his bag—was looking up in the dark at the enormous form of a bear leaning over him.
There was no time to react, to move, to do anything.
Meat, Brian had time to think—he’s smelled the venison and come for it. He’s come for the mea—
And it was true. The bear had come for the meat but the problem was that Brian lay between the bear and the meat, and the bear cuffed him to the side. As it was it wasn’t much of a cuff—nowhere near what the bear could have done, which would have broken Brian’s legs—but the bag was zipped and Brian became tangled in it and couldn’t move fast enough to stay out of the way so the bear hit him again.
This time hard. The blow took Brian in the upper thigh and even through the bag it was solid enough to nearly dislocate his hip.
He cried out. “Ahhhh . . .”
The bear stopped dead in the darkness. Brian could see the head turn to look back and down at him, a slow turning, huge and full of threat, and the bear’s breath washed over him and he thought I am going to die now. All this that I have done and I’m going to die because a bear wants to eat and I am in the way. He could see the bear’s teeth as it showed them and he couldn’t, simply couldn’t do anything; couldn’t move, couldn’t react. It was over.
The bear started to move down toward Brian and then hesitated, stopped and raised its head again and turned to look back over its shoulder to the left.
Half a beat and Brian lay still, staring up at the bear. But now a new smell, over the smell of the bear; a rank, foul, sulfurous and gagging smell as the bear turned and took a full shot of skunk spray directly in the eyes.
Betty had arrived. Whether she’d just been out hunting and had come back or had been awakened and surprised or simply didn’t like bears very much—whatever the reason she had dumped a full load in the bear’s face.
The effect was immediate and devastating.
“Rowwrrrmph!”
The bear seemed to turn inside itself, knocking Brian farther to the side, and rolled backward out of the shelter area, slamming its head back and forth on the ground, trying to clear its eyes, hacking and throwing up as it vanished in the night.
Brian looked to the source of all this. Betty stood near the end of the shelter, still with her tail raised, only now aimed at Brian. She twitched it once, then again, and Brian shook his head.
“I’m sorry. I just didn’t think you’d be thinking of food . . .” He took a piece of meat from the pile—a big one—and tossed it to her and she lowered her tail, picked up the meat and waddled off into the dark in the direction of her burrow.
Brian lay back in his bag. His shelter was a mess, the wall tipped over, and his hip hurt, but it wasn’t raining and the bag was warm. He could fix things up in the morning.
The stink of skunk was everywhere—much of what Betty had shot at the bear had gone around it and hit the wall—but Brian didn’t mind. In fact, he thought, I’ve grown kind of fond of it. I’ll have to make sure to give her extra food. It was like having a pet nuclear device.
He went to sleep smiling.
In the morning he found that the damage was not as extreme as he’d thought. The bear had tipped the wall away and down but the dried mud had held it together and Brian—after four heaving tries—tipped it back up and against the rock. He chopped a hole in the thin ice near the edge of the lake and brought up new mud to pack in around the seam and inside an hour it was as good as new.
Then he reviewed his thinking. The war bow wouldn’t help—at least not as a protective device. He’d shot it and made it work for him but in the dark, in the night in the shelter, there was no way he could have gotten the bow aligned or an arrow into the bear. And god knew what would have happened if he had hit the bear with an arrow—especially if he’d missed anything vital. The bear would have been really mad then—even Betty wouldn’t have been able to stop the thing.
Perhaps, he thought, a lance—a killing lance. If he used the same principle as with the arrows . . .
He went back to the stone he’d been chipping arrowheads from and studied it. He would need a wider, longer head, and the flakes came off too small for a spear. Near it there were other black stones, however, and he tapped at them with the back of the hatchet, knocking off flakes until he hit one that had a bigger pattern. Three times he hit, and took off flakes that were irregular or that broke in the middle. But on the fourth try he came away with a piece almost as wide as his palm and about seven inches long, tapering to a sharp point and with two edges like razors.
He worked tie-notches into the round end and mounted the point in one of his hardwood spears, carefully splitting the wood back and then tying the head in place with a thin strip of deer hide—which proved to be much tougher than the rabbit skin—and burning the hair off when he was done.
He hefted the lance and held it out, bracing with his arm. It wouldn’t do any good to throw, but for in close, like last night—if he had to use it—the head should cause some damage. Or at least discourage a bear. He nodded. Good. If nothing else, it gave him a feeling of security.
Later he would think on how strange things were. He would never see the bear again and inside the shelter he would never be threatened again.
Yet the lance would save his life.