I opened one of the water bottles, took a quick drink and recapped it. I wiped away the thin line of sweat that was running down the side of my face, even in this cold air. My feet were still wet. I kept walking.
I finally got to the stand of birch trees. Vinnie wasn’t there.
“Vinnie!” I yelled. “Vinnie! Where the hell are you!”
Nothing.
“Vinnie!”
A bear. In the distance. Nothing else.
“Where the fuck are you, Vinnie?” I went up the trail, trying to pick up his boot prints on the ground. I had already proven to myself just how bad I was at tracking, but I didn’t know what else to do. It turned out to be easy, because he had just been walking here within the last couple of hours, and a dozen goddamned bears hadn’t messed up the trail yet.
The trail split off into a couple different directions. I followed his tracks left. It split again. The tracks went left again. I picked up the sound of running water. And something else I couldn’t quite make out. Probably more bears.
“Vinnie!”
Did I hear something then? It was hard to tell. I kept walking. The water sounds grew louder. Finally, I came to a waterfall. The water was coming down, maybe eight feet from top to bottom, and splashing on the rocks.
I looked again and saw that there was a great beaver’s dam in the stream, raising the height of the falls. From where I was standing, the whole thing rose above my head. On another day, I would have stood there and admired it.
Then I saw the bootprints. Vinnie had gone up the side of this stream, up this jumbled mass of rocks and dirt, all the way to the top. I followed them. There were big depressions in the ground, where he had no doubt buried his boots halfway to his knees in the mud. Mine were already a soaking mess, so I had nothing to lose. I fought my way up the incline, grabbing on to rocks and roots and God knows what else.
I heard them. Before I got to the top, I heard the throaty roaring of the bears.
As I stumbled onto the top, I saw it all at once. I saw the bears, two of them, one black, one cinnamon brown, all fur and teeth and nails, one of them on its hind legs for a moment, suspended in the air. Vinnie swinging a long stick in slow motion, making a wide arc that would have been graceful in any other place than this sudden hell. The ground all churned up, like a battlefield. Freshly dug dirt, all along the bed of this creek. A clearing, the sun shining down. The sleeve of Vinnie’s coat in tatters, blood on his arm.
I saw it all for a moment that lasted forever, feeling like I was seeing it from far away, out of my own body, until finally it all snapped into place and I heard the noises again and I knew what was happening.
The bears were attacking Vinnie. He was screaming and trying to beat them off with a stick.
I yelled something and ran forward, sliding through the muck and landing hard on my back. I clawed my way back to my feet and ran to him along the edge of the stream. The bears were on either side of him now, the ground itself a morass of black soil and stones and dead grass, torn up in strips.
And something long and white.
Bones. God help me, bones.
As I came to him, I saw the bones in the dirt. A hand. Black fingers locked in a twisted claw. White fingernails. A leg. The ribs of a man, half buried in the dirt.
This is what happened. They are dead. All the men are dead. The bears killed them and now they will kill us, too.
“Get away!” Vinnie’s raw voice. “Get out of here!”
I screamed at the bears. I waved my arms. “Go! Get away! Go! Go!”
The smell. It washed over me. The stench of it, God, the dead rotting bodies.
And something else.
Vinnie swung his stick. A sudden pain in my arm as the end of the stick hit me and broke off.
I knew that smell.
“Get away!” he yelled. “Get away! Get away!”
One bear turned away, the one with the brown fur.
“Get away! Get away, God damn you!”
I couldn’t even tell which of us was yelling anymore. That smell.
The black bear made his horrible inhuman noise and turned around. He looked back at us with yellow eyes and went away, toward the woods.
Vinnie kept screaming.
A long time ago. How many years? The same smell. The bodies in bags, zipped up tight. And yet the smell still hit me right in the face. I’m there in that same place now, as if it just happened, the way only a smell can take you back.
That house in Detroit. That burning house.
The fire.
I looked down at it. I had to look down. The white bones, the flesh… Black. Blacker than the bear. Blacker than the dirt. Blacker than evil.
They were burned. The bodies were burned. The bears didn’t do this. The bears didn’t kill these men.
And the bears weren’t attacking Vinnie. It was Vinnie who was attacking the bears. He saw what they were doing, saw the bears digging here in the ground, desecrating this shallow grave of dead burned men. He had tried to drive them away.
Vinnie was bent over now, with his face in his hands. There was blood all over his arm. He dropped to his knees. “Oh my God, Tom, oh my God.”
“Vinnie,” I said. “Vinnie.” I grabbed his shoulders from behind.
He sat back on his heels and cried. The stream went by, the bears moved through the woods. The sun went behind a cloud and it got colder. The bodies of five men were spread all around us, some piece of each man above the ground, another piece below, and some inside the bears.
I dug into the dirt, took it in both hands, and threw it over what was once a man’s head. I did it again and again, digging with my bare hands and covering the bodies. Vinnie stayed still. I worked all around him, spreading the dirt over everything I could see. My hands were hurting, scraped raw by the rough earth. But I kept at it. It was a primitive need to bury something dead and that was all I was capable of doing.
When I had done as much as I could do, I went to Vinnie and pulled him up by the armpits. I turned him around and held his head on my shoulder. He didn’t fight me.
I looked at his left arm. A bear had raked a claw down his forearm, right through his coat, leaving three deep cuts. I needed to clean his arm off and wrap it up. That was the next thing I had to do. “Come on,” I said. “We have to go.”
I grabbed his other arm. He was holding something tight in his hand. “What is it, Vinnie?” I said. I lifted his hand and looked. It was a watch, caked with dirt, the crystal shattered.
“Come on,” I said. “Come on.” I led him back down the stream. He walked slowly, staring at the ground, his eyes half closed, as if he could barely stay awake. I took him back to where the trail led down over the ledge, next to the waterfall. I tried to help him climb down, but he was moving automatically, with no thought. We both ended up sliding down in the muck until we landed hard at the bottom. I found one of the water bottles there, opened it, and poured the water into his mouth. He swallowed it. I took a drink and then put it in my coat pocket. “We’ve got to move,” I said. “We’ve got to take care of you. Okay?”
I picked him up, helped him out of the mud and onto the trail. He finally started to resist me. “No,” he said. “No, no.”
“Come on, Vinnie.”
He looked behind us. “No.”
I pushed him. “Let’s go.”
“No,” he said. But he was too weak to fight me. He had nothing left. I turned him like a robot and pointed him south.
“Let’s go, Vinnie.”
We walked all the way back, three miles down the trail. I kept Vinnie’s body moving forward, but I had no idea where his mind was. I couldn’t even imagine. A good hour later, I had him back in the cabin, sitting at the kitchen table. I filled the big pot with water and put it on the stove to boil. I didn’t see a first-aid kit anywhere, so I stripped down and took off my undershirt, and tore it into strips. I threw the strips in water, and added the dish towel that had been hanging on a nail in the wall. Vinnie sat there the whole time, looking at nothing.