(1995) The Oath by Frank Peretti Read Free Book Online Page B

people killed by bears before, maybe more than our share, but this one’s pretty spectacular.”
    “Oh, yeah, spectacular,” Levi said.
    Jerry tried to soft-pedal his way out of the subject. “Well anyway, we don’t want to get people all upset, so we didn’t put the gruesome details in the leaflet and, uh, I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t talk it around too much.” He walked over to his patrol car and opened the door on the driver’s side. “But if you hear anything, if you talk to anybody who’s seen anything, give me a call, will you?”
    Levi answered almost absent-mindedly, “Uh-huh.” Then as Jerry drove away, Levi muttered to himself, “As if anyone’s gonna talk to me about this.”
    THAT NIGHT Steve got a call from Marcus DuFresne, and the next morning they went into the mountains as a team.
    Marcus, a state game warden with silver hair and a handlebar mustache, was most familiar with 318 , having patrolled the bear’s favorite haunts far up the Tailor Creek drainage, some thirty miles north of Wells Peak. He even had a nickname for the bear: Herman, after his overweight and cumbersome brother-in-law. He and Herman had shared the area for several years without incident, so this hunt was nothing Marcus felt happy about. Apparently, the trouble started the way it always started, when a bear and people got a little too used to each other. Bears normally didn’t want anything to do with humans, but offering a big grizzly an easy and predictable food source such as a garbage dump or unprotected trash cans could change all that. Herman had lost his fear of people and started claiming their refuse as his own, and that made him dangerous. Now the local farmers, ranchers, and homesteaders were seeing him all too often, prowling and scavenging around their homes and livestock, terrifying their children. Marcus was just planning how he would sedate the big fellow and relocate him when the attack occurred on Wells Peak. Suddenly, just moving Herman was no longer an option.
    Herman’s size didn’t help his case any. He was at least seven hundred pounds, and the general agreement seemed to be that no smaller bear could have inflicted the extent of injury sustained by the mauling victim. It had to be the biggest bear available, and that meant 318 .
    By midmorning, Steve and Marcus, dressed in camouflage and carrying rifles, had reached a well-used game trail that twined across the face of the draw just above Tailor Creek. It was a path used by bear and elk alike, and recent signs indicated 318 had been in the area, making his midsummer rounds among the huckleberries, then ambling routinely down to the creek to wash it all down.
    At the bottom of the game trail, alongside the creek, Steve and Marcus hoped to encounter the old grizzly. In a curious reversal of standard camping rules, they had brought two large bags of day-old doughnuts and a tub of rancid bacon grease, an odorous and tempting combination they intended to mix together and leave uncovered, open to the breeze. This time they fully intended to attract a bear.
    “This’ll do,” said Marcus, setting down the bucket of grease and doughnuts. “We can set the bait here where he’ll stumble right over it, and—” He looked uphill, where a thick growth of service-berries formed a tightly woven thicket around the trunks of some ancient cottonwoods. “Yeah. We can set up one blind in those trees.”
    Steve paused to listen to the sound of the creek. It was a nice, noisy spot with lots of splashing and gurgling, enough to drown out any rustling noises he or Marcus might make from their hiding places. The wind was moving uphill, away from the bait; hopefully 318 wouldn’t get a telltale whiff of their presence.
    “I’ll try up in there,” Steve said, pointing to another thicket a little farther up the trail, in sight of the bait. “Should give me a good angle.”
    Marcus took a long, steady look at where Steve was indicating. “This blind here