Bear Trapped (Bear Creek Grizzlies #5)

3. Finn

FINN

I n the end, he didn’t get the truck fixed. So Simon drove him through the old dirt roads through all the land the alpha bear and his mate purchased the year before. They’d bought it up from neighbors who wanted to retire or inherited and didn’t know what to do with the vast tracts of mountainous terrain and forests and bear-riddled trails. Most of it abutted the national park, and Simon wanted to keep as much of it free and accessible as possible. Which meant helping out local and federal law enforcement when they uncovered bad actors using the land for shady business.

Simon hadn’t been happy that Finn agreed to go looking for drug smugglers, particularly since they had a few large tours to wrap up before winter set in, but he couldn’t argue. The alpha bear used the long, quiet drive as an opportunity to tell Finn how worried all the bears were for him, that Finn looked more and more like he was listening to his bear side too much, that he’d lost weight and started looking haunted, that he had nightmares and they’d all heard him shouting.

Finn hated every second of it and scowled out of the window like some emo teenager being lectured about staying past curfew. It wasn’t anyone else’s business if he didn’t sleep well or couldn’t eat or stayed out in the woods as much as possible. He was still on his best behavior around the females and children, which was all they should have asked of him.

When he told Simon as much, the alpha bear shot him a dark look. “You’re my teammate, dick. I won’t forget that, and I’m not about to leave a team-mate behind. So pull your head out of your ass. When you finish this job up, we’ll come up with a plan to get things straightened out.”

So he’d jumped out of the truck the second it rolled to a stop, waving away Simon as the other man stepped out to yell something at him, and hiked as fast as possible to pretend he didn’t hear. There wasn’t any reason the other bears needed to worry about him. He’d never been like them, he’d always been closer to a bear than a man. He’d just gotten better as hiding it from everyone, so they never knew how close to the edge he balanced every day. They never would have trusted him in battle or around their families if they’d known. Now that they knew… maybe it was time to leave. Leaving was preferable to being told to go.

Finn shook his head as he hiked faster, clenching his jaw against the awkwardness of Simon’s lecture. Finn didn’t want anyone else worrying about him. He didn’t need big brothers or a father figure or a mama bear studying him and making sure he drank his milk and cut his steak into little bites so he didn’t choke. If he wanted to go lose himself in the woods, he’d fucking do it and there wasn’t anything anyone could say to change his mind.

He hadn’t bothered to ask Simon what kind of plan the alpha bear thought would be needed. Finn just wanted to get out of the truck and away from the touchy-feely bullshit conversation, so he agreed to whatever Simon wanted and got the fuck out of there. He moved so fast he almost forgot his rifle and the sat phone, and pretended he didn’t hear Simon when he shouted about leaving it behind.

Finn hiked his pack up on his shoulders to stretch his back, adjusting the straps and checking his rifle. That had been three days ago, and his mind was only just starting to settle. The bear remained agitated, though the quiet trails and opportunity to run around as a bear as much as he liked helped a great deal. There was something about the smell of the forest—faint pine, mulchy dirt, squirrels, clean air—that helped him remember where he was. When he woke up in a sweat, panicking because he couldn’t find his helmet or kevlar or most of his weapons, it was scent alone that kept him from losing his mind.

He grumbled and checked the map one more time. He’d been crisscrossing the area that Shotgun outlined as likely to be used by the smugglers, but very little had turned up. A few boot prints, the occasional hint of human scent on the air or trapped in some vegetation, and once a firepit with warm, soggy ashes. Not enough to say what people were doing out there, and certainly not enough to hand to Shotgun as proof of smuggling.

He’d been close to finding something for the last day, once he’d finally made camp the night before. He’d stowed his gear and food before dusk settled in the trees, then shifted to his bear shape to hunt and explore. It was much easier to feed himself as a bear, flipping fish out of the rivers until his belly was full. He moved faster as a Kodiak, that was for damn sure, and didn’t care about staying quiet or not leaving traces of his passage. The smugglers would be looking for evidence of rangers or hunters, not for big fucking bears who didn’t belong in the mountains of Oregon.

Not that he expected drug smugglers to recognize the differences between a normal brown bear and the Alaskan brown bear.

Finn stretched up to rake his claws down the length of a massive pine tree, leaving clear signs to humans and other animals that an apex predator was stalking the woods and they needed to beware. It felt good to finally roam in his bear form and not worry about making it home for dinner or before Zoe started to worry, or not worrying about whether his roar would startle the baby or scare the tourists.

He scratched his back on the tree trunk, groaning, before dropping to all fours and continuing his trek until he reached a river teeming with fish.

Finn roamed for most of the night, searching for hints of interlopers, but eventually circled back to where he’d left his gear for a few hours’ sleep. Once he lay down under the stars, though, his thoughts wouldn’t settle to let him rest. He’d at least excluded some of the wilder parts of the search box that Shotgun laid out, since there was no way that anyone was smuggling a large volume of drugs through the wildest parts of the mountains. There just wasn’t enough room or the paths to support humans moving things around.

Which left him with a small problem. He wasn’t going to get paid for not finding anything. Shotgun might or might not believe him that Finn came up empty-handed. The suspicious son of a bitch would probably send out two or three other rangers or city boys to try and confirm what Finn had already told him. He waited until false dawn to pack up his stuff and start moving again. Maybe if he got in a fight or forced march all day, he would be tired enough to sleep later.

He scratched his beard as he trudged along, thoughts drifting to the latest problems. Not that Finn minded staying out and wandering through all corners of the park until he narrowed down where the smugglers were.

There was enough that didn’t feel right on Simon’s land that Finn figured he should stay until he unraveled exactly what had gone wrong. Maybe it wasn’t drug smugglers. Maybe it was illegal hunters taking bears and elk out of season. Maybe there were hikers going off the trails and destroying the rivers or leaving trash and shit all over the place. It could have been more illegal gold prospectors, tearing up rivers and valleys to search for a few measly ounces of shiny metal. He frowned and slowed down as distant sounds reached him through the trees.

It sounded like voices, or at least bird calls he hadn’t heard before. His head tilted back as he took a deep breath, tasting the air, and searched for a hint of what might have caused the noise.

His skin prickled at a metallic scent, completely out of place in the mountains, and a hint of unwashed bodies. There it was. Just a few days’ hike out the other side of the wide swath of land that Simon owned, and dangerously close to the protected area of the national park. Finn growled under his breath and moved faster, searching for a good place to stash his gear. He vaguely remembered a dilapidated cabin nearby, but he didn’t want to waste time searching for it.

He shoved his pack into the hollow trunk of a dead tree and stripped down to shift into his bear form. If he was seriously outnumbered, the smugglers might be inclined to just shoot a man and leave his body to rot. Hopefully they’d respect a bear enough to leave it the fuck alone as long as he didn’t charge them. All Shotgun wanted was for Finn to mark the location and get a good count of how many guys worked the operation. He wasn’t going to be a hero or some bullshit like that. Still, at least in his bear form he was so much bigger and covered in fluffy fur.

Or he’d be able to absorb the bullets and heal faster anyway. It had been a while since he had a good fight as the Kodiak.

The bright flash of pain cleared his head when he shifted. He grumbled in agitation as the bear’s senses picked up on even more details of the trouble brewing down the slope, but he kept his silence and lumbered through the trees. He would have smiled. Time to ruin someone’s day.