She was extremely uncomfortable on the bus. Her fellow passengers dropped the windows excitedly whenever they wished to take a picture unhindered by the glass, and they wished to take pictures every time they spotted a bear. Which was often. She was cold and hated being jostled as they jockeyed for position. The motor drives which advanced the film whined incessantly as the shutters clicked and clicked and clicked. They meant to have their trophies. Sarah had brought no camera.
The bears were part of a dull landscape studded with numerous large pale rocks and low, spindly shrubs. Sarah had a sudden sad longing for color. The lilacs along Speer were purple and white in the late spring. Hal’s roses had bloomed crimson and pink and yellow until the snow. Flagstaff still had its autumnal reds. Here it was as though wind and cold had leeched the land to bone. In all directions the plain stretched away perfectly flat.
Hudson Bay was a long thin line of dark water on the eastern horizon against a leaden sky. When the bus rolled to its edge, Sarah could see the ice forming a crumbling necklace along the shore.
Despite the repeated encouragements from the guide, Sarah did not leave the bus. She remained behind as her fellow tourists trooped uneasily across the tundra to take pictures of dun-colored lichen and stunted willows at the edges of frozen ponds.
Eventually they returned to town, and she was able to sit on the edge of her bed in the rather ordinary motel and rest and wait for dark, which was not long in coming. She delayed to let people going home from work clear the streets. Around six o’clock she left the motel and hurried along Kelsey, the main street of Churchill and the only one she had seen which was paved. The wind was stronger now, and the few people left on the street were hurrying too, hurrying toward light and warmth. She soon passed the cautionary row of signs bearing the image of the bear which marked the limit of the town. Then she was alone.
It was not so dark that she could not follow the tracks of the buses out of town and across the tundra, angling toward the bay. The only sound she could hear now over the wind was the icy mud crackling beneath her feet. From time to time she stopped and raised her head to the biting wind and tasted the air.
She didn’t see the bears until she was almost among them. In the darkness she had mistaken them for stones. As she drew nearer, she could see that there were four of them, probably all males. They lifted their heads, swinging their muzzles toward her. Behind them she could just make out the white-capped bay with its growing fringe of ice. Soon freeze-up would begin, and the bears would leave the land behind them. Soon they would be hunting the ringed seals, each bear making its solitary way over the great stretches of pack ice that rotated imperceptibly beneath it, drifting clockwise past Ellesmere Island, Point Barrow, New Siberian Islands, Franz Josef Land, Svalbard, Greenland. All countries were the same in the great polar night. The seals would come up to their breathe holes in the ice, and hunting would be good. Now the bears were coming to the end of their long summer fasts, and they would be very hungry.
She quickened her stride toward them, toward the sea and toward the dark, where they were waiting to take her to the top of the world.
Late Night Fright
by Billy James Kirk
© 1996 by Billy James Kirk
Devil’s Wind
by Michael A. Black
© 1996 by Michael A. Black
Chicagoan Michael Black began writing fiction seriously in the 1970s, at about the same time he became an officer on the Matteson, Illinois police force. The following piece marks a change for Mr. Black, whose previous work, published in magazines such as Hardboiled, has focused more often on crime than on the traditional whodunit.
I’d just finished bagging my samples when I saw the cloud of dust roaring toward me about one hundred yards away. Bolo, my horse, began nervously stomping and pawing at the ground as he too eyed the approaching pickup.
“Easy, boy,” I said, patting his dapple-gray neck. This seemed to do little to calm him. Perhaps he sensed my uneasiness, for I had little doubt who was in the truck or that they meant trouble.
My apprehension was reaffirmed moments later when, with a shrill squealing, the pickup skidded almost to a halt about twenty feet below me and began climbing the shallow rim of the desert basin. I put my equipment in the saddlebags just as the truck stopped. Joe Threestalks got out holding a pump-shotgun at port arms.
“You’re trespassing, washichu,” he snarled, his dark brooding eyes barely visible under the brim of his hat. Charlie Onehorse got out the other door. He didn’t have a gun, but he locked open the blade of his buck knife and sauntered forward.
“Look, guys,” I said cautiously, “I’m sympathetic with the tribal lawsuit. I really hope you win it. Honest. I was just out collecting some fossil samples.”
“So you didn’t mean no harm, huh, washichu?” Joe sneered. He brought the pump back, then snapped it forward, chambering a round with an ominous chunking sound.
“Dump out those saddlebags,” Charlie said. “Then empty your pockets.”
Since I’d just spent two hours in the hot sun sweating over a hill of poisonous harvester ants to collect the fossil fragments the ants brought to the surface during their excavations, I wasn’t too happy about complying. But I didn’t want to argue with a man carrying a shotgun. Carefully, I removed the bag and opened it, trying to explain what it was.
“Just drop it!” Joe yelled. “Charlie, get his wallet.” Charlie was reaching with one hand, the knife held in the other, when an authoritative command stopped him. We all looked around toward the source of the voice. At the top of the basin rim, silhouetted by the midday sun, I could see two legs and the outline of a hat. The rest of the figure was obscured by the brightness. But I could still tell that he was holding a rifle.
“If you touch him, Charlie, I’ll take you in for armed robbery,” Jim Buck said. “Drop that knife.”
“But we caught him trespassing,” Joe yelled.
“I heard,” said Jim, still looking down the rifle barrel.
Charlie threw the knife down angrily.
“Joe,” Jim continued in his strong voice. “Put your shotgun on the ground. Now.”
As Joe obeyed, Jim’s boots scuffed through the crusty red earth of the basin rim and he came down to us. He stopped by me and regarded each of us with his deep-set eyes. His face was flat-looking, with high chiseled cheekbones and an amber complexion. The barrel of his rifle rested on the shoulder of his khaki uniform. In the bright sunlight the reservation police badge shimmered like sterling silver.
“I shoulda known you’d take his side,” Joe said, gesturing at me.
“Taking a washichu’s side over us,” Charlie muttered in support. “Still a white man’s boy, huh?”