The Only Man on the Mountain

(This story contains: Animal harm and Starvation/desperation)

The slope gave under him before he understood it was going. He went down through brush and shale, and Bear went down with him, closer, faster, until the ground leveled out and stopped and they lay in it, breathing.

His leg was wrong. He knew that before he moved it, before he saw it.

He didn't look at the leg first.

He turned onto his side and got his hands into Bear's coat, working through it — shoulders, ribs, the long muscle of the back leg — checking for anything broken, anything wet that shouldn't be wet. There was a cut along the flank, shallow, already clotting on its own. There was grit worked into the fur that didn't belong there.

He picked it out with his fingers, one piece at a time.

His pack was somewhere above them, split open against a rock, half its contents scattered wherever the slope had wanted to put them. He didn't go back for it yet. He had a little water in the bottle still clipped to his belt, and he used some of it now, working it into the cut with his thumb, more than the wound needed.

Bear turned his head and licked the inside of the man's wrist, once, and went still again, letting himself be handled.

He sat back after a while and looked at his own leg. It was already swelling against the boot. He'd deal with that next.

Light was going out of the sky. He looked up the slope at what he could see of his gear, too far and too steep to reach before dark, and decided it could wait until morning.

He put his hand back in the dog's fur, not to check anything now. Just to leave it there.

In the morning he climbed enough of the slope to bring down what hadn't scattered past finding — a bag of trail mix torn open and half spilled, a bar, a knife, a lighter, a length of cord, one wool blanket stiff with dirt on one side. His water bottle. No more than that.

He laid it out on a flat rock and divided the trail mix into two piles by eye, then corrected the smaller pile until it looked fair to him.

Bear ate his share in four bites and sat watching the man eat his.

The man gave him another piece from his own pile.

That was automatic.

He built a lean-to against a fallen trunk with what cord and brush he had, and when the light went they lay down under it together, Bear pressed along his good side, and the dog's heat came through the blanket like something borrowed.

Sometime in the night he woke to Bear standing at the edge of the shelter, ears up, weight forward, looking at something in the dark that the man couldn't see and didn't try to. He put his hand flat on the dog's back until it lay down again.

He slept believing he had been guarded.

By the second day his mouth had gone past dry into something with texture to it, a thickness on the tongue. He had rationed the bottle down to a mouthful he was saving without admitting he was saving it.

Bear left in the early afternoon and didn't come back for three hours.

When he did come back he was wet through — belly, legs, the ruff at his neck dark and slicked flat — and he shook once at the edge of camp and came in close the way he always did, glad, unbothered, smelling of standing water and mud.

The man got both hands into the coat before the shaking had even stopped.

He worked his palms down the ribs and gathered what he could into his cupped hands, four times, five, and drank it off his own skin, grit and all, dog-smell and all. He put his fingers along the dog's jaw and worked the wet fur there too, and tipped what came off it into his mouth, and it wasn't enough, it was almost nothing, four dogs' worth of a wet coat wrung by hand into a cupped palm, but he did it anyway and did it again.

He tried, after, to get Bear to lead him back to it. He stood him up, faced him out toward whatever direction he'd come from, said show me in the voice he used for commands that usually worked.

Bear took this for a game. He circled, ran a short distance and returned, ran again, tongue out, delighted at the man's sudden energy, and led nowhere, because there was nowhere in his understanding to lead to. There was only having been wet, and now not being wet, and the man's hands in his fur, which felt the same as any other time the man's hands were in his fur.

The man stopped trying before Bear did.

That night he did not put his hand back in the coat. He let the warmth come to him without reaching for it.

On the fourth day, weak now, the leg gone the color of something no longer entirely his, he watched Bear go still in the brush at the edge of camp, one paw lifted, and then move once, fast, and come up with a vole in his mouth, still working.

He didn't kill it first. He didn't share it. He put his head down and ate it in three motions, bones and all, standing in the same spot, not looking at the man, not looking at anything.

The man sat with his back against the trunk and watched the whole thing happen.

He was hungrier in that moment than he had been since the fall.

He said something to the dog, sharp, not quite words, and Bear's ears went back and his tail went low and quick against his legs, reading the tone as trouble and not knowing what kind, and he came closer instead of away, the way dogs do, looking for the correction that would tell him what he'd done.

There was nothing to correct. He put his hand out anyway and let the dog push its head into it, and took the hand back before it was finished.

That night Bear lay a little farther off than usual.

The man noticed.

Days went by that he stopped counting exactly, though he could have told you the number if pressed. He found the creek two days into that stretch, followed the sound of it down through the timber until the ground turned wet underfoot, and after that water stopped being the thing that woke him afraid. He grew good at finding what there was to find — grubs under bark, a handful of unripe berries, once a bird's nest with two eggs in it, which he took whole, shell and all, and ate standing over the wreckage of it.

Bear ranged. He came back wet some days and dry others, hungry sometimes and heavy-bellied other times, and the man had stopped asking where.

He noticed himself doing arithmetic. He noticed himself watching which direction Bear took out of camp, timing how long he was gone, deciding from the fullness of his sides what he'd likely eaten and where. He was not doing this to help the dog. He understood that about himself, dimly, the way you understand weather.

On the day he finally got a rabbit — a young one, slow, caught by luck more than skill, in a snare he'd made from the cord and set without much hope — Bear had been gone since morning and didn't come back until the smell of the fire brought him in.

He sat at the edge of the firelight and watched the man cook it.

Earlier in the week he would have set aside a portion without thinking about it. He thought about it now. He thought about the wet fur wrung into his own palm for almost nothing. He thought about the vole taken apart in three bites six feet from where he sat with an empty stomach. He thought, he can find his own.

He ate all of it.

Bear watched until the fire had nothing left over it, then got up, turned twice, and lay down farther from the man than he had the night before.

The man told himself the distance was for the dog's own comfort, that dogs liked cool ground sometimes, that it meant nothing.

He said it again the next night. And the night after that, when it had stopped needing saying at all.

The freeze came on a night he'd felt coming in his bad leg for two days before it arrived. Rain first, then something harder, needling down through what canopy there was.

Bear came in close without being asked, the way he always did when the weather turned, pressing the length of himself along the man's good side. The man let him. He put a hand on the ribs and felt them working, in and out, faster than his own breath.

He didn't think anything large about it. He simply lay there and let the animal breathe against his hand until the rhythm of it was the only thing he was paying attention to.

Sometime past midnight Bear's paws moved, small twitching motions against the ground, chasing something in a dream the man would never know the shape of.

Later — an hour, two, he couldn't have said — Bear's head came up. Ears forward. Whatever it was, the man never heard it.

Bear stood, and the cold air came into the space where he'd been lying.

The man said his name once, low, the way you'd say it to call a dog back rather than to hold one in place.

He was already moving off through the dark and the rain by the time the name was fully out of the man's mouth, and whether he looked back at all, the man could never afterward be entirely certain.

In the morning there was no dog.

He called until his throat gave out on it. He dragged himself as far from camp as the leg would carry him, in widening arcs, and found a stretch of disturbed ground near a creek bed that told him nothing conclusive — some hair caught low on a branch, a patch where the wet leaves had been pressed flat and were drying now in a shape that could have been a body lying down or could have been nothing.

He went back to camp because there was nowhere else to go.

Nine or ten days on, in the dark, something came in low and unsteady at the edge of the firelight, favoring one leg, drawn by whatever he had cooking. He was on his feet before he'd decided to be.

What happened after that he never put in order afterward, not even alone, not even at night when there was no one left to perform the story for. He knew only that his hands were shaking when he finally sat back down, and that there was more in his stomach than there had been an hour before, and that he slept through until morning for the first time since the fall.

Without a second mouth to feed, he stopped dividing anything, which made a kind of sense he didn't examine further.

The days went loose after that, one running into the next without much to mark them apart, and what he did in them changed by degrees he didn't track at the time.

He tore the nesting hollow out of a rotted stump looking for eggs that weren't there, and left it open to the weather. He stripped bark for the pale wood underneath in a wider ring than he needed, girdling trees he'd have left alone before. He fouled the creek downstream of where he drank because there was no other mouth that might need it clean.

He noticed, distantly, that he had stopped arguing with himself about any of it. His hands did the work before he'd finished deciding to let them.

He talked to Bear sometimes, out loud, in the voice a man uses when he isn't sure whether he's talking to keep himself sane or to be heard by something.

You made your choice, he said once, to the empty air where a dog used to be. You were built for this ground. Better than I was.

He said it again a few days later, smoother.

By the time smoke or voices or the sound of a search party's whistle finally reached him — he never was sure, afterward, which came first — he had the whole of it worn into a shape that came out of him without a seam in it anywhere.

He heard them before he saw them. Two men and a dog of their own, working up along the drainage, calling his name.

He looked once, quickly, at what was around him — the stripped trees, the raided nest, the blackened wider ring of the fire pit — and dragged his pack over a low place near the ash before they came into the clearing, and told himself it was only to clear a place to stand.

They came in loud and relieved and full of the particular energy of men who have found what they were looking for. They gave him water and something soft to eat and told him he was lucky, resourceful, tougher than he looked.

One of them, moving the pack to make room by the fire, turned up the collar from underneath it — the buckle strap still through it, the leather parted clean across the middle — and held it up.

"This his?"

The man took it back without looking at the cut in the leather.

"He went off," he said.

The searcher nodded, the way a man nods at something he's heard before and has no reason to doubt, and said dogs did that sometimes up here — chased something, got turned around, came back down on their own three or four days behind their people, thinner but fine.

The man said that was probably it.

He slipped the leather into his pocket and followed the others down.