And There He Kept Her (Ben Packard #1)(3)

When the EMTs arrived, Packard excused himself and left to find the bear. He drove slowly with the window down, watching the trees and the ditches for the animal. There had been a full moon the night before, followed by a fair amount of rain. The bear’s tracks were easy to follow in the soft ground on either side of the road.

A half mile later—thin, shrubby trees on one side, small homes spread far apart on the other—he came upon two men standing at the end of a driveway. One had a bloody rag wrapped around a hand he was holding against his chest. A blue pickup was backed into the driveway next to a chop saw and a pair of sawhorses set up outside a partially sided garage.

“Is that from the bear or the saw?” Packard asked as he rolled to a stop.

“Bear,” the bleeding guy said. “We were just getting started. I was up on the ladder when the bear come across the road. I yelled but Jim was running the saw and had his ear protection on. I came down and tried to chase the bear away. Got too close and got raked across the back of my hand.”

“Where did the bear go?”

“It’s in the garage,” said Jim.

Packard could see a boat on a trailer, a four-wheeler, and a riding mower packed into the two-car garage. “What’s in there that a bear would want?”

“Fifty-pound bags of dog food and birdseed.”

Packard parked the county SUV. There was no chance of making it to the sheriff’s house by 7:00 a.m. He texted the sheriff’s wife to let her know he was running late, then asked dispatch to have the ambulance at the old man’s house sent to his current location when they were done. He had the number for the county conservation officer in his phone. He called her to confirm what he should do about the bear.

“Any idea if it’s a male or female?” Theresa Whitaker asked.

“Haven’t got that close yet,” Packard said, keeping an eye on the garage, watching for any sign of movement.

“Cubs?”

“Not that I’ve seen.”

“You have to put it down,” Theresa told him. “It’s attacked two people. I’ll call the university and have someone come pick up the carcass. They’ll test it and see if they can find a reason for the aggressiveness.”

Packard gave her the address and then got out of the vehicle, taking the twelve-gauge shotgun from the rack behind his seat. He asked the men if there was anyone else on the property. Both shook their heads. Packard told them to stay where they were. “Where’s the dog food?”

“Back right, behind the boat,” Jim said.

“Is there a garage door opener in that truck?”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s get it.”

The guy with the bloody hand followed Packard to the truck in the driveway and unclipped the opener from the visor. Packard asked him to shut the garage door once he was inside.

“Try not to shoot my boat,” the guy said.

Packard approached the open garage with the shotgun raised. He stepped inside, nodded back at the man behind him, and waited as the door lowered. In twelve years as a police officer in Minneapolis, he’d fired his service weapon once. In the last eighteen months with the sheriff’s department in Sandy Lake, he’d already shot two deer and a moose, all mortally wounded after being struck by cars. A bear was another first.

The weak light on the overhead garage door unit stayed lit. Packard hugged the wall to his left, skirting the four-wheeler and the riding mower, since he didn’t know exactly where the bear was. The trailered fishing boat was a red Lund with a 60-horse Johnson tilted over the stern.

He could hear the sounds of plastic being dragged and the crunch of dry dog food. Near the back wall, he got his first glimpse of the bear—its snout buried in a torn bag—pinned in the far corner by the boat’s motor. Packard pegged its weight somewhere north of three hundred pounds. Its fur was deeply black and glossy. It smelled musky.

As soon as the bear realized he was there, it rose up on its hind legs, taller than Packard, who was six four. Packard kept the gun up but paused to marvel at the size of the animal. It moved its pale snout this way and that, sniffing the air. Nothing in its shiny black eyes gave any hint of what it was thinking. In such an enclosed space, they could have been in an interrogation room back at the station. Packard had a ridiculous urge to try to negotiate a deal with the bear. Let it off with a warning if it promised not to attack little dogs or cranky old men again.

The bear dropped its front paws on the motor’s lower unit, hard enough to bounce the front end of the trailer, then rose up tall again.

Packard took two quick steps forward and pulled the trigger.

The twelve gauge thundered. The bear curled like a question mark, then collapsed, boneless, to the floor. Packard waited for a few seconds, then hit a button on the back wall to raise the garage door. Daylight raced across the floor like a sunrise at high speed. He squatted next to the dead bear, his ears ringing. The animal already looked diminished in death. Packard put his hand on top of its head. “I’m sorry,” he said.

***

Packard was hours late by the time he turned into the sheriff’s driveway. A decorative split-rail fence ran a short way on either side, then ended abruptly, keeping nothing in or out. The house was a brick rambler with green shutters that backed up against acres of thick woods five miles outside of town.

Marilyn Shaw answered the door. Early sixties. Hair dyed red with gray roots. Wearing blue slacks and a cardigan sweater over a green shirt. She had a dish towel over one shoulder that she used to finish drying her hands before she took Packard’s between hers and stood on her toes to kiss his cheek. “You get taller and more handsome every time I see you.”