Chapter 2
Chapter Two
GABI
The deer carcass shows up on my porch on a Tuesday.
I almost step on it. Bare feet, coffee in hand, pushing open the door to feel what kind of morning the mountain decided to hand me, and there it is.
A young buck laid out on the boards, neck broken clean, not a scavenger mark on it.
Placed. Arranged, even, legs tucked under like it's sleeping instead of dead.
My coffee sloshes over my knuckles. I don't feel the burn.
Because I know what this is. My grandmother told me about it once, in the voice she used for the old things, the things our kind carried down from the north before the sleuth scattered and we became a handful of cold-blooded ghosts roaming the Rockies alone.
A bear leaves you meat, she said, when a bear has decided.
I'm the last of us. There's no one left to decide anything about me.
So I stand on my porch with my heart going wrong in my chest and I tell myself it's a mountain lion.
Lions cache their kills. Lions are territorial and strange and this is exactly the kind of thing a lion would do, except a lion would have eaten the soft parts first, and a lion would not have laid the legs so careful, and I have spent my whole life knowing what's bear and what isn't.
This is bear.
I haven't crossed another shifter in four years.
Not since my mother stopped shifting and started dying, slow, the way she chose to, lying down inside her grief and never getting up.
Before her there was my grandmother. Before my grandmother, stories.
We came south generations back when the northern sleuth broke apart, and we spread thin across this whole spine of country, never enough of us in one place to be a sleuth at all.
Just polar bears in grizzly country, too rare to find each other, too rare to find anything.
I came to this cabin to write it down. All of it.
The migration and the names and the way my grandmother smelled like clean snow even in August. Somebody should know we existed.
When I'm gone there won't be anybody left who carries it, so I carry it into a notebook at three in the morning and I tell myself that's enough. That a record is a kind of survival.
A record doesn't leave you a deer.
I drag the carcass off the porch by its hind legs, which takes everything I've got, and I haul it to the tree line and leave it for the scavengers and I go back inside and I do not write a single word all day.
The firewood comes Thursday.
Stacked against the south wall where I'd been meaning to put a stack and never got around to it.
Split clean, the cuts so even they look run through a machine, except there's no machine up here for forty miles and no road to bring one.
Just wood, dry and ready, more than I'll burn before the snow flies.
I stand in front of it with my arms crossed and my jaw tight and I say, out loud, to nobody, "Arrête."
Stop. It does no good. Whatever's leaving me things doesn't speak French and doesn't speak human and is somewhere up that mountain right now watching me find what it left.
I should be scared. A woman alone in the woods finds evidence that something large and intelligent has been on her porch, that's a horror story, that's the part right before everything goes wrong.
But my bear isn't scared.
That's the thing I can't get past, standing there in the cold with my hand on a stack of wood I didn't ask for.
My bear, who has been a dull quiet ache under my ribs for four years, who I haven't let out since before my mother went into the ground because there was no point, because what is a polar bear alone in Colorado but a thing waiting to be the last of its kind, my bear lifts her head.
She likes the wood.
She likes that somebody split it. She wants to roll in the smell of whoever did, and the want is so sudden and so animal that I have to go inside and sit on the floor with my back against the door until it passes.
It doesn't pass. It just gets quieter.
The carving shows up the following week.
By then I've stopped pretending I'll send it back. There's no sending anything back to a mountain. I find it on the railing, set where the morning light will catch it, and I pick it up before I can talk myself out of it.
Bone. White and smooth and worked down to something my hands don't want to put down.
It's a bear. Carved from what looks like an elk's leg bone, every line of it patient, the muzzle and the heavy shoulders and the way the thing's head is turned like it's listening.
Whoever made this took hours. Whoever made this sat somewhere with a blade and a piece of bone and thought about me the whole time, because there's no other reason to make a thing this careful and leave it on a stranger's rail.
I sit down on the porch steps with the carving in my palm and I cry, which surprises me, because I haven't cried since the funeral and I didn't think I had any left.
It's just that nobody's ever made me anything.
Thirty-one years and I have spent most of them learning to need nothing from anyone, because the people of my kind were always too few and too far and now they're gone, and you cannot grieve what you never had.
I told myself that for a long time. You cannot miss a sleuth you've never been part of.
You cannot ache for a male of your own kind when there are none left to ache for.
Then a stranger leaves bone carved into the shape of what I am, and the lie I've been telling comes apart in my hands.
The shifter who's doing this knows what I am.
Has to. You don't court a woman with meat and wood and bone unless you understand the language, and you don't understand the language unless you're bear yourself.
Which means somewhere on this mountain there's one of my own kind, or close enough to it, and he scented me before I ever scented him, and he's decided.
The grandmother voice in my head says, A bear courts what it means to keep.
I bring the carving inside. Set it on the table next to the notebook, next to the pages I haven't been able to write since the deer showed up. And I sit there in the dark with the lamp pulled close and I open the notebook and I write a single line, the first one in days.
There is another bear on the mountain.
I look at the words a long time.
Then I get up and stand at the window the way I do most nights, mug in both hands, looking out at the black wall of trees.
I can't see anything out there. But my bear can feel it, the way she's been able to feel it for two weeks now, that there's something up the slope that's aware of me, that's awake when I'm awake, that watches the same way I do.
"I know you're out there," I say to the glass.
Nothing answers. Wind in the pines. An owl somewhere down toward the lake.
But the cold under my skin warms by a single degree, the way it does when my bear is paying attention, and I understand that whatever's up that mountain heard me.
That it's close. That it has been close for longer than two weeks, probably, and the deer and the wood and the bone were only the first time it let me know.
I should be afraid.
I set my mug down and press my hand flat to the cold window and I'm not afraid at all. I'm something I don't have a word for in either language, and for the first time in four years, I'm not alone.