Extinction by Bradley Somer

Author:Bradley Somer [Somer, Bradley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2022-06-23T17:00:00+00:00

11

Ben hits a rhythm and surrenders to it. His breathing, his heartbeat, the one-two crackle of gravel under his feet tick off the time that he quickly loses track of. His eyes stay locked on the rail ties; his gait is short-step, awkward from trying to land on the ties and not twist an ankle between them. He tries running along the ballast slope for a while, but the footing is uncertain. The gravel rolls away without warning and there are too many deep ruts and gullies.

Running becomes animal movement; the repetitive motion, the meter of his breathing, his muscles working on automatic, all driven by purpose and not thought. He feels he could move like this forever.

Ben thinks of the bear. There were two beeps at Poppy’s cabin, and it was somewhere to the north, somewhere around where he is right now. His focus becomes unsettled, glancing over his shoulder at intervals, constantly scanning the trees for the beast, his charge.

In tracking the bear, Ben always tries to remain in proximity but out of sight. He likes to think the bear prefers that as well. Surely, it is aware of him in the area, the bear’s nose filling in for the deficiencies of his vision. They smell each other. They hear each other moving through the bush. They spot each other periodically, and on those instances, they travel in parallel lines with a wary eye kept on one another.

It makes sense that the bear is around the old mine; Ben chastises himself for not thinking of it sooner. The tracker has been telling him what he should have already known. It’s fall and the bear is preparing to hibernate. The ground around the old mine is riffled and wrecked. Berries love the sunshine and the disturbed earth. The old buildings and abandoned equipment are perfect for rats and cockroaches. Ben has seen the bear there in the past, moving between the abandoned structures and rooting out both, kicking through the dry tufts of grass with his rolling gait. The bear scrounged and huffed around the buildings for hours.

When evening settled, the bear skirted the open pit, grazing on berry bushes mostly long past their prime harvest, but still vital calories for the massive beast. Ben perched on a slag pile and watched. The long light cast a shadow bear at the creature’s feet, and Ben remembers imagining there were still two of them.

The bear knew Ben was there, it had turned his way several times during the day, swaying and lifting its nose to read the scent of him. It grazed through the twilit hours, then stepped into the dark wood lining the pit and was gone. And as easy as it was to imagine the bear and its shadow were two, Ben imagined the hollow forest without even one.

Ben cuts a step short to land on an angled tie tilting up from the ballast. The plank shifts like a seesaw and thumps in his passing. Somewhere in the bush, water burbles over a stone.

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