Prey (11 page)

Finally, she handed out the canisters of bear spray, two each, and the holsters to carry them in. “Keep these within easy reach, not in a pocket or your saddle bag,” she said.

Chad looked at the canister. “Why bother with this when we have the rifles?”

Angie grinned. “Ever tried to take a leak while you’re holding a rifle? All that zipping and unzipping? You’d need three hands.”

He turned beet red. Davis actually laughed, the sound surprising her because she hadn’t expected any sign of humor from him, even at someone else’s expense. “If a bear got after you, you wouldn’t have to worry about unzipping,” he said to Chad.

“I don’t imagine any of us would,” Angie interjected. If the two men had been friends, the comment would have been funny, but it was obvious they weren’t friends at all. Even worse, Davis seemed to be downright hostile toward Chad, which made this outing not only strange, but downright uncomfortable.

“The difference between hunting bear and hunting elk is that the elk won’t try to drag you off and eat you,” she continued. “Have either of you ever used bear spray before?”

“Of course,” Davis said, sounding bored, but Chad turned the canister over in his hand and was reading the directions.

“I can’t show you when we get to the camp,” Angie said, “because the spray itself contains food scents that can lead a bear to
you. Right here is as good a place as any.” She showed him how to aim it. “Spray a cloud between you and the bear, and don’t wait until it’s actually charging or it may be through the cloud and on you before the spray settles low enough. Never, never spray if the wind is blowing toward you, because then you’re blind and you still have a bear after you. And always have two cans on you, because one might not be enough.”

Chad gave her a disbelieving look. “I thought bear were shy, and ran away unless you just stumble onto one.”

“Don’t you believe it,” Ray said. “Bears are predators. Now, I wouldn’t want to startle a grizzly, especially a sow with a cub, but if you ever look back and see a black bear trailing you, you’d better pray you have a rifle and that you’re a good shot, because it’s coming after you and two things are certain: It can run faster, and climb better, than you can. If you don’t get it, it’s going to get you.”

That was pretty much bears in a nutshell, so Angie didn’t add to it right then. When they reached the camp she’d institute the camp safety rules, but all of that was better done when they could see the actual layout of the camp.

They were wasting daylight, time in which they might actually do some hunting and, please God, bag a bear right away, so she said, “Let’s ride.”

Mitchell Davis dismounted, looked around the camp she’d leased, and surveyed the portable toilet set off to the side. He turned and looked at her, an incredulous expression in his cold eyes. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said in a tone so sarcastic that Chad flinched and turned red yet again; on the ride up, he’d been the target over and over again of Davis’s serrated tongue, which chewed up and shredded rather than destroyed with a fast, clean slice. Davis had something to say, none of it good, about how Chad rode, the brand of rifle he owned, the cheapness of his scope, even the newness of his boots.

During the ride Angie had thought several times that if she’d been Chad, she’d have dug in her heels, told Davis to kiss her ass, and gone back to the truck. Now, with that hostility turned on her, she bit her tongue and silently apologized to Chad, because he’d no doubt kept his silence for the same reason she was keeping hers: She needed the money. This was her payback for feeling superior, when she wasn’t at all; she was in the same boat Chad was in, paddling for all she was worth.

“Maybe I’ll take up meditation,” she mused aloud, earning a covert chuckle from Chad that he quickly turned into a cough.

She didn’t know what the big deal was about the camp. Exactly what had Davis been expecting? A lodge, maybe? She had no idea what Chad had told him, how he’d described the accommodations to Davis, but she’d been completely honest with Chad about the camp when she had leased it. It wasn’t the best she’d ever been at, but neither was it the worst. At least they weren’t sleeping on the ground, and she’d done that more times than she cared to remember.

The campsite was in a picturesque spot, on a fairly level section of the mountainside, surrounded by lodgepole pine and tamarack. Below, a crystal clear creek wound its way along the valley floor, bracketed by stands of spruce and black cottonwood. Taller peaks, white-capped with snow, loomed over and around them. Huge boulders and thick tangles of chokeberry bushes dotted the landscape. The presence of the creek and the chokeberry bushes upped their chances of finding bear, which was the reason for being here in the first place. She could have taken them to a place with more luxurious accommodations, but the odds of Davis shooting a bear went down.

There were six wooden platforms, but only three of them were set up with tents. Angie deeply appreciated the platforms; when the rain began, that meant water wouldn’t be running through their tents. The tents were heavy-duty canvas, each with a sort of offset wing in front of the entrance, for extra privacy. She knew for a fact that silhouettes couldn’t be seen through the canvas, which was a big plus for her. The tents weren’t huge, about seven and a half feet by five feet, but that was plenty big enough for a cot and their belongings. They each had an inflatable mattress to go on the cot, and a sleeping bag. The portable toilet took care of calls of nature, and she’d brought enough wet wipes for them to stay reasonably clean and unstinky for a week—longer than that, if need be.

A lot of their food was prepackaged, but a food-prep area had been set up a couple of hundred yards away. There was a camp stove for making coffee, which was as much of a necessity as clothing, in her opinion. There were battery-operated LED lamps in the tents, flashlights, extra batteries. She had Swedish steel for making fires, and if by chance the weather turned bitterly cold, which it wasn’t supposed to do, each tent was stocked with a small oil heater.

Best of all, the rough corral had a section with a roof over the feed troughs, so the horses had a bit of shelter. If the wind got up, she’d cut some pine branches to brace against the corral as a wind break. She believed in taking care of her horses, because their lives could well depend on the animals.

As far as she was concerned, this camp pretty much had everything except television and cell phone service. If Davis was as experienced as he’d said he was, wouldn’t he have known what to expect, or at least had a general idea?

“Which tent is mine?” he demanded, his voice tight.

Without hesitation, Angie pointed to the one on the far left. She’d take the one farthest to the right; she wanted to put as much distance between them as possible. Granted, it wasn’t much, because the tents were separated by only about ten feet, but every little bit counted.

Davis left his horse standing and disappeared into the tent.

She stared after him, her mouth falling open at the absolute boorishness of the man.

“I’m so sorry,” Chad whispered, actually wringing his hands.

She shook herself, and squared her shoulders. “His manners aren’t your fault,” she said, reaching for the reins of the dark bay before he could take it into his head to wander off.

Chad helped her get the horses unsaddled and watered, and the supplies put away in her tent. She wouldn’t have much room to move around, but that didn’t matter; she wouldn’t be in the tent much anyway, and this way everything was at hand, plus no
prowling predator could get into their supply and destroy everything, at least not without alerting her. She not only kept her rifle at hand, but she also had a pistol, and she slept with it.

As she’d expected, Chad was moving a little gingerly, but he didn’t complain. Soon enough they had all the chores done, though the work would have gone faster if Davis had stirred himself to help. She noticed Chad kept darting little anxious glances at the tent, and finally he said hesitantly, “Should I … I mean, were you planning to do any hunting today?”

“It’s wasted time if we don’t at least scout around,” she pointed out. “I know where I found bear sign before, and we need to see if there’s any fresh sign.” Taking a bear wasn’t an easy proposition; Montana didn’t allow hunters to put out bait for bears or use scent to pull them in. They had to
find
the bear, if possible call one in using a bear call, and their hunting time was limited from half an hour before sunrise to half an hour after sunset.

“I’ll, uh, I’ll call Mitchell,” Chad said, squaring his shoulders, and went off to Davis’s tent.

Angie got out her hunter orange vest and put it on, checked her two cans of bear spray to make certain she could get to them without having to move anything out of the way. She loaded her rifle, put an extra box of ammo in one of the vest pockets. She had her binoculars, her bear call, a bottle of water, and while she was waiting for Chad to come back out of Davis’s tent she hastily ate a protein bar, chasing it with water. The biscuit she’d eaten for breakfast had long since worn off and she was starving.

Chad came back out of the tent, his face the dark red that had become so familiar on the ride into the mountains. Sweat glistened on his forehead. “He, um, he said when you found the bear he’d come along. Until then, he isn’t interested.”

Now was a very good time to begin meditating. Angie held her breath for a few seconds, then let it out slowly. Again. There, that was better. Maybe there really was something to this breathing stuff. She didn’t think she had any huge anger issues—other than
where Dare Callahan was concerned, then all bets were off—but she supposed she had her moments. Everyone had a breaking point, and she was well past hers where Davis was concerned.

Most of the time she loved her job. Almost all of her clients were perfectly nice people who enjoyed the outdoors, who loved a challenge, who simply liked to hunt. When they weren’t hunting they were telling stories, talking, joking, laughing. They came up here to relax, to have a good time.

This week wasn’t going to be like that. She’d never refunded a fee and walked away in her professional life, and she wouldn’t this time either because she needed the money, but oh, boy, she wanted to. Whether or not she and Dare agreed on a deal they could both live with, she had bills to pay, so she’d stick.

It hit her that this might very well be her last job as a hunting guide—here, anyway. She didn’t have anything else scheduled, and the odds were that come spring she’d be living in a new place, getting accustomed to a new job and new neighbors. Maybe she didn’t have any choice, but damn it, she didn’t want to go out like this, annoyed and stressed to the max.

But it looked as if that was what she was going to get. Maybe this was a sign that she was doing the right thing, selling out and moving on.

“He’s an ass,” she muttered, then realized she’d said that aloud and looked at Chad with an appalled expression. “Oh, God, I’m so sorry. I apologize. I should never have said that.”

Chad mopped his shiny face, then gave her a shy smile. “Yeah, I know,” he said, keeping his tone low. Then he gave a helpless shrug, as if to say, What can you do?

She should have known, should have expected it when Davis had left her to take care of all the horses, not even tending to the bay he’d been riding. He was a decent horseman, she’d give him that, which made it even more incomprehensible that he hadn’t offered to take care of the animal that had hauled his ass up here. His personality would be vastly improved if he were more like the
horse he’d ridden: silent, and gelded. Come to think of it, that would apply to a certain other man she could think of, though it totally pissed her off that she couldn’t put him completely out of her mind.

“I don’t know what’s wrong,” Chad said, darting an anxious look at the closed tent on the far end. “I know he likes to hunt, he talks about it all the time. I really enjoyed going out with you last time, and I thought, well, I had no idea he’d be …” He let his sentence trail off, evidently not wanting to call his client a bastard.

“Not your fault, Chad,” Angie said honestly. She smiled at him, trying to ease his discomfort. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and both of you will bag a bear tomorrow. I don’t think anyone would mind if this trip ends early.”

Chad shrugged. “If he gets a bear, I’ll be happy to call the hunt done. I mean, I have my permit for a bear, but I’m really not much of a hunter. I just don’t get into it.”

That was kind of sad, that he forced himself to go on this kind of a trip with a man who seemed bent on making everyone around him miserable.

“Then why don’t you take it easy the rest of the day,” she said, thinking of his sore muscles, “while I see what I can find.”

A relieved expression chased across his face before he blinked and said, “But isn’t that dangerous, going out on your own?”

“Dangerous enough, but I’m armed, and I have the bear spray.” She thought about saddling up the roan and riding it, but the idea was to not spook any nearby bear. Besides, she wasn’t going that far, and the horses needed a rest. The trail was rough and mostly uphill, and the brush was thick where she needed to go. She felt her stomach draw up tight at the idea of going in alone, but she’d done it before when she scouted up here. All she wanted was to find some fresh bear scat, then she’d quietly and quickly retreat, and tomorrow they’d go hunting.

Breathe
.