6. Jakob #2
Second window. The one by the front door.
I measure it with my eyes, snap the plywood to size against my knee, and nail it flush.
The wood is wet and fights me, trying to warp under the nails, but I drive them deep and close together until the sheet sits tight against the frame. Rain pours off my forearms as I work.
"Jakob?"
She comes through the wall, small and confused. I don't answer. Third window. This one faces northwest, directly toward the drainage where the tracks originated. I nail it shut with six nails instead of four.
I grab the rifle from the porch where I left it leaning against the post. Check the chamber. Loaded. Safety on. I sling it over my shoulder and stand in the rain with the hammer still in my fist and my heart rate perfectly level and every sense tuned to the gray wall of forest surrounding us.
The bear will come back tonight. I'll be ready.
She calls my name again from inside. Louder this time. Worried.
I grab the remaining plywood and head for the last window.
The last nail punches through plywood and bites into the window frame.
I give it two more hits for good measure, then step back and survey the work.
Every window on the ground floor is sealed.
The cabin looks like it's bracing for a hurricane, which isn't far from the truth if you swap wind for three hundred pounds of displaced black bear with a nose full of baked goods and nowhere else to go.
I circle the perimeter one final time. The rain has washed out the tracks near the porch, but the ones by the woodpile are still holding their shape, dark impressions filling with brown water.
I memorize the approach angle, calculate the sight lines from the front door, and mentally mark the spot where I'll set the trip line before dark.
Then I climb the porch steps, lean the hammer against the railing, and push inside.
The warmth hits me first. Then the smell.
Whatever she baked, the cabin still holds it like a promise.
Sweet. Yeasty. Completely wrong for this situation.
The fire has died to a low orange pulse in the stove, and Kinsley is standing in the kitchen with the broom clutched to her like a weapon, her eyes huge and fixed on the plywood where the window over the sink used to let in gray light.
"Why are my windows gone?"
She says it like they're her windows. Like she's lived here long enough to claim ownership of the light that comes through them.
I slide the deadbolt on the door, then the chain, then drop the two-by-four brace into the floor brackets I installed the first week I moved in.
The thud of it seating into place makes her flinch.
I unsling the rifle and lean it against the wall by the door.
Within arm's reach. Always within arm's reach from here on out.
Water pours off my jacket and pools on the floorboards.
I shrug it off and hang it on the hook, and the cold follows me deeper into the room, clinging to my skin like a second layer.
"Jakob. You're scaring me. Why did you board up the windows?"
"Bear."
The word lands flat between us. She blinks. The broom lowers an inch.
"A bear? Like, an actual bear?"
I don't dignify that with a response. I cross to the counter and grab the tin of ruined pastries and the plate of whatever she baked, some kind of lumpy biscuit thing that crumbles when I pick it up.
I carry both to the woodstove, open the iron door, and shove them into the coals.
The pastry box catches first, then the biscuits, and a thick sweet smoke curls up into the flue.
"Hey! Those took me an hour!"
"Bear tracks around the cabin. Fresh. Three hundred pounds, maybe more. It smelled the food." I shut the stove door and turn to face her. "New rules."
She stares at me. The firelight through the stove's grate throws orange bars across her face, and her jaw has that stubborn set I'm starting to recognize, the one that appears right before she decides to argue with a man twice her size about things she has zero experience with.
"Rules?"
"One. You don't open that door. Not for any reason. Not to look at the rain, not to get fresh air, not because you're bored. That door stays sealed until I open it."
"That's a little dramatic, don't you..."
"Two. No more baking. No more cooking anything with sugar or fruit or anything that puts a scent trail in the air. We eat what I prepare, when I prepare it. Canned protein. Jerky. Nothing sweet."
"Okay, now you're just being..."
"Three. If I tell you to get behind me, you do it. You don't ask why. You don't hesitate. You move."
She plants the broom on the floor and leans on it like a staff, one hip cocked, her head tilted at an angle that on anyone else would read as defiance but on her reads as a puppy squaring up against a Rottweiler.
She's still wearing my flannel. It hangs to her mid-thigh, the sleeves rolled four times at the wrist and still falling past her knuckles.
She looks absurd. She looks like something I need to put inside a steel vault and guard with my body.
"Jakob, I appreciate the whole grizzly-man survivalist thing, I really do, it's very Discovery Channel, but I think you might be overreacting to one little bear.
They're more scared of us than we are of them, right?
That's what the pamphlet at the ranger station said.
I read the whole thing on the drive up. Well, most of it. The first page. There was a pie chart."
She's smiling. She's actually smiling at me while I'm telling her about a predator that can cave in a car door with one swipe.
"It's not a grizzly. It's a black bear, and the pamphlet is wrong.
A displaced bear with no food cache in unfamiliar territory doesn't behave like a settled one.
It's hungry, it's stressed, and it already circled this cabin once to memorize where the food is.
It will come back, and when it does, it won't knock. "
"Okay but you can't just burn my biscuits and board up all the windows and expect me to sit in the dark like some kind of..."
I move. Two strides. She's still talking when my hands close around her hips and lift.
A sack of flour. Less. My fingers span from her hip bones to her waist, and the flannel bunches under my grip as I set her hard enough to rattle the tin cups on the shelf above.
Her legs part around me out of pure physics, her knees bracketing my ribs, and the broom clatters to the floor behind me.
Her mouth is still open but the words are gone.
Her hands land on my shoulders, fingers gripping the wet thermal fabric, and her eyes are hazel shot through with amber in the firelight, staring up at me from a distance of six inches.
The counter puts her face level with my collarbone. I'm still between her thighs, my hands still locked on her hips, and I can feel the heat of her through the shirt. Through my wet shirt. Through every layer between her skin and mine, which isn't nearly enough.
"That bear will peel the siding off this cabin to get to food. It will break through a standard door. It will come through a window. And if you are standing in its path when it does, you will not survive. You won't have time to scream. You won't have time to run. You will just be gone."
Her fingers tighten on my shoulders. The playfulness drains from her face like water through sand, replaced by something raw and real. Good. I need her scared. I need her listening. I need her to understand that this mountain doesn't care about pie charts or pamphlets or how bright her smile is.
"You are mine to keep alive. Do you understand?"