It was circling this strange thicket that had appeared in its hunting grounds, sniffing at it, probing it with swipes of its paws. Discovering that it came apart rather easily.
It was a bear—it could be nothing else—and it was homing in on the back of the truck, where Zula was.
WHEN SHE HAD made the move from Iowa to Seattle, driving a cute little miniature U-Haul loaded with the Encyclopaedia Britannica and other things she couldn’t be without, Zula had made a small diversion into northern Idaho to look in on her uncle Jacob and his family: wife Elizabeth, eldest son Aaron, and two other sons whose names she had, embarrassingly, forgotten. She had been warned by most of the family to expect serious weirdness, but she was assured by Uncle Richard that they were perfectly normal people. What she’d found, of course, was somewhere in between; or perhaps those aspects of their life that seemed normal only made the weird stuff seem weirder. Elizabeth going about her housewifely chores and homeschooling the boys with a Glock semiautomatic lodged in a black shoulder holster strapped over the bodice of her ankle-length dress. Or were those culottes?
Anyway, conversing over dinner, they had somehow gotten onto the topic of bears. Uncle Richard had warned Zula, once, that bears were the conversational equivalent of a black hole, in the sense that any conversation that fell into that topic could never escape it. Considering how rare bears and bear attacks were in the real world, Zula, the rational-skeptic college kid, had doubted the veracity of Dodge’s observation. Maybe it just happened to him a lot, she had reasoned, because he had this one bear incident in his past that people never got tired of hearing about. But then she had seen it happen a couple of times, around tables in dormitory cafeterias: nineteen-year-old kids who had never seen bears in their lives somehow straying onto that topic and then sticking with it until everyone got up and left.
Uncle Jacob had been out building log cabins all day and had sawdust in his beard. He was tired and distracted by his energetic boys, who wanted all of his attention, and he looked like he wanted a cold beer: an indulgence forbidden by his variant of Christianity. So it had taken a while for him to slip into avuncular mode with Zula. She had almost begun to wonder whether he didn’t accept her as a real family member. But it slowly became evident over the course of the meal that he was just hungry. So eventually it turned into a real conversation.
The cabin was built three stories high on a small foundation. The cellar was a food storage area giving way to a subterranean bunker that Jake had dug out by hand and lined with reinforced concrete. The ground floor was practical stuff: sort of a garage/workshop with corners dedicated to such practical matters as slaughtering, butchering, canning, and ammo reloading. The floor above that was one big kitchen/living/dining space and the top story was bedrooms. Both the second and third floors had sliding doors and windows giving way to screened-in decks on what Zula thought of as the back side of the house, since it faced away from the driveway; but she soon learned that Jake and Elizabeth thought of it as the front. It looked out over an area of flat ground extending across a couple of acres, sparsely populated by trees, which lapped up against the base of a steep rise, the southern approach of Abandon Mountain. A mountain stream, Prohibition Crick, tumbled down that slope and ran past the cabin, making a beautiful sound, on its way to a beaver pond about half a mile away. Like-minded neighbors had built homesteads around that, forming a sparse community of five families and a couple of dozen souls distributed across two square miles of flattish, semiarable land at the head of a river valley that ran almost all the way to Bourne’s Ford.