Killing Grounds by Dana Stabenow Read Free Book Online Page B

add insult to injury, fireweed was growing from her trim line. Her name, once bold white letters a foot high, was a faded, ghostly presence, pride broken, spirit gone.
    Unconsciously, Kate pulled her hands free of her pockets, squared her shoulders and raised her chin, coming more or less to attention. Mutt, padding ahead of her, halted and turned to cock an inquiring eyebrow.
    The Marisol had been sailing the waters of Prince William Sound since before Kate was born. Her father had deckhanded for Eli Tiedeman during many very successful crab seasons, but it wasn't crab fishing Kate remembered in connection with the Marisol, it was a week when she and her mother had flown out from Niniltna to board the Marisol to go deer hunting on Montague Island.
    It had been late fall, she remembered, a cold, clear, crisp November day. The limit had been four that year, four deer per hunter, and the party had split up in hopes of catching everyone's limit. Zoya had gone with Eli, Eli's wife Luba with their son, Ed.
    Kate had gone with her father. She was six years old and armed to the teeth with a .22 rifle that was as tall as she was. It might have slowed down a very small deer at point-blank range, but Stephan had insisted from the time Kate could walk that she become accustomed to always going armed on a hunt.
    There was only a thin crust of hard snow on the ground, and it crunched underfoot as they hiked Montague to the north. Eli had anchored the Marisol inside the lee of Jeannie Point, and there was a nice long beach where the deer often came down to eat seaweed and lick salt off the rocks. Zoya and Eli had headed up Torturous Creek, Luba and Ed up Jeannie Creek, and Stephan had made for the swamp that drained into Nellie Martin River. It was four miles as the crow flies, and slow going on foot through heavy brush and the occasional stream and an unending series of deserted marshes. Kate had found some blueberries still hanging on the bushes. They were as big as the top joint of her thumb and frozen solid. She held them in her mouth, the cold, smooth sphere melting into a half-sweet, half-tart mush. Stephan had laughed at her blue tongue.
    They'd found their deer, a fat doe, on a little rise overlooking the Nellie Martin, probably on her way to the beach. Stephan brought her down with a single shot, just above and behind her right shoulder. Together, he and Kate had fashioned a yoke with the rope he'd brought and they'd begun the hike back.
    As they were coming into a small clearing at the bottom of a hill, Stephan had paused for a breather. He looked up, to see three grizzlies watching them from the top of the hill, a female and two males. The males were smaller than she was, but a grizzly, big enough to start with, looks twice its size outlined against snow, and the three of them together looked like all four horsemen of the Apocalypse. Even the first week of November, the last thing Stephan had been thinking about was bears, because any decent, upright, law-abiding bear was in hibernation by then. He was carrying a bolt-action .30-06 with five rounds, one of which he'd used on the deer and the other four of which were in the pocket of his mackinaw.
    He dropped the rope and reached for the ammunition. At the same time, the female caught the scent of the dead deer and exploded into a run. Her sons were right behind her.
    As long as Kate lived, she would never forget watching those bears tear down that hill in their direction, looming larger and larger against the snow. She unshouldered her .22.
    "No," Stephan said. "Run, Kate. Run!"
    She ran a few steps and stopped, out of his eyesight, and watched, the .22 held in both hands across her chest. Her world narrowed down to her father and the bears, and suddenly everyone seemed to be moving in slow motion, slow enough for her to notice things and think about them, slow enough for her to feel the smooth metal of the .22's barrel and the slick wood of its stock against the palms of her