Snowblind by Daniel Arnold Read Free Book Online Page B

crash down on her like a wave.
    The bear drops. Turns. Ambles away.
    Thoughts flash by Ann in a series, going off like firecrackers on a string.
    Turn. Run.
    Bear knows where it is. You don’t.
    Bears look for food. Nothing to eat where you came from.
    Don’t you fucking do this!
    Ann races after the bear.
    Its big brown haunch is still just visible through the blizzard. Ann chases it through the flying snow. The bear’s tracks are deep, but new snow fills them fast, and Ann knows she isn’t seeing well or thinking clearly. When Ann loses sight of the bear, even for a moment, an edge-of-the-world terror seizes her. The bear will cross its own trail, vanish in the woods, blink back out of existence, and she’ll be left alone again. And when she has the bear in sight, all she can think of is it swinging around a second time, freezing her with its moon face, knocking her down with a paw like a spiked club, and digging into her guts.
    The bear is as alien as a meteorite, half a ton of muscle and unknowable intention. It sniffs the wind. Swipes the snow. Ann watches it flip a hundred-pound stone as casually as a kid turning over a rock. It gallops fifty yards, then stalks along with its nose down. Ann follows, fast or slow, through bunkers of brush and over moraines, straining to keep that furry hind end just in view and no closer. At a hundred feet, the bear is still too near. Ann’s legs twitch like a rabbit’s, trying to turn her away and send her into flight. Each time Ann catches a side view—of hooked claws, a shoulder built like a steam piston—the horror movie looping behind her eyes shows the bear coming all the way around and lunging through the storm, leading with its teeth. The bear enters dark woods with snow underfoot and soil under the snow.
    It occurs to Ann that this might be all that’s left of the world for her. She’ll reach the ocean, and it will be salty. She’ll follow the bears and stars until she starves or something kills her. Just because she asked them doesn’t mean her questions will be answered.
    She follows the bear through the woods, between trees and outbursts of devil’s club. The snow drops between the trunks, white on black, a feathery carpet-bombing. Ann drifts closer to the bear. She is starving, tired, numb—and what difference does ten feet make? The bear knows she’s here. It will cut short this parade when it damn well pleases. But if Ann loses the bear, she will be on the dark side of the moon. The trail of scents and signs they’ve followed is so convoluted Ann barely knows her left from her right anymore.
    Ann gives in to tunnel vision, gives up any pretense of paying attention to the warp of the land or the composition of the forest. Her hood is cinched tight; the bear is in front of her. It is goddamn ironic, is what it is. For how many years she has slapped aside every effort to hook her up with a partner, and now, at the end, she is a donkey on a string behind a side of bear-flesh that would on an average day eat her, or just kill her for mucking around in its tracks.
    Fallen logs on the forest floor look like bodies under the snow. Buried deeper, their outlines soften, until Ann runs them over and frags the soft curves. The bear bulls through the drifts. And sure, if Ann were as Stone Age as the mountains, maybe she’d take the bear for her totem. Pray to it, ask favors. But her world is all probabilities and lottery wheels. And she sees her number spinning down to zero. The big void lurks behind the numbers. From the mountains, Ann has watched it draw close and recede, her personal black hole.Sneaky bastard, to catch her like this. The bear rips open a rotten log and sniffs its insides. Ann is almost tired enough to welcome that treatment. Freezing to death might be more peaceful, but it will give her a long damn time to think.
    The bear shambles into a run. Ann follows, her legs clumsy and spazzing. The woods