I cursed my contrary id and looked up at the sky. It was getting darker much earlier these days. I wondered what it would be like in a few months, having just a few hours of sunlight each day. But I wasn’t uneasy now. The verdant jungle surrounding my hometown had always seemed so forbidding, with a constant, threatening undercurrent of man-eating mosquitoes and water moccasins, not to mention the occasional alligator. Here, I felt welcomed by the fragrant green, the cool, deep shadows. But as enchanted as I was, I knew that I didn’t need to be this far from my cabin after dark, bear mace or no bear mace.
“Time to go back to the house, Oscar. Come on, buddy,” I called. Oscar, who seemed to see leashing as some sort of personal insult, took two steps toward me, then suddenly turned as fast as his chubby little legs would carry him and took off into the trees.
“Oscar, no!” I cried as he began barking frantically.
I chased after him, slowed by thick branches and underbrush.
“Oscar!” I yelled after the echoing barks. I muttered to myself, “This is not a smart thing, Mo, following a tiny canine canapé into the woods when there’s a bloodthirsty wolf on the loose. Why not just rub yourself in meat tenderizer and put an apple in your mouth?”
I thought about turning around and letting Oscar find his way home. Clearly, he could get through the brush easier than I could. And he could smell a predator coming, couldn’t he? He’d be able to run. But the thought of him alone and defenseless, in his silly little doggie sweater, kept pushing me forward.
I could see a clearing ahead, the branches thinned in the dimming light. Oscar seemed to have stopped, because his growls and yaps were staying in one place. I jogged ahead, trying to remember if there were skunks this far north, because I was not prepared to destink a dachshund. I pushed through the last barrier of branches. “Dang it, Oscar—” And that’s when I heard the roar.
I skidded to a stop and landed on my butt as my legs flew out from under me. The grizzly bear, already agitated by the yapping dog, reared up on its legs, standing a full eight feet tall. That thing was bigger than my first car! The sheer size of it was enough to make my primal brain scurry to a corner of my skull and whimper in the fetal position. In the rational part of my brain, I knew I had Alan’s bear mace in my pocket, but I couldn’t seem to make my hands reach toward my jacket. My reactions were limited to screaming or wetting my pants.
I went with screaming.
I scrambled back, scraping my hands against the rocks and branches. The forest that had seemed a welcoming fairyland just a few minutes ago was now a living nightmare. How ironic was it that my nature-loving parents were going to be mourning a child who was eaten by nature?
The bear lurched back onto all fours. Its breath was hot and rank, sweeping across my face in damp puffs. My mouth went dry and slack as the animal barreled closer. The bear’s massive front paw drew back as if prepared to take a swipe at me. My brain seemed frozen, fixating on the obscenely long claws fanning out from the paw and wondering if there was a good place to be hit with them. The answer was a definite no. I flinched, throwing my arms over my head, waiting for the blow, and a lot of things seemed to happen at once.
The blow didn’t come. I opened my eyes to see wolf-Cooper, standing between the bear and me, his stance wide, defensive. The hair on his back was as bristled as a wire brush.
I felt a rush of gratitude for the idiosyncrasies of the human brain and its effort to protect me from bear snack-time horrors. In a last-ditch effort to dull the shock of growling, clawed death, my mind had produced a fantasy image of my furry savior. I was sure this last heroic image would be a small comfort to me as I made my way though Not-So-Gentle Ben’s digestive tract.
The wolf growled, a low baritone over Oscar’s panicked staccato barks. I shook my head, rattling brain cells back into their proper orbit. Wolf-Cooper was real.
Oscar, who apparently didn’t want to be outdone in the canine bravado department, lunged at the bear’s front leg, sinking his little teeth in. The bear roared and flicked Oscar away with a shake of his paw. Oscar yelped, and his small body landed inches from me. I scooped him up and kept him in my lap as he strained to get back into the fray.
The bear advanced, eliciting a snarl from the wolf. The bear attempted to circle right, pushing the wolf counterclockwise, away from me. But the wolf stood his ground, advancing against the bear’s charge. The bear attempted a left-hand strike, which earned it a nip on the nose from the wolf. The wolf backed up, his long tail swishing against my feet as he moved into a defensive crouch and let out a vicious snarl.
The bear reared up again and gave a roar that had my ears ringing. When this display of ursine testosterone failed to chase Cooper away, the bear dropped to all fours and huffed at me, a sort of ‘you can eat her, she’s not worth it’ gesture. Sure that it had made its point as the loudest, meanest, biggest animal in the clearing, the bear sauntered off.
I let out a long, trembling breath, burying my face in Oscar’s sweater.
Cooper phased back to human. He was naked, sweaty, and quite angry. Hmm.
When I was no longer paralyzed by fear and the blood was circulating properly in my brain again, I was going to evaluate what it said about me as a person that I had some strange kind of relationship with a man I didn’t particularly like, in which he was naked at least half of the time we spent together. And I didn’t seem to be bothered by it. I really had to have sex sometime soon.
“Are you out of your mind?” he shouted as I hesitantly pushed myself to my feet. The relief I felt finally allowed my brain to process what had just happened. A cold chill swept through my body, and I had to brace my hands against my knees to stay upright.
“Give me a minute,” I wheezed, holding up one hand.
“Do you realize what could have just happened to you? What is wrong with you? Do you enjoy putting yourself in harm’s way?” Cooper’s hands clamped around my arms and gave me the slightest shake.
“Which question do you want me to answer first, Cooper?” I asked, my voice uncharacteristically calm. I broke eye contact and looked down, and we both realized exactly how unclothed he was. Cooper stepped away, and his arms dropped to his sides. Now that the angry red had faded from his cheeks, he seemed embarrassed by his outburst.
“I was walking Oscar. He got away from me,” I said. “If I’d known there was a bear, I would have run in the opposite direction, trust me. I don’t have any death wishes or adrenaline addictions that I’m aware of. Here lately, I seem to find myself in the very wrong place at the very wrong time. What are you doing out here, anyway?”
Cooper flushed again. “I can change anytime I want, but the urge to do it is a little stronger during the full moon.” Cooper gestured to the faintly glowing orb rising in the distance. “When the urge to phase is this strong, I usually end up hunting.”
“So close to my house?”
“You’ve been throwing bread crusts and scraps out in your backyard for the birds, right?”
I nodded.
“Well, you might want to stop,” he said. “Free food attracts all kinds of animals. Squirrels, foxes, elk. There’s a particularly lazy family of rabbits that cuts through your yard every night, scarfs up the buffet, and heads to that stream,” he said, nodding through the clearing. Now that the blood was no longer roaring in my ears, I could actually hear the musical splashing of water over rocks. “Smaller animals attract larger predators.”
“Such as yourself.”
“Or bears, which you seem to think will be chased off by whimpering and screaming.”
“Hmph,” I snorted, not quite convinced. “Well, do me a favor. Don’t snack on your prey on my front lawn. It disturbs my sleep.”
Cooper’s brow creased. “What do you mean?”
“My first night in town, you brought down an elk right outside my front door. Scared the crap out of me. Of course, at the time, I thought you were a real wolf, not a Cooper wolf. Not that there’s a whole lot of difference.” Cooper’s stare was blank and embarrassed. I asked, “You don’t remember any of this?”
He shrugged. “I don’t remember everything I do when I’m a wolf. It’s sort of like dreaming. You remember bits and pieces but not everything. My grandfather says it’s the weak human mind’s way of protecting us from remembering the less pleasant aspects of wolf life, like eating raw meat. Some wolves are better at keeping a clear picture, though. It helps if you run with a pack. Some say it’s like having a collective memory. My cousin Samson says it’s like having a bunch of frat brothers ready and willing to remind you of the stupid things you did when you were blackout drunk.”
That explained a lot, particularly his uncertainty about whether he’d attacked Susie. And he didn’t remember helping me in the alley, because it hadn’t been important enough to remember. Or he did remember and didn’t think it was important enough to mention. Somehow I was glad he couldn’t guess how much either option hurt me.
“Are you OK?” he asked, his voice soft as he stared at the ground. “You’re not hurt or anything?”
“I’m a little shaken up, and I’m never going to be able to hear ‘Teddy Bear Picnic’ without flashbacks, but physically, I’m fine.”
“Good,” he said, clearing his throat. “I don’t want anything to happen to you, Mo. I—people around here couldn’t stand that.”
I shrugged it off, as if I hadn’t noticed that sentence had started with “I” before he tacked on “people.”
“It’s my pancakes,” I told him solemnly. “They inspire loyalty.”
“Stop that. Stop making jokes when I’m talking about you getting hurt,” he said, looking me in the eye now as his fingers wrapped around my arm, pulling me closer. The warmth of his hand burned through my clothes and traveled up my arm. “You have to—nothing can happen to you, do you hear me? You have to take care of yourself.”
My brow furrowed at his sudden shift in demeanor. “OK, I’m sorry.”
“Promise me,” he insisted, the timber of his voice lowering to a rumble that vibrated through my chest. “Promise me you won’t take risks like this again. That you’ll stay inside at night, where it’s safe.”
His mouth was close, his breath gliding over my cheek like a caress. The heat of it, the intensity, had me dizzy. Everything around me was fluid motion and bleeding color. But Cooper remained still and constant.
“Promise,” he whispered huskily.
“I promise, Cooper,” I said, reluctantly pulling away from him. The loss of contact seemed to sober him. He straightened, his face smoothing out from the worried lines that creased it. He reached down to pat Oscar. My little sausage-shaped buddy shied away from contact with the recognized top dog.
Cooper sighed. “Let’s get you and Oscar home.”