It was after midnight when they finally crawled into their sleeping bags.
Without warning, Anna's eyes were open, blind and useless in the claustrophobic dark of the tent. Something had signaled an abrupt end to sleep. A sound. Cracking. Wood on wood or a twig snapping under a heavy foot. Or hoof. Or paw. Perhaps Rory, up in the night to answer the call of nature. Though the poor boy was so afraid of critters he'd probably suffer till morning in the imagined safety of his tent. Not for the first time, Anna wondered why a young man still frightened of the monsters under his bed would pay to work in bear country.
Not yet concerned, she waited for the sound-the quality already forgotten, left in the sleep it had so rudely jerked her from-to come again, attach itself to meaning so she could call off the internal watchdogs and close her eyes.
A soft exhalation, the sigh of the wind or a ghostly child penetrated the tent wall, then brushing, gentle, the sound a soft-bristle brush would make on nylon. Anna had heard it before when furry denizens had come to visit in the night: skunks, raccoons and, once, a porcupine. The noise their coats made rubbing against fabric as they explored her campsite.
Tonight's brush was painting strokes high on the tent wall. Deer. Elk. Bear. Anna felt the first tingling along her spine as a race memory of untold millions of years of being hunted by night stirred deep in her primitive brain.
Making no noise, she reached over and touched Joan.
She woke quickly. "What-"
"Shh." Anna listened. Though she could see nothing of her tentmate and no longer touched her, she could feel Joan's tension, along with her own, charging the atmosphere inside the tent.
Shushing, susurrating sound. All around them now as if the animal circled the tent. Not once. Not to probe and, curiosity satisfied, move on. Circle after circle. No sound but the soft brushing and the periodic gusts of air, voiceless woofs. A bear. Grizzly. Black. Full grown. Shoulder touching high on the domed wall of nylon.
With each circuit, Anna's Disney-born sense of oneness with her fellows of the tooth and claw faded. It was replaced by the lurid pen-and-ink illustrations she remembered from a sensationalized account of two women killed when she was in college, both dragged from their tents, mauled, killed and fed on in Night of the Grizzlies.
She pushed her lips as close to Joan's face as a lover might and barely breathed the words, "What's it doing?"
"Don't know," Joan whispered back.
The circling stopped, as if at the thread of sound the two women spun between them. A silence followed, so absolute in the perfect darkness of the tent, Anna felt dizzy, as if she were falling into it. Her senses stretched: blind eyes trying to see through two layers of tenting, deaf ears trying to hear movement beyond the insubstantial walls.
A barely audible rustle as Joan pushed herself up on her elbows sawed across Anna's nerves with the impact of sandpaper on a sunburn. No second hand to measure it, time did not tick by but pulsed, expanding and contracting like the air in her lungs as Anna forced herself to breathe.
"Do you think-" she whispered.
A snap of wood.
"Shh."
A growl broke the night above them and both women screamed. The growling increased in volume and moved down the length of the tent. On this circuit the bear leaned in, no longer brushing but caving the tent walls in with its weight. Formless, terrifying, Anna felt the nylon push hard against her shoulder, the side of her head.
Hands-Joan's-fumbled over the front of her sweatshirt, closing on the cotton. "Down," she was hissing. "Fetal position."
Anna's training came back to her. Play dead. Try and protect the soft white underbelly. Curling in on herself when every ounce of her being urged her to break out of this North Face sarcophagus and run, actually hurt, stomach and leg muscles trying to cramp.
The growling ebbed and flowed but remained in one direction as if the animal stood outside the front-zippered fly talking to itself, deciding whether they were to live or die.
Anna flipped through her brain looking for anything she'd done to attract the animal, to hold its attention for so long. Nothing. Under Joan's watchful eye she and Rory had put everything that could be of any interest whatsoever to bears into the red bear-pack: lip balm, insect repellent, sunscreen, deodorant, toothpaste, virtually anything liquid and/or scented. Even if it was sealed in glass, Joan insisted it go in the bear-bag, which was hung with the food fifteen yards from camp.
The mental listing was cut off. The bear was roaring, raging. "Holy shit," Anna said. Her own voice scared her. "Is it hurt, you think? Wounded?"
"God, I hope not," Joan said fervently.
A blow struck the tent then and they heard nylon ripping.
"Shit," Anna said.
"Quiet."
Nylon tearing. Roars that cut through the dark and tore into Anna's bowels. Joan breathing or crying on her neck. Her, gasping or sobbing on Joan's.
Noise from without went on for what seemed like forever but was probably only half that long. Crashing. Roars. Fabric ripping. Thumps as if the bear threw or batted things from one place to another. Swooshing and flopping. Digging. Bass gutteral grunts pushed out with the sound of frenzied destruction. Impacts against tent and earth as if the beast tore at the ground.
"What in hell?" Anna whispered.
"Beats me," Joan whispered back.
Soul splitting, a roar broke close and vicious. Blows began falling first to one side of the tent then the other. Anna felt a cut through to her right shoulder.
Blood. Now there would be the smell of blood.
The lightweight metal tent frame collapsed with a second blow and Anna felt weight slam down on the back of her neck. Habit or instinct, she threw her arm over her face and pushed down tighter around Joan.
The animal had gone mad. The deep-throated anger of nature turning on humankind. Then came crunching and a prolonged rustle. Rolling on the downed tent? Burrowing through the thin stays in the fabric? A high wild roar, a shriek in gravel and glass.
"Rory," Joan whispered.
"Shh."
A crack. Maybe a tent pole, maybe a peg jerked from the ground by the elasticized cord and shot into a tree.
Abruptly everything stopped. Deathlike stillness. Anna was dizzy with the quiet. The rage of the attack ended as a candle's light is ended when the wick is pinched.
Nothing moved: not Anna, not Joan, not the bear. For what seemed a very long time, Anna waited, muscles in body and mind drawn tight, waiting for the slash of claws to rake blood from her back, the smell of an omnivore's breath before the puncturing canines pierced skull and bone.
The crunch never came.
Fear did not diminish but increased. The fear that if she moved, even so much as an eyelash, if her pulse fluttered or her skin twitched, the narrowly averted disaster would be brought down upon them. Either Joan felt the same way or she'd fainted.
After a while Anna thought she heard the passage of a large creature a few yards away. Maybe the bear had crossed the meadow soundlessly and now pushed into the underbrush at the edge of the clearing.
"Gone?" Anna whispered. Her throat was dust-dry. The word came out as a croak that sounded scarcely human.
"Wait," Joan replied.
Handfast like children lost in the wood, Anna and Joan lay in the wreckage of their tent. Anna could feel the nylon fallen over the side of her head and neck. A cold draft came in through a tear someplace.