“Jeebee!”
The word was no scream. It was a shout. But it carried the same note of alarm that had sounded in the voices of the horses. At the same time, he heard the bark of the .30/06 from beyond the wall at the head of their bed.
His reaction was instinctive and immediate. He grabbed the revolver from the two pegs on the wall behind the bed, as two other pegs above these had held the rifle, now gone.
Holding the handgun, he flung himself out of bed and through the door to the outer room. Merry was firing the rifle through one of the loopholes he had built into the front wall for that purpose. The outer door of the cold room was slightly ajar, showing a slice of gray, beginning daylight through it. He made two racing steps through it, out into the open, and saw, less than fifty meters off, the massive shape of a grizzly, coming toward them fast on all four legs.
“My God!” he said out loud, without thinking. “It’s the horses! It’s come for the horses!”
“Get back in here, Jeebee!” Merry’s voice cried behind him.
But the bear had already seen him, and was now aiming, not in the general direction of the cave and the corral, but directly at him. Jeebee ducked back into the outer room, swinging the outside door half closed, but leaving himself room to fire through it with the revolver. He and Merry fired almost together.
“You were right, Jeebee!” Merry’s voice was tight. “It’s like throwing rocks at him, using this rifle!”
It was true, Jeebee saw through the crack in the door, even as he was aiming with the pistol and firing again. The grizzly was paying no attention to the bullets that must be hitting him. Even if he was missing, Merry would not be. Not at this short range and with a rifle.
“Try to get him in the eye or mouth!” said Jeebee. Where was Wolf? It was dawn, his time to come in. If nothing else, he could harass and distract the grizzly, as he had the black bear down by the willows.
The pistol clicked empty in his hand. He threw it away, snatched up the crossbow, then threw it down again. The single bolt he would have time for might damage the bear enough to kill it, eventually, but it would not slow it down now. A wildness exploded in Jeebee. He snatched up the boar spear from where it leaned against the front wall beside the crossbow and burst out again through the door out into the open.
“Jeebee, come back here!” he heard Merry shouting. But in this moment he knew enough not to listen.
Just then, as if out of the dawn light itself, Wolf did appear. He burst onto the scene from between the trees behind the bear and to Jeebee’s right. It was his usual time, and he came.
The dawn wind was from the cave to the bear. Wolf could well have scented the other creature from several hundred yards behind on his way home—scented it attacking his pack territory—and come instinctively to its defense.
Now he was coming at the bear from behind, not as he had come at the one down in the willow bottoms, but as he had attacked the part-collie at the station, in his fantastic ground-eating leaps of approach.
The grizzly heard him and whirled, standing up on his hind legs, but not before Wolf reached it and made a dart at its hindquarters.
The bear struck at him. Not so much batting, as reaching suddenly with both great paws, as if to catch Wolf between them. But Wolf was already back out of reach, changing his angle of attack, and as Jeebee shouted and the bear looked for a moment at him, darting in on the larger animal once again.
Once more the grizzly grabbed at him, and missed. Still at full extension, it threw one paw outward, catching Wolf with the back of it, high on one shoulder—just barely touched him, it seemed, but Wolf went tumbling down the slope of the meadow toward the nearby stream.
The grizzly, still on its hind legs, turned again toward Jeebee. Merry’s rifle continued to sound, and the bear continued to ignore the bullets that must be striking it. It came toward Jeebee on its hind legs.
Jeebee saw it coming, appearing to grow enormously as it got closer. Head and shoulders towering over him, it seemed to swell to mountainous proportions, blotting out the earth and sky, black and invulnerable.
Its blackness was the blackness of his dreams, but now, here in daylight and reality. As a formless void in his dreams, that blackness had destroyed all his work. It had ridden his sleeping hours and pursued him out of Michigan and westward across the devastated land. It had never left him permanently, and now it had taken living shape. Merry and Paul were behind him, and he was the only thing that stood between them and it. A wildness inside him picked him up and drove him. He lifted the boar spear and ran toward the grizzly.
In that second there was no fear or fury in him, nothing but purpose. What was, was before him; and their coming together was inevitable. He ran full at the bear with his spear in one hand.
In the moment before they reached each other he jerked the spear up into both hands, hurled himself forward—“Aim for the balls,” Nick had said. He remembered the black bear in the willows. As they came together at their combined speeds, he shoved down the butt of the spear to brace it against ground.
It was like hurling his body against a wall of rock; and then the spear, its point now buried deep in the soft lower body of the grizzly, kicked in his grasp so strongly that it threw him away, tumbling as Wolf had tumbled.
He scrambled back to his feet and saw the grizzly, all its attention now removed from any human target and focused only on the visible shaft of the spear that stuck out from its body. Wolf was dodging in, out, closing his jaws on the thick legs from behind; but the bear ignored him, also.
All its attention was on the visible part of the spear. The shaggy black head and open jaws were lowered to bite at it, but the jaws could barely reach down that far, and its teeth scraped ineffectively upon iron. The bear battered and pulled at the shaft with his paws, roaring each time he struck it, and the point tore and cut inside him. The wooden part of the shaft snapped and splintered, but the backward-pointing tines of the spearhead kept it from being pulled free.
It fought the embedded spear like an enemy, the only enemy there was. Wolf continued harrying from behind, and from the loophole Merry was still pumping rifle shots into the great body. Jeebee stood, empty-handed, less than four paces off, staring, hypnotized by the massive, wounded creature.
The bear began to stagger, still struggling to rid itself of the spear with teeth and claws. It stumbled drunkenly for several steps as if fighting to keep its balance. Then it lifted its head, opened its mouth, and gave utterance to a strangely humanlike, moaning roar of agony and frustration.
One of its legs buckled. It fell to the ground on its side, with one spasmodic jerk moving its hind legs up toward its belly like a man with a cramp. It lay still.
Merry’s rifle stopped firing. Wolf darted in, snapped at the throat of the fallen animal and leaped away before it was possible to know if his jaws had actually touched it. He made another snarling, half dart forward, then checked, still some feet away, tensely staring, bright-eyed, at the still beast.
For a long moment he stood there, jaws open and panting, gazing at the bear with a sort of alert disappointment. As if he waited for the dead animal to get up and threaten them again.
The grizzly did not move. Wolf stepped closer and sniffed at it, waited, sniffed again. Suddenly he darted his nose under one heavy forelimb, lifted it slightly and dodged back—all in one quick movement. He waited. The foreleg lay where it had dropped.