Free Breakup by Dana Stabenow

and productive. The lower-echelon employees, i.e., the ones who got the copper out of the ground and loaded it on the railroad cars, stayed in the bunkhouse farther down the side of the hill and shared the bathroom with ninety-nine others.
    The houses were small affairs built of the same faded, peeling red clapboard as the main buildings. There wasn't anyone on the roof of the first house in line, and the soft, slushy, rapidly melting snow hid what tracks there had been. She didn't hear the growl of an infuriated grizzly, either, and she was listening for it pretty hard. All that was audible was the roar of the Kanuyaq River, lou d enough to drown out the sound of an approaching bear until it was right on her.
    "Lady?" she called. "Lady? I've got a gun, I'm here to help. Your husband's okay. It's safe to come down now." She walked forward.
    One house. Around a corner and another. A cluster of scrub spruce and a third house, a fourth and a fifth without incident.
    "Lady?" she called again, and cursed herself again, this time for not asking for the name. "Lady, can you hear me? My name is Kate Shugak. I've got a rifle. Don't be afraid, you can come down now."
    A sixth, a seventh, an eighth. The road wound around the ninth and Kate halted abruptly.
    The woman lay in the middle of the road, soaked to the skin from the rapid melt of a winter's worth of snow, staring sightlessly at the sky.
    Or she would have been, if she'd had any face left.
    Her left arm was missing below the elbow, as was most of her belly and thighs. Betrs were notorious for exerting the least effort for the most result and went for the soft meat and the viscera first. The arm had most probably been lost in trying to fight off the inevitable.
    Blood was everywhere, the salty copper smell of it strong in her nostrils, and the melting snow had kept it bright red, redder than the fading walls of the little house in the background. The resulting slush had mixed with the dirt track beneath and the area was a sea of churned-up mud in which the paw prints of a very large bear were prominent. The muddy, bloody prints led into the brush on the downhill side of the road.
    She couldn't move.
    This could have been me, she thought.
    If I hadn't moved fast enough, gotten up the bank when I did, this could be me lying here. If the brush hadn't slowed her down coming after me, if Mutt hadn't been barking, if her cubs hadn't been bawling for her.
    This could have been me.
    She could almost see herself, sprawled on her back in the little swimming hole, sightless eyes staring up, the dark blood drifting out of the backwater to be snatched into the swift, midstream current and washed downstream, into the river and the gulf beyond. How long before anyone would have known, if ever?
    Her hands cramped, making her aware of how hard she was gripping the rifle. She swallowed and forced herself to move forward, focusing fiercely on one of the clearer prints, in which a puddle of reddish water was already beginning to form. About six or seven hundred pounds, she estimated, standing six to eight feet.
    The pink shreds in the grizzly's claws had been human flesh.
    She looked away, at the fading wall of the house, long strips of paint peeling from its sides, and swallowed hard. Dimly, her own words echoed in her head. It was that hundredth bear you had to watch out for.
    She heard a sound behind her and spun around, rifle at the ready, to find Mrs. Baker retching emptily on one side of the road. Mr. Baker, white to the lips, was patting her shoulders soothingly.
    "Oh great," Kate said before she thought. "Mandy is going to kill me."
    George Perry ground-looped 50 Papa on a short final into Niniltna.
    Two circumstances contributed to this unfortunate occurrence.
    One, there was a fourteen-inch rut halfway down the icy surface of the 4,800-foot airstrip, which the latest grader pass had missed and which the left front tire on 50 Papa had the misfortune to eaten precisely at touchdown.
    Two, Ben