Page 13 of The Boy Who Cried Bear
We’ll deal with this later. Gunnar shouldn’t have come into the forest after we forbade it. In fact, at the meeting he said he wasn’t going back in the forest until we killed the bear.
The last time he followed someone in, he got shot, which apparently didn’t teach him a lesson. He should have told Anders what he saw and let Anders find us. But Gunnar is a grown man who knows the risk he’s taking. How much do I want to argue about him coming to warn us instead of taking time to find Anders first?
I’ll need to think about that. For now, judging by the shouts and snarls, Dalton has run Louie to ground.
“Get off me, asshole,” Louie is saying.
“I’m pinning you down because you have a goddamn butcher knife in your hand.”
“It’s not a butcher knife. It’s a hunting knife.”
As we catch up, Dalton starts to spin, gun rising, and I realize I forgot an important piece of information.
“Gunnar’s with me,” I quickly call. “He followed Louie.”
“Holy shit, that is not a hunting knife,” Gunnar says. “That belongs to Mathias.”
“It’s for hunting,” Louie says. “For field-dressing game.”
“You actually took one of Mathias’s knives?” Gunnar says as I pluck it from Louie’s fingers. “Hoo, boy. No need to punish him, guys. Just make him take that back to Mathias and admit what he did.”
Louie snorts. “The guy is a gray-haired old shrink. I’m not concerned.”
“Then you, my friend, are an epically shitty judge of character. How do you think he got so good at butchering?” Gunnar leans down toward Louie, prone on the ground under Dalton’s boot. “Disposing of his victims.”
Louie twists his head toward us and rolls his eyes.
“Enough,” I say. “Yes, that is Mathias’s knife, and yes, you are telling him you took it, but that is secondary to the real issue.”
“Wanna tell us what you’re doing out here?” Dalton says.
“Let me up, and I will,” Louie says.
“Talk, and I will. Maybe.”
“You don’t scare me any more than that French guy. I’d like to see how tough you are without that gun.”
Dalton cocks his head. “Really?”
Gunnar snickers. “Nah, I don’t think you do. You weren’t here last month, when we held wrestling matches. Will Anders won, obviously. I thought I’d get second place. I didn’t even get third.”
“I’m guessing the point of this story is to tell me that the sheriff came in second. And third?”
Gunnar hooks a thumb at me.
“We’re not wrestling so you can decide whether I deserve your respect,” Dalton says. “As tempting as it would be to kick your ass right now, I’m told that’s wrong.” He slants a look at me. “Yes?”
“Sorry,” I say.
Dalton says to Louie, “I deserve your respect because you got on that plane and came out here and handed it to me, along with a fair number of your personal freedoms. It’s a trade. I protect you, because you agreed to let me do that. So you respect my authority. Whether you respect me or not is another matter, and I don’t give a shit about that. I just need you to listen to what I say, and if I say stay out of the fucking forest? You stay out of the fucking forest.”
“Please tell me you weren’t going after a grizzly with a knife,” I say.
When Louie doesn’t answer, Dalton nudges him with his boot. “You were out here looking for that bear, right?”
“What else?”
Dalton and I exchange a look. What else indeed.
