The Caretaker

They were dogging bear again. It was the fourth night that autumn he'd been woken by the bawling hounds. The din they made put them someplace on the two-track, not far above the breaks that marked the western edge of Hannah Tucker's property. A halfhearted drizzle plunked along the Airstream. Hoping against hope that the poachers, plotts and blueticks would turn away from Hannah's, Tom Phillip climbed from bed and staggered the three short steps past his toilet, couch and kitchen. It was cold inside the trailer. As Tom knelt to light the stove, there came the unmistakable clamor of the pack lining out on a scent, baying their quarry down the saddle from the upland.

The .30-30 leaned barrel-up beside the door. After he had dressed, Tom slung the rifle on his shoulder and stepped out into the rain. From the small clearing in the pines and fir, he could hear, away up on the dark ridge, the poachers rev their quads, then stop, dismount and hoof it into Hannah's land. As near as he could tell, the dogs and bear were bound for Gypsum Creek—or the wetlands Gypsum had recently become. Hopping in his truck, Tom Phillip headed that way down the logging road. He drove easy, spurred by no special enthusiasm for what might have been a fool's errand. Every time the hunters had trespassed onto Hannah's, they'd easily eluded him. More to the point: What was Tom fixing to pull if he did manage an ambush? Hannah Tucker seemed to think it was simply a matter of brandishing the .30-30 and looking mean. "I guess you need to tell them in a language they can understand," she'd said when two high-caliber reports had echoed through the valley less than a week after he'd hiked her property posting signs.

By the time Tom parked at the culvert, the rain was coming strong. He got out and listened. The hounds had stopped about a quarter mile from the road. Tom found his tobacco and tucked a pinch between his gum and lip. "Cocksuckers," he said.

The way they were berserking left little doubt the bruin had been bayed or treed.

Stepping it out into the damp cover of the pines, Tom lit the way only now and then, leery of detection. After a while the ground began to squish; above, the tightly knit weft thinned to open sky. Back when Nate Tucker, Hannah Tucker's dead husband, had hired Tom to help out with the hogs, this clearing had been a meadow, all deer brush and pussy tow. Now it was marsh. If the beavers kept it up, soon they'd have themselves a pond. Before Nate died, they used to wade out in the cattails, snipe those bastards with the carbine. But widowhood—or maybe, Tom suspected, just the violence that had brought it—had worked a change in Hannah. After the accident she'd put an end to beaver killing and hog slaughter alike; nothing Tom could do would sway her.

The hounds had splashed through the mud and sedge to an elevated hummock, where they surrounded the trunk of a skinny pine, snapping teeth and yowling. Up in the tree, the spooked black bear sat upright on a limb, hugging its trunk. Finding some cover downwind in the grass, Tom got into the prone and drew a bead on what seemed to him the lead dog—a slobbering plott hound in a thick steel choke collar. He waited.

Five minutes later, when the poachers showed up, the rain had moved down the valley and a crack in the clouds allowed some starlight on the scene.

Sure enough, it was Pete Mauldin and Pete's buddy, Leo DeMint.

Tom Phillip watched them slosh up to the dogs. Pete Mauldin produced a magnum from his belt and held it on the bruin while Leo DeMint dragged the hounds one at a time to the far end of the hummock. When Leo returned from tying up the last of the pack...