The High Rocks by Loren D. Estleman Page B

Then I felt nothing whatsoever.
    Half-formed images chased each other endlessly through my head. Now I was suspended in mid-air, my head, arms, and legs dangling while some unseen force bore me upward over uneven ground to where the air grew thin and sharp as flying thorns. Next I was lifted even higher and transported from pale moonlight to abysmal darkness, where small furry things with membranous wings fluttered about me, brushing my face with feathery strokes. In the next moment I was pitched like a sack of grain to the earth. After that there was a long stretch of nothing until I awoke with heat on my face.
    The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was flame. I drew back in panic, pain shooting through my abused joints, only to find to my relief that I was lying on my side and looking into nothing more dangerous than a campfire, consuming a small pile of wood a foot in front of my face. Around me, the warm light cast by the fire rippled over stone and splashed weird, writhing shadows over walls and ceiling tinted orange by the glow. Beyond the flame
was a black void. I was in a cave or tunnel of some sort, and I was not alone.
    In the entrance, two eyes glowed eerily green in the reflected light of the fire. As I watched them a chunk of wood rolled off the top of the pile and crashed into the heart of the flames, sending up a spurt of yellow and illuminating the opening. I found myself staring into a narrow face with a coalblack muzzle and mouth parted to reveal two rows of sharp, curving teeth separated by a dripping tongue. Amber eyes with black slits in their centers studied me as if in fascination. One pointed ear, the muscles of which had been torn in some long-forgotten fight, refused to stand up like its mate, and so hung sullenly almost to the corner of the jaw. Beyond this was a bushy neck, a deep chest tapering to a visible ribcage, and two powerfully bowed forelegs covered with matted gray fur. The wolf was in view but an instant, and then the flare died and only the glowing eyes remained.
    There was a roar in the cave. Something buzzed past my right ear. I heard a yelp and then the thudding sound of feet fading into the distance. A thin stream of dust, dislodged from the cave’s ceiling, settled onto my head and down inside my collar. I rolled over onto my right side. In the gloom at the back of the cave, Bear Anderson sat upon a flat rock with a Spencer in his hands, a plume of white smoke twisting out of the barrel.

    â€œJust nicked him,” he said, more to himself than to me. “That won’t make the old bastard any easier to handle after this.”
    â€œYou talk like you know him,” I said. My voice sounded strange in the comparative silence that followed the shot’s echo.
    â€œOught to. Two years ago he and his pack cost me the best horse I ever had. We go back a long way together, Old Lop Ear and me.” He fished a fresh cartridge out of his pants pocket—he had doffed the bearskin—and reloaded, jacking a shell into the chamber to replace the one he had fired. He grunted with the effort. That′s when I noticed the dark stain on his buckskin shirt along his left side.
    â€œHow bad is it?” I asked, nodding toward the wound.
    â€œJust a graze.” He laid the Spencer on the stone floor by his feet and sat gripping his knees in his enormous hands. “Bullet scraped around the ribs and got stuck in back. Can’t reach it, but it ain’t doing me no harm. I’m letting it bleed out some before I try to dress it. How you feeling?”
    â€œSore.” I placed a tentative fingertip against the back of my head. It still throbbed, but the cut had ceased to bleed a long time ago. I unwound the bandage and cast it into a dark corner of the cave. Cold air stabbed at the wound. “What I’m wondering about is how come I’m still alive.”
    He grinned, lighting up his end of the cave. “Not because of anything you did,” he