Free Brian's Hunt by Gary Paulsen Page B

bear, one small female, two even smaller yearling cubs, but they all moved away from him and the dog when they saw him and when he moved to where they had left tracks he knew they weren’t the bear involved in the attack.
    He knew the attacking bear’s tracks, how his right front paw toed in slightly, along with the missing claw and broken other claw, like a signature.
    And no new sign all that day. Not until evening.
    They had moved across a ridge that led up a small hill and somehow, hunting along the ridges, he had come back to a hill he’d moved across before.
    He did not know it at first, not until he crossed the top, the dog moving just ahead of him, and he saw a place where they had stopped to listen and rest. He recognized a scrub oak tree he had leaned against because it had a twisted, bent fork about four feet off the ground.
    “Well,” he whispered, his voice sounding strange to him, “we’ve come around. . . .” He stopped because the dog had changed. She had been smelling the ground and her back hair suddenly stood on end and she growled.
    “What . . .” Brian moved to where the dog stood, looked at the ground, but it was thick with humus and grass. He could read nothing. He held his breath, as the dog did, and they listened together but he heard nothing and he looked back to the ground and did not see anything until he had gone three yards farther along his own old track and there, where the grass had been worn by a white-tailed deer scraping, there was soft dirt and smack in the middle of the dirt there was a perfect print.
    Large, huge, missing claw, perfect sign and very, very fresh.
    It was the bear.
    The Bear.
    And it was following him, tracking him.
    Hunting him.
    Hunting
him.
    And for just that second, that long, long second, Brian went from predator to prey, felt a coldness on his neck, felt as a deer must feel when the wolves pick up its scent, as a rabbit must feel when the fox starts its run . . . cold, no breath, everything stopped. No thinking. Just that long second of something even more than fear, something very old, very primitive.
    The bear was hunting
him.
    Then it was gone. The coldness, the fear were gone and replaced by something even more pure, more primitive, as he thought of what was coming, what the bear’s tracks actually meant.
    He did not have to hunt the bear any longer. It was hunting him, it would come to him, and it would be soon, soon.
    Dusk now, he thought, dark in an hour, if it takes an hour. I passed here, what, three hours ago, and if he’s moving on my trail, how fast? Faster than me, certainly, he could be close, very close. In that split second he happened to be looking at the dog, saw the dog’s head turn to the left, and he dropped and turned at the same instant, heard brush crashing as he fell, brought the bow up, tried to pull the broadhead but too late, all too late.
    The bear was on him, rolling him, cuffing him. The bow was knocked out of his hands, flying ahead, arrows spewing out of his quiver, the bear strangely silent, pushing, pounding him as he first rolled in a ball and knew that wouldn’t work, not now, not with this bear. This bear had come to kill him and he was
going
to kill him and there wasn’t a thing Brian could do about it. He tried for his knife but the bear knocked it out of his hands, knocked his arms sideways, grabbed his left arm in his jaws and flung Brian back and forth the way he would worry a small animal.
    I’m not going to make this, Brian had time to think. He’s going to win again, he’s going to kill me, and then he heard the ripping growl of the dog and it landed on the bear’s back and grabbed and the bear turned to hit the dog, knocked it sideways twenty feet where it lay, stunned, and then the bear turned back to Brian.
    But there had been that second, two seconds, and Brian was lying on the ground well away from his bow but the arrows that had flown out of his quiver were all around him and he grabbed a broadhead