The Poacher's Son (Mike Bowditch 1)

come after me. I don’t want anyone else in the woods right now.”
    “Don’t go out there.”
    “You won’t bleed to death, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
    His eyes filled with tears again. “I’m sorry.”
    “I don’t want to hear it,” I said.
     
    On the doorstep I paused and drew a deep breath. Darkness was coming fast. The sky in the west had turned the color of a bruise, and overhead I saw Vega, the first star of eve ning. I had only minutes to find the bear before it became too dark to hunt.
    I crossed the yard to the pen, searching for the spot where Thompson had brought down the animal with his gun. I found it easily enough: a patch of trampled weeds and claw-scratched dirt near the place where we had buried the pig. Dust-coated pearls of blood clung to the grass there.
    Why did the bear come back here?
    I crouched down and touched two fingers to the spoor, smelling the ferrous, rusty smell of fresh blood and feeling a quickening of my pulse as I scanned the edge of the forest. The animal might or might not be dying. I knew that when a heavy bear is shot, the thick fat beneath the skin can plug up the wound. This one had probably found a hollow under the cover of some nearby spruce to hide and rest. All I knew for certain was that a wounded black bear was capable of killing me now if I stumbled upon it suddenly in the darkness beneath the trees. I might get a shot off, but not before it crushed me beneath its weight and fastened its jaws around my skull.
    I wiped my hand in the dirt and rose to my feet. Even in the weakening light the blood trail showed clearly in the weeds leading back across the field. A wind was blowing at my back, just the faintest of sea breezes, really, but it would be enough to carry my scent to the bear where it was hiding in the timber. Bad luck for me.
    I followed the track through the wall of sumacs and alder, ducking my head against the leaves to enter the forest. Here the wind diminished, but I could still feel its breath against the back of my neck, and when I set down my feet on the dry leaves, the sound was sharp and brittle. The trunks of the trees crowded close about me, the paper birches glowing ghost-white in the shadows. Every spruce seemed large enough to conceal a bear beneath its dark, shaggy boughs.
    I tried to remain still.
    There were no crickets, no sound whatsoever beyond the whisper of wind in the treetops.
    After a minute, my eyes had adjusted themselves to the gloom as much as they were likely to do, given the lateness of the hour. I figured I’d have to look hard to find the trail again. But I didn’t. At my feet there was a small, starry splatter of blood on some moss.
    I followed the spoor down the hillside. The bear, bleeding hard, had gone fast at first. I could see where his claws had gouged the pine-needled floor of the forest, and even where there was no blood, the crushed ferns and snapped branches of alders showed the violence of his passing.
    Then he found his way into a dense stand of black spruce trees that had bristling boughs like pipe cleaners. The trunks of the trees grew very close together here, and I could not push my way through without going blindly, noisily, with the breeze driving my scent ahead of me. I figured the bear had hidden himself somewhere deep inside the thicket, crouched down there amid the darkening shadows, waiting for night to come to make him safe. He could be lying inside those spruces, and I would not see him until I was only a few feet away. By then it would be too late.
    I knelt down and rested the butt of the Mossberg on the ground. I wished again that I had a dog to help me track. My better judgment told me to call Kathy Frost and ask her to bring her dog, Pluto. With a K-9, we could find the bear, even in pitch darkness. But I seemed to be disregarding my better judgment as a matter of course these days. To hell with being careful, a voice said in my head. Be a fucking man and get the job done.
    I eased myself through the nearest spruces putting my foot down as quietly as I could, heel first and then toe. Dead spruce branches scraped the skin of my face and bare arms, then sprang back into place behind me, making a whipping sound. Almost instantly I realized that I would never be able to track the bear here. It was too dense, too dark.
    That was when I heard the crash. Maybe twenty yards off to my right, at the edge of the spruce thicket, came a sound like a big tree falling, and I knew