I stood up and put my shoes on. There was a pot of water on the propane stove. It was just starting to boil. One of the front windows was on the floor. The big bear had pushed it right in.
When I went outside, I saw Vinnie on the dock. He was on his knees, washing his face with lake water. He had his shirt off, which wouldn’t have bothered me if it wasn’t about thirty degrees. “Morning,” I said. “Mind if I use the sink?”
“It’s a bit cold,” he said.
“I think maybe I’ll keep my clothes on. That should help.”
“Suit yourself.”
“Your water’s boiling in there,” I said. I knelt down and just about pitched myself into the lake.
“I’ll let it boil for a while,” he said. “It’s lake water. I found some instant coffee.”
“That actually sounds pretty good right now.” I splashed the water on my face. In ten seconds, my hands went from painful to numb.
We sat on the front porch, having our breakfast of salami sandwiches and hot instant coffee. We watched the morning fog drifting across the lake.
“I saw Tom last night,” Vinnie said. “In my dream. He was trying to tell me something, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying.”
“Did it seem like he was in trouble?”
“No, not at all. He was happier than I’ve seen him in a long time. He was laughing.”
“When do you suppose Guy and Maskwa will get here?”
“I imagine they’ve already left,” he said. “How long did it take us to fly here yesterday? About an hour?”
“I think so, yeah.”
“So they should be here soon.”
“They’re really going out of their way to help us,” I said.
“It’s not so surprising,” he said. “It comes naturally to them.”
“Being Indians and all.”
He looked at me. “No, just being good people.”
“Okay,” I said. “No argument there.”
We waited around for another hour. The sun came up and burned off the rest of the fog on the lake, but it didn’t do much else. “I can’t just sit here,” I said. “I’m gonna be so stiff, I won’t be able to move.”
“I hear you,” he said. “They might be having some trouble getting that old plane started. I’d hate to sit here and waste half the day. Why don’t we go up this trail a little bit, start looking around.”
“We could leave them a note.”
“Yeah, and we’ll hear the plane coming.”
“Okay, let’s do it,” I said. “Anything to get moving.”
I found an old notepad in the cabin and a two-inch stub of a pencil, wrote them out a quick note, and put it on the front porch. I put a rock on it so it wouldn’t blow away. “Okay, show me this trail,” I said.
We set off north, picking up a wide trail that led deep into the woods. If I’d forgotten just how far away from civilization we were, it took about ten minutes of walking through the trees to remember. There were no signs of human life whatsoever-none of the little things you find on just about any trail in America if you look close enough, like cigarette butts or gum wrappers. There were no wooden signposts, no little trail marker tags nailed to the trees. The trail belonged only to the animals. For all we knew, it hadn’t changed in a thousand years.
Vinnie was walking slowly, looking at the ground in front of him. His footsteps didn’t make a sound. “There are so many bear tracks here,” he said.
“Can I ask a dumb question?” I said.
“Go ahead.”
“How many moose tracks have you seen?”
“Not one,” he said.
“So how good could the moose hunting be on this lake?”
“Sort of explains why they didn’t bring one back,” he said.
“Those other guys we saw,” I said, “the first day we got here. They got a moose, but they were out on a different lake, remember?”
“I remember. So you’re wondering why Albright and his guys came to this lake instead.”
“There being no actual moose here, yeah.”
“It’s a good question.”
Something moved ahead of us. We couldn’t see what it was, but we heard the brush moving. Then we heard the sound, the same sound we had heard the night before as we stood on the porch of the cabin. It was like a low growl, but with an eerie, glottal pulsing to it. It was almost what a giant dog would sound like if it could purr like a cat.
“Vinnie, you’re telling me a bear’s making that noise?”
“Yes, Alex.”
“How come I’ve never heard that before?”
“People don’t realize how vocal bears can be,” he said, “or how strange they can sound. Did you know when they do bear scenes in movies, they usually dub in some other animal’s growl? Like a wolf?”
“That so?”
“And this time of year, hell, some of these bears are still desperate for food. They’ve got to put their fat on before the winter comes.”
“That bear we saw last night, it was hard to tell in the dark, but it looked like it had brown fur.”
“I’m sure it wasn’t a true brown bear. Even black bears can have brown fur.”
“How do you tell the difference?”
“The face and shoulders,” he said. “And the size. Browns are bigger.”
“Whatever you say, Vinnie. All I know is, I’ve never heard a sound like that.”
We were maybe three miles up the trail when we came to a stand of white birch trees. The leaves were long gone. The cold sunlight lit the ground through the bare branches.
“This is where we stopped yesterday,” Vinnie said. “Can you see all the marks on the ground?”
I bent down and looked. “All I see are bear tracks,” I said.
“Yeah, but besides that. Over here toward the sides.” He pointed a few feet off the trail, by the base of the biggest birch tree. “Careful where you walk.”
“You make it sound like a crime scene,” I said. Then it occurred to me. A crime scene might be exactly what this was.
“You see the boot prints?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“There are several together, right here.” He stepped carefully and leaned against the tree. “I think there’s at least three different boots here.”
“So they were all walking in a line.”
“But why so close to the tree? The trail’s wide-open. There’s no reason to walk all the way over here. And this is what we were talking about yesterday-you see here how this boot print is deep on the inside edge? And this one here, too. You wouldn’t see that if somebody was just walking normally.”
“So what do you think happened here?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “We need to keep looking.”
“How far up this trail do you wanna go?”
Vinnie didn’t answer me. He stood there looking up into the sky. “Do you hear that?”
“What?”
“Listen.”
It took a few seconds to pick up the sound. It was a faint buzzing, in the far distance. “The plane,” I said.
“They’re coming. It’s about time.”
“So let’s go back.”
He looked back down at the ground. “You think you can find your way back to the cabin?”
“I suppose so, why?”
“We’re just gonna go meet up with them, and then come right back up here. I’d rather just stay here and look around some more.”
“Well, don’t go wandering off too far. We don’t want to lose you, too.”
He looked at me.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Are you sure you can find your way back?”
“Vinnie, I’m not that hopeless. I can follow the trail back to the cabin.”
“Bring me some food when you come back,” he said. “And some water.”
“Will do,” I said. “I’ll be back soon.”
I turned around and took two steps, then stopped. “Are you sure this is a good idea?” I said.
“Alex, I’m just gonna look around. Go get the guys.”
“All right,” I said. I shook off the little chill that had run up my spine and started down the trail. You’re starting to imagine things, I thought. Damned bears and those noises.
I retraced our steps, leaving the white birches behind and heading into the deep shade of the pine trees. The pine needles were a soft blanket beneath my feet. The only sound was the steady buzz of the plane, getting louder and louder with each passing minute.