Chapter 2

I ate lunch before venturing outside. I took Joe at his word and wore my new pistol. In a way, I might have been more comfortable with a rifle, more because of habit than any idea that I would really need a weapon. After all, people lived around here, so there shouldn’t be much in the way of dangerous animals. Man, did I have a lot to learn. Joe was right to give me some time to acclimate!

I had been walking for about an hour. Mostly, I was enjoying the scenery and trying not to get lost, but I was watching and listening for anything unusual that might show up in the neighborhood. In my wandering, I came to a small river; I assumed that it was a tributary to the Columbia, but I was not really sure. That didn’t make much real difference—a river was a river.

Anyway, I had walked a few hundred yards downstream when I heard some women screaming. I had never considered myself much of a hero back in my past life, but these women sounded like they were in serious trouble, so I broke into a run to try to be of as much assistance as I could. I came around a bend in the river and spotted five women standing in the water. Facing them from the bank was the biggest damned brown bear that I had ever seen in any zoo. I didn’t know if it was a grizzly or not, but it sure was big enough to my eyes.

Obviously, the bear had to be dangerous from the way the women were acting. Hell, they lived around here, so they must know what to be afraid of and what to ignore. Well, let me tell you, they were not ignoring that bear! I had no idea why the bear would be interested in the human women, but it was now splashing through the water toward them at a fairly rapid pace.

It suddenly dawned on me that I wasn’t going to accomplish a damned thing by trying to scare the bear away from the women. I either had to kill the bear or let it attack the women. I pulled out my pistol and quickly selected “B” and up arrow. I wasn’t going to fool around!

I used both hands to steady my aim and fired three shots into the bear’s back. I have no idea if all three shots were necessary, but I will say that bear stopped where it was and fell dead just before it reached the first of the women.

There was no problem with getting the attention of the women. They heard the shots, and Man, were they loud! Even in the open, the shots reverberated up and down the valley. Well, that was beside the point. I ran up to where the women were still thrashing about in the water and asked the nearest one if anybody was hurt.

Naturally, I spoke in English and the woman did not understand me. However, she began to rattle off a string of sentences and my translation device started working before she finished her first hysterical paragraph. She just kept going, with words pouring out of her with the force of pure panic. At least, I now had enough for the translator to work when I shouted for her to shut up in the Klickitat language.

I had to yell at her two more times before she would quiet down. I didn’t want to slap her face, but I wondered if that would be necessary to get her attention. By this time, the other women came up to me, and I asked another one if anyone was hurt. This time I got a less panicked answer, and she said that nobody was hurt, thanks to me and my powerful magic.

I had no opportunity to argue that magic thing because about 10 or so men came running up, brandishing spears and clubs. They shouted questions, mostly of the nature of what the Hell had frightened them so. The women pointed to the dead bear in the river. It was so damned big that its back stuck out of the water a good foot. I was sure that meant that it was at least five feet in diameter. To me, that was a biiiiig bear!

There was an appalled silence for a minute or so, then one of the men asked who and what had killed it. The women all started jabbering at once that I had killed it with my powerful magic. It was hard to understand them, not because of some failure of my translator, but from the fact that they were all talking at once. Finally, the women ran down, and the spokesman said to me, “You must be a very powerful wizard to be able to kill such a large bear without ever getting close to it.”

I started to deny that I was any kind of wizard, but I had a change of heart and went along with the idea of magic. I remembered something Arthur C. Clarke was once supposed to have said, “Any science sufficiently advanced is going to look like magic.” Taking that into consideration, I decided to go along with the easy answer. Instead of arguing, I smiled a deprecating smile and agreed with the Indian. That was enough for him, and he started giving instructions on getting the bear’s carcass from the river.

Some men worked on getting the bear to shore while two other men ran back to the village to fetch a large travois. When the bear was finally on shore, the spokesman asked me what I wanted to do with “my” bear. Hell, I was stumped for a moment, then I said that I wanted the head and the skin, but the Indians could have the bear for food if they wanted it.

Apparently that was exactly the right thing to say. The women immediately started skinning the bear while the men sat around giving advice which it looked to me like the women ignored. When the job was done, and that took about 90 minutes, the skin was laid out on the travois, and chunks of bear meat were carved from the carcass and tossed onto the skin. By the time the bear was carved up, there was one hell of a pile of meat on the travois. At that point, everybody, including the women and me, pitched in to drag the travois to the village.

When we got to the village, the meat was laid out on a large leather mat and some women began cutting it into more manageable pieces while others started working on a cooking fire. They had a bed of coals in what I considered record time and the great cookout was begun. Something that I thought looked like a monster potato was wrapped in wet leaves and laid next to the coals. It looked like the point was to cook the vegetable by steaming it. A lot of these were prepared, so there should be enough for everyone to have his or her own vegetable, whatever it was.

When the meat was cooking, but there was very little other activity, I asked one of the women from the river why they had not climbed out of the river and run away. Her answer made so much sense that I wanted to kick myself for my ignorance. They had stayed in the water because they had a chance to outrun the bear there, but they had no chance if they had tried to run away on dry land. The had no adequate weapons with them with which to fight the bear, so all they could do was to scream for help and try to stay out of the bear’s reach. She knew no more than I did why the bear was after them—maybe the bear was crazy!

The bear meat and the vegetables were distributed by the women. I guessed that the men were served by their wives, but I had nobody so I wondered what I should do. I was answered when one of the women from the river brought me some food and sat with me while I ate. I got the impression that she was to fetch more meat if I wanted it.

Another woman came around with a leather bag full of something that the men drank. I was served first in a gourd cup, but I waited a little bit before I drank. My hostess asked why I was not drinking. I answered that, in my tribe, it was polite to wait until everybody was served before consuming the drink. She nodded, but she looked at me kind of funny.

Eventually, I had no choice but to try the liquid. I don’t know what it was, but it sure seemed to me to be an excellent substitute for paint stripper! I managed to get down one cup of the drink, but after that I was too busy eating to have time to drink any more. My hostess caught on to what I was doing and half smiled, but she did not give me away.

Following the meal, there was a session of storytelling. Since I was the guest of honor, someone else stood up to tell the story of me killing the bear. He must have talked to the women about the event because he gave a reasonably accurate description of it. However, he spent nearly an hour embellishing ever move that anyone made, and he had me chanting a magic charm while I dispatched the bear with three mighty strokes of lightning and thunder. At that point, I was glad that I had used the noisy setting on my gun because, otherwise, the speaker would have had trouble finding an explanation for me killing the bear. This way, everybody knew about the way I had captured the forces of the heavens to rescue the five women. There was no question that I was a hero, and later on I found out what my reward would be.