war lance

  Then he reviewed his thinking. The war bow wouldn’t help — at least not as a protective device. He’d shot it and made it work for him but in the dark, in the night in the shelter, there was no way he could have gotten the bow aligned or an arrow into the bear. And god knew what would have happened if he had hit the bear with an arrow — especially if he’d missed anything vital. The bear would have been really mad then — even Betty wouldn’t have been able to stop the thing.
  Perhaps, he thought, a lance — a killing lance. If he used the same principle as with the arrows…
  He went back to the stone he’d been chipping arrowheads from and studied it. He would need a wider, longer head, and the flakes came off too small for a spear. Near it there were other black stones, however, and he tapped at them with the back of the hatchet, knocking off flakes until he hit one that had a bigger pattern. Three times he hit, and took off flakes that were irregular or that broke in the middle. But on the fourth try he came away with a piece almost as wide as his palm and about seven inches long, tapering to a sharp point and with two edges like razors.
  He worked tie-notches into the round end and mounted the point in one of his hardwood spears, carefully splitting the wood back and then tying the head in place with a thin strip of deer hide — which proved to be much tougher than the rabbit skin — and burning the hair off when he was done.
  He hefted the lance and held it out, bracing with his arm. It wouldn’t do any good to throw, but for in close, like last night — if he had to use it — the head should cause some damage. Or at least discourage a bear. He nodded. Good. If nothing else, it gave him a feeling of security.
  Later he would think on how strange things were. He would never see the bear again and inside the shelter he would never be threatened again.
  Yet the lance would save his life.

Chapter 7


  I hit her. The arrow hit her in the neck. She’s charging. She’s charging at me. Another arrow. No, no time. The lance. That’s it, the lance.
  He threw the bow aside and reached for the lance, all in one motion and all too late. He felt his hand clamp on the shaft of the lance and at the same time she came out of the brush on top of him. He had one fleeting image of a wall of brown hair with the feathers of the arrow sticking out of the middle and he went down.
  He would never know what saved him. She was gigantic and on him and he thought she would crush him, mash him into the ground. But either the arrow hampered her movement or her momentum carried her too far and she went on over Brian and had to turn and come back at him.
  He was hurt. His leg, his shoulder, yet he could move, and he rolled, still holding the killing lance, and came up to a kneeling position. He raised the head of the lance just as she hit him again.
  One image. She threw herself at him, her eyes red with rage, and he saw her run onto the lance, the point entering her chest just below the arrow. Then her head hit his forehead. Brian saw one flash of white light, as bright as all the snow, then nothing but pain and darkness.

Chapter 9


  A great weight. Something heavy on him. His mother was calling for him to come back. He was little again, a small boy and playing outside, and his mother was calling for him to come inside but he couldn’t move because there was a huge weight on him, holding him down, keeping him from coming home…
  Brian opened his eyes slowly, closed them against the brightness and the pain in his forehead, then opened them again.
  It was, he thought, the same world. Snow all around, bright sun, he was breathing, had a pounding pain in his forehead — it reminded him of the plane crash — and had what appeared to be an entire cow moose in his lap.
  He twitched when he looked down at her. Her eyes still looked mad, and her head plowed against his chest. But he realized she was dead. He started to examine his own situation.
  Nothing seemed to be broken. He could not at first believe this and moved his arms and legs several times to make certain, then squirmed his way out from beneath the moose. She was lying half on him, her head on his chest pushing him back, and when he stood it was the first time he got a long look at how big she was.
  From nose to back end he guessed a good eight or nine feet, maybe more. He paced her off and came up with four paces in length, counting her legs, which were sticking out a bit.
  Maybe ten feet. And she was taller at the shoulder than he stood.
  He wondered for a moment if she was the same moose that had attacked him earlier in the summer and tried to feel that she was, tried to feel some animosity toward her. But the truth was that killing her made him sad — elated and sad all at once, as he had been with the wolf-killed doe.
  She was ugly and beautiful at the same time, lying there in the snow, blood from her chest wounds smeared where she lay — an ugly beautiful animal, and she was ended now. He had killed her, ended her life so that he could live, and he felt as bad as he felt good.
  He turned away for a moment, shook his head and then turned back. There was much work to do and for a moment he thought it would be impossible. It was perhaps half a mile back to camp and there was absolutely no way he would be able to drag her.
  He tried lifting a back leg and it was all he could do to get it off the ground. Dragging her would be simply impossible. She must weigh six or seven hundred pounds.
  He would have to cut her up here and take her back to camp in pieces and that nearly stopped him. How, he thought, do you cut a moose up? Never in all his life had he ever thought about cutting a moose to pieces. Where did he start? There were no dotted lines the way there were in the diagram at the meat market…
  He thought on it a full five minutes, looking at her lying there, and finally realized he could do nothing until she was skinned.
  He used the knife to slit the hide from the neck, down the chest and belly to the back end. He had to cut around the lance — which had broken off after driving into her — and the arrow shaft still sticking out because they wouldn’t pull free.

Chapter 10