Refresh, Refresh: Stories (30 page)
I was just out of its reach, but not so far that I couldn’t feel the air move, displaced by its claws. It wrestled with the rope a moment, like a dog bothered by a leash, then returned its attention to me. A low growl rumbled from deep in its throat. I could feel its eyes, like two heavy weights, on me. It was hungry. And I imagined what its jaws would feel like working around my skull, or through my belly, my flesh sinking into the dark oblivion of its stomach.
We stayed like this for a time, looking at each other, each afraid and hateful. Minutes passed and the stars wheeled above us and I slowly brought my shotgun down from my shoulder and held it before me. “I should kill you,” I said, a gentle sort of loathing in my voice. “You son of a bitch, I should kill you dead.”
I could feel the blood pounding through my heart and I could hear the air filling and emptying its lungs. I tried to breathe with the bear and soon our breathing fell into a rhythm where our lungs worked in perfect time with the wind, with the shifting of the branches and shadows. It was as if a rhythm had been beating all along, the rhythm of the land, and finally I had found it, here in the peace of the dark woods, with only one slug and twenty feet of rope between me and absolution.
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