Chloe Carter's Arc

Chapter 6 of 12

The sedan crept forward until the headlights held the shape in full. A black bear. It sat in the middle of the switchback, hunched on its haunches, one shoulder raw and pink where the fur was gone. Blood had dried in a crust down its side. It looked at the car and did not move. Chloe stopped ten feet short. She kept her foot on the brake. The switchback narrowed here, cliff on the left, cut bank on the right. She could not go around. She could not back up on the ice without sliding. She watched the bear breathe. Every breath came slow and heavy. It was hurt and it was not leaving. Behind it, the road bent down and out of sight. She did not know what waited past the turn. She had never driven this far. The main road switchbacked all the way to the highway. There was also a logging road that branched off somewhere below, if she remembered the map right. One of them ended at pavement. The other ended at nothing. She pressed her palms to her eyes. The tears came first, hot and quick. She let them. Then she found the anger under them and held on to it. Anger was useful. Anger drove. She picked up the knife from her thigh. She rolled the window down two inches. Cold air knifed in. She laid on the horn. The bear flinched. Its head swung up. She hit the horn again and held it. The sound bounced off the rock wall and came back doubled. The bear pushed itself up on three legs, the wounded shoulder held clear. It stared at the car for a long second. Then it turned and limped down the road, into the bend, and was gone. Chloe waited until her hands stopped shaking. She eased off the brake. The sedan crawled around the switchback. Below the turn the road forked. She had forgotten about the fork. The left branch was plowed once, maybe, and dropped away in clean grades toward the valley. The right branch was a rutted cut through the pines, wheel tracks filled with old snow, the shoulders sagging. A logging road. She could not see either one to its end. She did not know which fed the highway. She stopped the car at the split. The bear's blood spotted the snow to the left. It had chosen the plowed grade. Something about that made her stomach turn. She thought of a hurt animal picking the easy path because it could not manage the hard one. She turned the wheel right. The sedan rolled onto the logging road. The tires dropped into a rut and held. Branches scraped the paint. She kept her foot light and her eyes on the tracks ahead. A quarter mile in, the ruts ended at a wall of snow packed shoulder high across the road. A drift. No way through. No room to turn around.