Something in the Deep Woods Was Using a Dead Deer as Bait

A man I used to work with tells people I killed a bear with a dump truck. He wasn't there, but he's told it enough times that he started adding things, including a part where I supposedly backed over it to make sure. Usually there's a laugh at the end. I let him tell it for a long time because his version was easier to live with than what actually happened. Then he told it in front of the woman who'd been in the truck with me, and she left without finishing her dinner. I haven't let him tell it since. This happened in the upper peninsula of Michigan, north of Rapid River, during the second week of October. I was 43, and driving for a small gravel outfit my brother owned. We'd both worked for our father, although my brother had inherited the willingness to argue with customers, and I'd inherited the ability to sit in a truck for 10 hours without needing much company. That arrangement worked pretty well. He found the jobs, and I hauled whatever somebody was willing to pay us to move. Most of our work that fall was on private roads running off the public roads through the forest. A group of property owners had pooled their money to fix several miles of access road before winter. There were hunting places back there, a couple of year-round homes closer to the pavement, and stretches where you could drive a long way, without seeing anything a person had built besides the road itself. We'd been on that job for nearly three weeks. I knew the bad corners, the soft shoulders, and where to pull over if another truck came the other way. I didn't need directions to get out. The truck was an old tandem axle dump with a white cab, a three-person bench seat, and a red steel body. The hoist was underneath the box, rather than in the gap directly behind the cab. It wasn't pretty, but it was maintained. I'm pointing that out, because every time somebody hears part of this story, they assume I went into the woods in something that was already falling apart. The tires were good, the lights worked, the doors closed properly. Earlier that afternoon, I'd had my brother fix the little latch on the driver's vent window, because cold air was coming through it. That was the sort of problem the truck had when the day started. We were finishing a short section near the far end of the job, when a hose let go on the machine spreading the material. There wasn't enough daylight left to get it repaired, and the ground where my last load was supposed to go was too soft to leave a pile on. My brother told me to bring the remaining stone back to our temporary stockpile near the other end of the road. Somebody could spread it there in the morning. I had around six tons left, less than a full load, and enough fuel to get home several times over. We spent another half hour getting the disabled machine clear of the road, and securing it for the night. The other two men headed out while I stayed to clean up. A bucket of grease had tipped in the tool compartment on the spreading machine, and I wasn't leaving it that way overnight. That sounds like a stupid reason to be the last one out. At the time, it was 15 minutes of unpleasant work that would save an hour in the morning. I wiped down the tools, covered what needed covering, and put the used rags in the waste bucket. When I ate the other half of a sandwich I'd meant to finish at lunch. It was a little after eight when I started toward the stockpile. Full dark, dry road, no fog. There had been rain two days earlier, so the low places beside the road still held water, but I wasn't sliding around or struggling to see. I was wearing a light jacket, with my heavier work coat on the seat beside me, and an empty coffee cup rolling against the passenger door. My wife had made a pot of chili, and the only thing I was concerned about was whether there would be any bread left by the time I got home. About a mile from where we'd been working, I came around a bend and found a deer across the road. It was a doe, lying on its side across the road with its legs toward the left ditch. Part of the belly was turned upward, and I could see the pale underside of its neck. I slowed down well before I reached it. There wasn't any movement, and the way one rear leg lay across the other suggested it was dead. The animal took up most of the center of the road, but there was room to get around on my right if I put the passenger side tires close to the ditch. I stopped short of it for a few seconds. I wasn't planning to get out. We had a shovel on the truck, but a dead deer isn't something you casually move with a shovel, and I wasn't interested in getting blood on my clothes over something that could wait until morning. I checked the right shoulder in the headlights, picked a line and started around. That's when the front of the deer moved, not the legs. The whole front half slid about a foot toward the ditch on my left. The head turned under the neck, and the body stopped. I hit the brakes because I thought I'd been wrong, and it was still alive. The cab settled forward. For a moment, all I could see was the deer and a strip of gravel behind it. Then something pale closed around the deer's front ankle. It came from below the edge of the road, where the left ditch dropped away. I saw a thick length of bare skin, a bend that might have been a wrist, and several blunt ends pressed around the leg. The deer slid another few inches. Whatever had hold of it stayed low enough that I couldn't see the rest. I put my foot down and went around on the right. I thought, "Bare." There are other animals that will feed on a deer, but a bear was the first thing that came to mind when I saw the body move. The part that bothered me was how light the limb had looked, and the way it had closed around the ankle. I decided I'd caught a view of the underside of a paw. Headlights can make a wet surface look different from what it is. I had several miles of rough road ahead of me, and I wasn't going to spend them trying to identify an animal from a second's worth of bad information. Just a quarter mile later, a woman ran into my headlights with both hands over her head. She came up from the bank on my left, and crossed the road in front of the truck. One she was missing, and she was wearing a light-colored sweater with something dark all over the front. I stopped far enough away that she had room to move. She didn't come to my door. She went straight to the passenger side, climbed onto the lower step, and pulled the handle three or four times before I got the lock up. When I opened it, she grabbed the seat with both hands, and tried to get in. She couldn't bring her right leg high enough. I leaned across, took hold of the back of her sweater, and helped her over the edge. She fell onto the bench seat, and immediately reached behind her to pull the door shut. Her name was Sandra. I didn't learn that until later. At that point, she was trying to speak without enough air, and I could only understand individual words. I was a husband, car, down there. I set the parking brake. Her forehead was cut, and her right foot had a dark sock on it that was wet through. She kept looking past me at the driver's window, then at the back of the cab. When I asked if somebody had heard her, she shook her head, but she wasn't answering my question. She was trying to get me to look where she was pointing. There was a narrow driveway on the right, about 30 yards ahead. I'd used it to turn around earlier in the week. Across from its entrance on the left side of the road, the ground dropped down a bank into a patch of brush. I could make out one red light well below road level. Sandra got enough breath to tell me that their car had gone down there, and her husband was still inside. I took my phone out and tried an emergency call. It wouldn't connect. I tried once more while Sandra pointed out the car, with the same result. Someone had been bad there throughout the job, and I knew I could usually make a call once I reached the pavement, but that was several miles away. I told her we'd get her husband into the truck and drive out together. She caught my sleeve when I reached for the door. Don't go around the back of it. I thought she meant the car was unstable. I asked if it might roll farther, and she shook her head hard enough to make the cut on her forehead start bleeding again. Then she said there was an animal near it. I remembered the deer. I also had a woman in my truck telling me her husband was trapped in a crashed car. There wasn't an easy version of what I needed to do. I took the long tire bar from behind my seat, and the flashlight I kept in the door pocket. Before I got out, I moved the truck forward until the car was below, and a little ahead of my driver's door. I set the brake again. The tires stayed on the hard part of the road, and the headlights reached the broken brush at the top of the bank. I left the engine running and turned on the work lights behind the cab. Those lights lit the sides of the dump body and a good part of the road. They didn't reach far down the bank, but I wanted as much light as I could get. Sandra wanted to come with me. I told her to slide into my seat, keep the doors shut, and sound the horn if she saw anything. The fire extinguisher was clipped beside that seat, and I pointed it out before I shut the door. She nodded, although she kept trying to tell me something about her husband having stopped. I said she could tell me once we had him up there. I've gone over that interruption more times than I'd like to admit. At the time, a man was hurt, and I was wasting time standing beside a running truck. The car was a dark green crossover, nose down against a tree, with the driver's side higher than the passenger's side. It hadn't rolled over, but it had gone down at an angle that left the right front corner crushed, and the left rear wheel off the ground. The driver's door stood open against the rising bank. A strip of the rear bumper lay halfway up the slope. I called to the man before I started down. He answered right away. That helped. It meant I wasn't going to spend the next minute wondering whether I was walking towards somebody who was already dead. His name was Owen. He was in the driver's seat, held sideways by the belt, with both feet down near the pedals. He was conscious, and knew where he was. When I asked what hurt, he said his left leg, and the left side of his chest. He couldn't put weight on the leg. He had a short gray beard and a dark jacket, and there was blood on his chin that appeared to have come from his mouth. I swept the flashlight around the car before approaching. I saw broken brush, pale strips of bark on the tree they'd hit, and a shallow run of water farther down. Nothing moved. I couldn't see much beyond the passenger side because of the angle of the car, but I didn't hear an animal feeding or struggling in the brush. The only loud thing was my truck idling above us. I put the bar within reach on the high side of the car, and leaned in through the driver's door. The belt was holding some of Owen's weight, and the latch wouldn't release with him hanging against it. I told him I'd have to lift him a little, which was going to hurt. He gripped the top of the steering wheel and helped as much as he could. The buckle came loose, and he made a low strained sound when his weight shifted onto the seat. He didn't ask about Sandra. He could see her through the truck window above us. What he asked was whether I'd seen a deer. I said I had. Farther back. He grabbed my wrist so hard that I looked down at his hand. It was here. Then Sandra leaned on the horn. I straightened up and turned toward the road. Sandra was still in the driver's seat, holding the horn with one hand and pointing out my window with the other. I had to move the flashlight because it was still aimed into the car. As the beam passed across the rear window of the car, something pale rose on the far side. At first I couldn't understand how it was standing there. The ground was lower on that side of the car, and what I was seeing was level with the roof. Then a four limb came over the top, and I realized it had climbed onto the crushed front corner. The limb was thick near the body and narrow below the joint. There were patches of dark hair on it, but most of the skin was bare and gray. The end spread against the roof, with separate blunt digits. I could see dirt in the creases. One of them hooked over the edge above the passenger door while the others stayed flat on the metal. The head came up behind it. I don't have a neat description for that face. It was broad through the jaw, with small ears set close against the sides, and almost no hair around the mouth. The lips had drawn back or been worn away enough that I could see teeth even before it opened its mouth. One eye reflected the flashlight. The other side looked swollen shut. It was an animal's face, but the front of it looked too flat to belong to the animal I was trying to make it into. It didn't look at the light. It looked at my hand on Owen's arm. Then it came across the roof. I shoved Owen back into the driver's seat and pulled the door toward us. The animal landed against the outside before I had it shut. The impact drove the edge of the door against my upper arm. Something struck the outside of the window hard enough to cover it in white cracks. Owen was trying to move away, but the console stopped him, and I was half in the car with one boot slipping on the wet ground. I still had the flashlight. The tire bar was outside against the rear tire, and I couldn't reach it without putting my head beyond the door. I pushed with my shoulder and yelled for Sandra to keep the horn going. I don't know if she heard the words. She kept it going anyway. The pressure disappeared. That was almost worse. I couldn't see where it had gone. I had a cracked window in front of my face, a man who couldn't stand behind me, and an open space between the bottom of the door and the ground where something could reach my legs. I looked through that space and saw it crouched beside the rear wheel. It had come down on our side of the car. Its body was low and heavy, with the shoulders higher than the rump. The front limbs bent under it, and one broad end rested on the gravel beside my tire bar. It had a torn place across the muzzle that showed darker flesh underneath. When it breathed out, I could smell meat that had been left warm too long. It was close enough to get me. I want that understood. If it had put its head around the door, there wasn't anything between its mouth and my thigh. Instead, it moved the limb nearest the bar, laid it across the steel, and drew the bar underneath itself. I watched that happen. I wasn't remembering it afterward and giving it more meaning. I watched it take the only useful thing I'd brought down there and move it out of my reach. Then a white cloud hit it from above. Sandra had come out of the truck with the fire extinguisher. The powder caught the side of its head, and it jerked backward. She was standing halfway down the bank, bracing her sock-covered foot against a root, with the nozzle pointed at the car. She kept spraying as it backed into the brush below us. I heard it strike something solid down there, either the other side of the car or the tree, and then the beam of my flashlight found only powder hanging above the ground. I didn't wait to see whether it was gone. I shoved the flashlight into my jacket pocket, got one arm around Owen, hooked my hand into the back of his belt, and dragged him out across the door opening. Sandra dropped the extinguisher when it stopped discharging and took his other side. His bad leg caught on the silt. He cried out once, and then went quiet in a way that worried me more than the cry had. Getting him up the bank took longer than the attack. I remember that clearly because every little delay seemed ridiculous. His coat caught on a broken branch. My boot slipped. Sandra lost her grip and had to get both hands under his armpit. We couldn't do anything quickly without dropping him. I kept expecting weight to hit us from behind. At the truck, I opened the driver's door, tossed the flashlight onto the bench, and climbed onto the step. Sandra pushed from below while I pulled Owen across my lap and onto the seat. He ended up in the middle, bent forward with his bad leg stretched across the passenger floor. There wasn't room for her to climb over him. She went around the front of the truck, where I could see her in the headlights, and got in on the passenger side. I didn't have the driver's door fully closed when something struck it. The handle slammed against my fingers. The door came back at me, and I threw my shoulder into it. Through the glass, I saw the top of the head and a wide patch of bare skin between the shoulders. It was standing on the lower step. One for limb had hooked inside the opening below my elbow. I trapped it with the door. For perhaps two seconds, we stayed that way. I had both hands on the pole handle and my back against Owen. The door wouldn't latch because the limb was in it. I could see the digits bending on the inside, feeling along the metal. The nails were short, thick, and split at the ends. There was a little rounded pad set back from the others that kept pressing against the door seal. Then it pulled free. I shut the door so hard that the inside panel came loose at the bottom. I pushed the lock down, got the truck into gear, and released the brake. Sandra yelled something as we moved. I couldn't understand it, and I couldn't look at her. The road curved within 50 yards, and I had to keep six tons of stone and an injured man out of the ditch. As we picked up speed, there was one heavy impact behind the cab. I thought we'd hit a low branch. Once we'd cleared the first corner, I pulled my seat belt across myself. For the next minute, all I did was drive. I kept it under 30 because the corners wouldn't allow much more than that, and because the truck wanted to keep going straight every time the road turned. Sandra was trying to get Owen upright enough to breathe. He had one hand pressed to his ribs, and the other locked around the front edge of the seat. I could hear him taking short breaths through his nose. I told her there were clean rags, and a first aid kit under her end of the bench. He couldn't get to them with his leg across the floor. I pulled my workcoat out from under him, and told her to fold it against his chest so he could hold himself steady. There wasn't much else we could do while moving. The blood on his chin had stopped, but he looked gray in the dash lights. Sandra said they were renting a place farther in. They'd gone out for dinner and were coming back when they found the deer. Owen had stopped because he thought it was hurt. He'd left the headlights on, taken a small flashlight, and gone around the front of their car. That was when the animal came up out of the. ditch. Sandra hadn't seen it approach. She'd seen her husband turn, then disappear below the hood. The car moved when his weight hit it. He got up somehow, made it back to the driver's door, and pulled it shut behind him. His left leg was already hurt. Sandra dragged his belt across him and fastened it while he tried to get that leg away from the pedals. He turned the wheel to leave, then hit the gas before he'd straightened it. The car went across the road and down the bank. I asked whether she'd seen what it did to his leg. She said no. Owen said it had caught him above the boot and pulled. He didn't say anything after that for a while. Sandra had climbed across him, opened the driver's door against the bank, and squeezed out. She'd gone up to the road to stop someone, but the first time she reached the top, she'd seen the animal near the front of the car. She'd dropped back down behind the open door. For a few minutes before she heard my truck, the animal had disappeared. She'd tried to get Owen out during that gap, but she couldn't lift him by herself. She thought they'd been down there for ten minutes. It might have been less. Neither of them had checked the time. I asked where the deer had been when they first stopped. She pointed back the way we'd come, although there was nothing to see except the road behind us. "Right at the driveway," she said. Its legs had been pointing toward their car. Owen had thought somebody else had hit it and kept going. The deer I'd driven around was well beyond that driveway, in the direction I'd come from. Not a few yards. Far enough that it took time to drive between the two places. I didn't say that aloud. I didn't want to give either of them another thing to be afraid of. I told myself there might have been two deer. I hadn't searched the road near their car. I'd gone straight down the bank. There could have been another body there, outside the part lit by my headlights. Then Owen asked Sandra if she still had his flashlight. She said she hadn't picked it up. He looked at her for a few seconds before turning toward me. His eyes were watering from the pain. Don't stop for anything else. We passed the entrance to one of the camps. There was a steel gate across the drive. And beyond it, I could see nothing that suggested somebody was home. I kept going. A locked, dark building in the woods wasn't a better place for us than a moving truck. There was a wider stretch ahead, with a short bend at the end. After that, we'd reach a straight section where I could get a little more speed. That was when I noticed something wrong with the passenger mirror. It hadn't broken. It was turned in toward the cab. Normally I could see the rear wheels and the road behind them. Now I had a view of part of the door and the side of the dump body. I thought Sandra might have caught it while climbing in, but the upper bracket was too high for that. She'd used the handhold below it. I glanced over again as we went through the turn. Something moved across the narrow strip of road still visible in the mirror. A patch of gray skin, close enough to cover the reflection, then the red side of the body again. I took my foot off the accelerator. Sandra saw me looking. Before I could say anything, a broad end with those same blunt digits came down over the top of her window. It held the rubber seal for a moment. Then it moved lower and flattened against the glass beside her face. She didn't scream. She pulled Owen toward me so hard that his shoulder hit my upper arm. His injured leg was still across her feet. He couldn't get away from that side of the cab, and she couldn't move without hurting him. The three of us were suddenly pressed together on the bench while the thing outside shifted its weight. The truck leaned a little to the right. I could hear metal bending above her door. The roof wasn't collapsing, but something was using the edge for support. The digits on the glass spread apart, and the head lowered until the one good eye was level with Sandra's. It had ridden out with us. I hit the brakes hard enough to lock my belt. Sandra had hers on too, but Owen's buckle was trapped beneath his hip. He pitched forward between us. Sandra caught his coat with one hand, and his other arm struck the dash. I heard him cry out before I could ease the brake. The head slid forward, out of the side window, and something heavy came down across the windshield. I had a clear view of the underside of its jaw. There was a band of bare, thickened skin around its neck. Much paler than the rest. Dark hair hung in clumps below the ears. Its mouth opened against the glass, and I saw saliva, and dark pieces of something caught between the back teeth. It tried to hold on. One limb struck the hood. The other came down near the driver's wiper, and a narrow crack ran upward across the windshield. I kept pressure on the brake. Gravel rattled under the truck. For a moment, the animal's weight was on the hood. Its head facing me. Its hind end higher than the cab. Then it fell off the front. I felt a bump under the right front tire before I'd stopped completely. It wasn't a full rise and drop. The way it would have felt if I'd gone over the body. More of a hard knock. I put the truck back in gear and moved left, keeping my eyes on the place where it had fallen. It came up at the edge of the headlights with its mouth wide open. I'd caught part of a four limb. One side of it wasn't supporting weight properly, but it could still move. It backed into the ditch, dragging that limb for the first few yards, and I went past with the accelerator down. Sandra was saying something over and over. I thought at first she was asking me to stop, but she was telling me to slow down so she could get Owens belt out from under him. I eased down while she shifted his hip and found the center lap belt. She fastened it around him, and he stayed hunched forward, holding the coat against his chest. The light over the dash showed a little blood coming through his trouser leg above the left boot. I'd assumed the crash had done most of the damage. Now I could see two ragged openings in the fabric with bare skin between them. I told Sandra to keep pressure on that area with one of the clean rags if she could reach them. She got the kid out by pushing his heel aside, and he made a sound through his teeth, but didn't tell her to stop. She found a thick pad and pressed it over the torn cloth. We had perhaps four miles left to the pavement. The stockpile entrance was nearer than that, on our left, and I started counting the bends between us and it. I wasn't planning to stop there. I just needed landmarks I knew. The truck was still driving properly, the front tire hadn't gone flat, and the windshield crack wasn't blocking my view. If the animal stayed where I'd left it, we could be out in ten minutes. We didn't see it for a while. That's a part I don't hear people talk about when they describe being afraid. Sometimes you get a stretch where nothing happens, and you have enough time to start feeling stupid for how scared you are. I'd felt it go under the tire. I'd watched it limp away. An injured animal wasn't going to keep up with a truck. I began thinking about what I'd say when I got a call through, whether an ambulance would come to the road entrance, whether Owen's leg was bleeding more than Sandra could control. I was almost grateful for those problems. They were things I understood. Then we reached the long turn around the wet ground. The road made a long left-hand loop there, following the firmer ground around a low hollow. It nearly doubled back on itself. We'd walked across the inside earlier in the job, following an old strip of raised ground through the trees. A person could cross it in a couple of minutes, while the road took a truck most of a mile around. The last part of that loop was narrow enough that I had to slow to a crawl. I recognized the strip of raised ground behind it. It hadn't needed to follow every yard of road behind us. From where it came out, I thought it had reached that strip of raised ground and cut across, while I took the truck around. It came out near the far end, low to the ground, moving on three limbs. I saw it from a long way back, because there was a pale strip of gravel behind it. It stopped at the road's edge, turned its head toward us, and waited. I leaned on the horn and kept driving. I couldn't take that turn fast. There was a drop on the outside, and a soft shoulder inside, and the load was high enough that a bad steering move could put us over. I held the center of the road and aimed for the space just beyond the animal. I told Sandra to keep Owen's head down. It didn't stand in front of us. It moved alongside the driver's door as we came past, keeping close to the inner edge of the bend. I got one brief look straight down at its back. There were old scars across it, some smooth and pale, others thick enough to show through the remaining hair. Its body was broad and heavy, but not as long as I'd imagined when it was on the car. It was built close to the ground. The hurt limb stayed folded against its chest. Then it rose against the side of the truck. The vent window burst beside my head. Something struck my left ear and little pieces of glass went down inside my collar. I pulled away without turning the wheel. That took more effort than anything else I did that night. Everything in me wanted to move right, and there wasn't enough road to do it. The opening was small, but the limb came through to the joint. It caught the front of my jacket and dragged it. me toward the door. My belt stopped me. I lost my grip on the wheel with my left hand, and the horn stopped because I'd been holding it with that thumb. Sandra released her belt, leaned across Owen and hit the limb with the flashlight. It was my flashlight. I dropped it onto the seat when we got back into the truck, and she'd found it under Owen's hip. She struck the same place several times, hard enough that the light went out. The grip on my jacket loosened. I pulled backward, and a long piece of fabric tore away from the pocket down to the hem. I could see the next stretch of road, straight, firm, with room on either side. I got the truck moving faster. The weight left the door step, and for half a second I thought we'd shaken it off again. Then something struck the back of the cab. I looked at the wide shallow rear window. It was dark except for the red steel of the dump body close behind it. A pale shape crossed that space and vanished upward. It hadn't fallen off. It had climbed back onto the truck. There was blood running down my neck. I couldn't tell whether it came from my ear or the glass inside my collar. My left hand shook badly enough that I had to hold the wheel with my right and press the heel of the other against the bottom. I kept driving. We were closer to the pavement now, and I knew if I stopped without a plan, it would find another way in. Owen lifted his head and looked at the rear window. It did that two hours. Sandra told him to save his breath. He shook his head. It had come to the car while they were down the bank, he said. First the front, then the side, then the back. It had worked around the vehicle until it found the open door. He'd tried to pull that door shut after Sandra climbed out, but its bottom edge kept catching on the bank. He couldn't shift his weight enough to lift it clear. That was why Sandra had stayed outside instead of getting back in with him. When it came around to the rear of the car, she'd run up the bank and shouted. It had left Owen and come toward her. She'd gone back down when it changed sides again. She'd been keeping it from settling on either one of them. I looked over at her. Her face was wet, but she wasn't crying in a way I could hear. She had one hand pressed against her husband's leg, and the broken flashlight in the other. Her right sock had worn through at the heel. There was blood on the floor below that foot. Behind us, the rear window cracked. It was a different sound from the vent glass, a sharp pop followed by little pieces falling behind the seat. The dump body sat close enough to the cab that I couldn't see the whole animal. I saw a limb come down through the narrow space at the side and push against the broken pain. The front wall of the body blocked most of its reach. It could get the end in, but not the thick part above the joint. I pressed the accelerator harder. It hooked the top of the seat and pulled. The seat back moved against us. The animal couldn't pull it loose, but it kept applying pressure, testing the space. Its nails dragged across the vinyl behind Owen's neck. Sandra bent over him and pushed him forward. I could hear her breathing through her mouth now, fast and uneven. We couldn't make it to the pavement like that. Even if I got a call through, help would be minutes away, and the thing already had part of itself inside the cab. I had less than two miles left to the road entrance, but those miles included another tight bend and a narrow crossing. Every time I slowed down, it got a steadier hold. The stock pile entrance came into the headlights on my left. I'd loaded stone there that morning. It was an open gravel area cut into a low hill, with a long pile on one side, a turn around at the far end, and no overhead wires. We kept it gated when nobody was working, but the gate stood open because I was supposed to unload before going home. Beyond the stock pile, there was nothing except a bank of packed earth and trees. I turned into it. Sandra thought I was taking another road out. I didn't correct her until I had the truck across the entrance and onto level ground. Then I told her we were stopping and that she needed to get Owen as far forward as she could. She looked at the gate we just passed, then at the windshield, then at me. You can't make us get out. I told her I wasn't going to. There was a place beside the stock pile where I'd parked before. I drove close enough that the driver's side of the cab was almost against the sloping face of the stone. That left no easy place for the animal to stand beside my broken window. The passenger side faced the open part of the yard. The headlights pointed toward the far turn around and the entrance was behind us. I stopped, set the brake, and put the transmission in neutral. The end of the limb came through the rear window again. It caught Owen's jacket at the shoulder and pulled him backward against the seat. He tried to resist, but the movement hurt his ribs, and he couldn't draw enough breath. Sandra got both hands around the sleeve and pulled the other way. I reached back with my left hand and caught a fold of the skin above the digits. It was warm. I don't know why that surprised me. It had to be warm. It was alive, and I'd been watching it move for the better part of 20 minutes. But some part of me had expected something different. The skin was hot and rough, with hard ridges across it, and underneath I could feel muscle tightening as it tried to keep its grip. I pulled one digit away from Owen's jacket. Sandra dragged him forward, leaving a piece of the shoulder seam behind. The limb withdrew. I heard it climb higher over the front of the body. I engaged the pump for the hoist. My brother and I had been taught to operate dump trucks before either of us was old enough to drive on the road. The first thing our father taught us wasn't how to unload. It was to stay out from under a raised body unless the proper support was in place. He'd known a man who trusted the hydraulics to hold one up. That man's name still came up whenever somebody got careless in our yard. I wasn't thinking about him in a general way. I was looking at the hoist control beside my seat, and remembering exactly where that man had been found. The animal wanted the back window. With the dump body down, the space behind the cab was too narrow for it to get its shoulders into. If I raised the front of the body, I'd give it room. And if it climbed onto the truck frame underneath, I could take that room away. I couldn't explain all of that to Sandra while it was moving around above us. I told her to get Owen's head below the top of the seat and keep herself down with him. She looked at my hand on the control and understood enough to do it. She released Owen's lap belt so she could turn him. He tried to help, but he couldn't fold himself over his injured leg. She turned him toward her instead, putting his head against her shoulder and leaned them both toward the dash. I moved the control to raise the body. The engine took the load. Behind us, the front of the steel box started upward, bringing the short guard over the back of the cab up with it. I stopped the lift when the front was several feet above the frame. I kept the tailgate latched. I wasn't trying to dump the stone. I wanted the weight to stay in the truck. Through the broken back window, a strip of open space appeared where the red steel had been. I could see the dark yard behind us and the spill of the worklights. The stone shifted inside the body with a heavy scrape. The animal moved with it. I felt it cross above my head, then heard weight come down on the roof over Sandra. It hadn't gone where I wanted. The roof dented above the passenger seat. The animal braced itself over the door and struck the side window with its good forlame. The glass burst across Sandra's back. She covered Owen's head with her arms. I heard her make a small shocked sound, and then she was telling him she was alright, even though neither of us had asked. The head appeared in the passenger window. Without glass between us, it looked worse. Its face was streaked with the white powder from the extinguisher, mixed into the wetness around its mouth. The swollen side of the muzzle had split farther when it fell off the hood. One lower tooth stood at an angle. Its good eye moved from Sandra to Owen, then toward me. It put the uninjured forelimb through the opening and reached down between her shoulder and the door. Sandra drove the broken flashlight into its mouth. She didn't swing it. There wasn't room. She held it with both hands and pushed the long metal case straight toward the back of the jaw. The animal bit down. I heard the case bend and Sandra let go before it could pull her hands outside. It drew its head back, working its mouth. The flashlight hit the gravel beside the truck. She used that second to haul Owen lower until his face was nearly against her knees. The space behind the cab was open. What I needed was for the animal to leave the passenger window. I couldn't make it do that. For a moment I thought I'd made the whole situation worse. I'd stopped a truck that could still move, opened up another way to reach us, and put the controls I needed beside a door I could barely use. The animal had already shown it could work around an obstacle. There was no reason it had to choose the obstacle I understood. Then Owen began to slide off the seat. Sandra caught him under the arms, but she couldn't lift his weight and protect him at the same time. His bad leg twisted where it rested on the floor. He cried out, a full desperate sound that he couldn't hold back. The animal turned toward the rear window. It crawled toward the back edge of the roof. Owen's jacket was bunched above the seat, and Sandra was trying to pull him upright enough to breathe. Once the animal leaned over the rear of the cab, it had a straight reach toward them through the broken window. The dump body was no longer in the way. The roof lifted slightly as its weight came off. I looked behind me. A broad limb appeared at the side of the cab, gripping the upright metal behind the door. The animal lowered itself into the space I'd made. Its hurt forelimbs stayed close to its chest. It used the other to hold the back of the cab, while its hind legs found the truck frame below. It crouched there, with the rear half of its body under the raised box, and its head level with the broken window. I had my hand on the lowering control. Its head came through the window. The opening wasn't high enough for the whole head to come straight in, so it turned sideways. I saw the torn mouth and the eye, then the thick neck pressing against the broken seal. Its breath came across the back of my head. Sandra flattened herself over Owen, and I moved the control. The body started down. It wasn't a sudden drop. The front settled at the speed it always did when I lowered it after a load. I could hear the stone shift again. The animal stopped reaching and tried to look up, but its head was partly inside the cab, and the edge of the window caught below its jaw. It tried to come farther in. The uninjured forelimbs shot past the seat back, and closed on the loose fabric at Sandra's neck. It pulled her upright. She let go of Owen with one hand and grabbed the edge of the dash, but her grip slid on the glass. The collar of her sweater tightened under her chin. I took hold of the fabric with my left hand and held on. The pain in my shoulder went down to my elbow. It pulled me against the side of the seat. I kept the lowering control over with my other hand, and watched the little strip of red steel visible behind the animal's back. The steel touched it. Everything moved at once. The limb tightened inside the cab. The animal tried to stand on the frame, pushing upward against the underside of the body. The truck rocked. For a second, the dump body seemed to stop descending, and I thought there wasn't enough weight on the part that had caught it. Then its hindquarters slipped. The body came down another foot. The grip on Sandra's sweater opened. She fell forward across Owen. I let go of her collar and pushed her shoulder down away from the window. Behind us, steel scraped against steel, and there was a thick braking sound I felt through the seat. The animal's head jerked backward. The window frame bent outward around its jaw, then the head was gone. The forelimbs stayed inside, caught over the top of the seat, with the digits flexing against the vinyl. The dump body continued to settle. It stopped short of its normal resting position, held up by what was underneath it. The movement in the forelimbs changed. It wasn't reaching for us anymore. It opened and closed against the seat without finding anything to hold. Then it stopped. I kept the control in the lowering position. I don't know how long. My right hand had cramped around it, and I couldn't make myself let go. The engine was running at idle again. The air from the broken windows was cold, and Owen was making a wet sound through his nose. Those were the only things I could hear. Sandra lifted her head enough to look at me. I told her to stay down. We waited. I watched the limb lying over the seat. There was a narrow cut across one of the digits where the rear glass had caught it. A little blood ran into the seam in the vinyl and stopped. I watched that place until my eyes hurt. Nothing twitched. Nothing withdrew. The truck didn't move under any weight except hours. After several minutes I took my hand off the control. I didn't raise the body to check. There was nothing I needed to know badly enough to do that. Sandra had a red band under her chin and a patch of missing skin where the sweater had pulled across her throat. She could speak. Owen could answer when I asked his name, but he'd started shaking and couldn't seem to stop. Getting him to an ambulance had become the only thing I could think about without losing track of what my hands were doing. The dump body was sitting lower than I'd feared. Only a short distance above its usual position. I could see its front edge in the work light. The box was nearly level, but I couldn't tell how securely it would stay that way. Sandra tried another emergency call on my phone, but it still wouldn't connect. Owen was fading, and the pavement was less than two miles away. I couldn't leave him there, and I couldn't drive the truck normally. Sandra got Owen upright again and fastened his lap belt before putting on her own. I disengaged the pump, put the truck in its lowest gear, and eased forward into the turnaround. The limb dragged across the seat as we moved. Sandra grabbed my arm. I stopped immediately. We both watched it. The turn had shifted the carcass beneath the body, and the end of the limb had slid down the vinyl. It hung there without moving. When I started forward again, I made the turn so slowly that it seemed we weren't turning at all. I got the truck facing the entrance. Then we went out through the open gate and back onto the access road. I drove the last stretch at little more than walking speed. At the tight bend and the narrow crossing, I stopped to line the truck up before moving through. I kept the tires on the packed gravel and moved a few feet at a time. I kept waiting for the weight under the dump body to shift again. I kept waiting for the end of that limb to lift off the seat. It never did. Sandra kept talking to Owen. She wasn't saying anything about the woods or what had happened. She was asking him to tell her where they'd put the spare house key. Whether the light in their kitchen was still on, little things she could make him answer. Sometimes he answered the wrong question. She asked it again without correcting him. Near the road entrance, my phone finally showed service. Sandra made the call because I couldn't make my left hand hold the phone steadily. She told the dispatcher we had two people with serious injuries and that we were in a dump truck near the pavement. Then she tried to explain the animal. I heard the dispatcher ask her to repeat that part. Sandra looked at what was hanging through the back window and her face changed. Until then, she'd been doing one thing after another. Now there was a person on the phone asking questions in a normal voice and she couldn't get the words to come out. She put the call on speaker and held the phone where I could speak into it. I gave the location. I said the animal was dead, trapped under the dump body, and that nobody should try to release it until we were out of the cab. I said the truck was stable where I'd stopped and that I wasn't moving it onto the pavement with the body not fully down. The dispatcher told me help was coming and stayed with us while we waited. A car passed on the paved road before the ambulance arrived. Its headlights crossed the entrance and went on. I remember being offended by that, which wasn't fair. The driver couldn't have known what was sitting back there. To them, it was a work truck with its lights on. The first person to reach my door was an emergency medical worker carrying a bag. He climbed onto the step, looked through the broken vent, and asked whether I could get out on my own. Then he looked past me at the back of the seat. He stopped talking in the middle of the question. I asked him to get Sandra and Owen out first. The upper frame of the passenger door had been bent during the attack and it wouldn't open normally. They got it open with tools, lifted Owen out and helped Sandra down after him. She didn't leave until she could see her husband on the stretcher. I climbed out on the driver's side and sat on the lower step because my knees wouldn't hold me. A deputy who'd arrived with them kept asking whether there was anyone else in the woods. I told him about the car and the deer and said I didn't know. It was the first time all night I'd said aloud how little I knew. I didn't know what else was there or how long that animal had been using the road or whether someone else might have stopped before Owen did. They didn't find another person. I asked about that more than once afterward. Owen spent five nights in the hospital. His lower leg was broken. There were deep wounds above the boot and two of his ribs were fractured. The wounds above his boot came from the attack. He never knew whether the leg had broken when the animal pulled him down or when the car hit the tree. He had surgery on the leg and another procedure to clean one of the wounds. Sandra had stitches in her forehead and the bottom of her foot. Her throat hurt for more than a week but there wasn't lasting damage. I had a cut along the back of my ear, glass in my shoulder and a strained arm that kept me from driving a loaded truck for a while. Once somebody had cleaned the blood off me, I looked like the least injured person who'd been in that cab. That was accurate, although I resented it for a few days. I wanted there to be something on me that explained why I couldn't sit with my back to an open doorway. My brother went out with the recovery truck the following morning. I told him twice not to touch the hoist until the people dealing with the animal said it was safe. He said later that he understood why, as soon as he saw the rear of the cab, the animal was dead. There wasn't any doubt about that. They supported the body, lifted it enough to remove the carcass, and brought our truck back on a heavy wrecker, because nobody wanted to guess what damage had been done to the controls and lines underneath. The rear window opening had been bent out of shape, the passenger door needed replacement, and the back of the seat had been pulled away from two of its mounts. The body itself needed surprisingly little work. Steel built to carry stone will tolerate things that a truck cab won't. I was told the carcass was a large male black bear with extensive hair loss and old injuries. That's the identification I was given, and I don't have the training to offer a better one. It wasn't there when they examined it. I saw something sick, badly scarred, and much too close, under conditions where I wouldn't trust myself to judge its size accurately. The deputy said the damage from the truck had changed the shape of its head. That explained what the recovery crew saw. It didn't explain why its face had looked wrong to me before it ever climbed onto the truck. I can accept all of that. I'd be glad to accept every part of it if that settled the rest. But identifying what an animal is doesn't explain everything it does. When they recovered Owen's car, they found one deer. Back near the bend where I'd first seen it. They found stretches of a broad drag mark in the damp gravel between that bend and the driveway. At the driveway, they found blood and disturbed gravel where Sandra said the deer had originally been lying. Owen's little flashlight was there too, broken beside the road. He hadn't walked down to the other bend. Both he and Sandra put his first encounter within a few yards of their front bumper. Taken together, that was enough to convince me the animal had moved the deer after the crash. The deputy said the marks were consistent with a carcass being dragged, although he couldn't tell us when it had happened. An animal moving a carcass isn't unusual by itself. He thought it might have been trying to protect a food source. Maybe that was all it was. I wasn't going to argue over motives with a man who'd spent part of his morning helping collect what was left under our truck. The road was closed to through traffic while they recovered the vehicles. Our crew went back in daylight with two trucks and finished the work the following week. They didn't have another encounter. Neither did the people who owned the places back there, as far as I ever heard. There wasn't a second animal, a disappearance, or some later event I can offer to make the whole thing fit a bigger story. The one that followed us died under the truck, and the attack stopped. Owen recovered enough to go back to work that winter. He still has trouble with the ankle when it's cold. Sandra replaced the shoe she'd lost but kept the good one for months in a bag, with the clothes the hospital had cut off him. He told me she couldn't decide whether throwing it away would help or make her feel worse. I understood that better than I could explain to her. We still have dinner a few times a year. It was at one of those dinners that the man I used to work with started telling his version. Sandra got up, took her coat, and went outside. Owen stayed at the table long enough to tell him that I hadn't been trying to kill anything when I stopped that night. I'd been trying to help two people get home. In other words, Sandra apologized to me for leaving. She said the part she couldn't stand was when people described the attack as something we'd stumbled into, as if we'd surprised an animal feeding, or gone where it was resting, and everything after that had followed from a bad decision. She'd been in that car. She knew where Owen had stopped and how far he'd walked. He hadn't gone into the woods at all. I drive at night again. I still work for my brother, although we sold that truck after the repairs. For a while I thought the broken back window was the thing I'd never get over. Then it was the hand, or whatever the correct name for that part of a bear is, lying against the seat beside us all the way to the pavement. Those are bad memories, but they're memories of something that ended. I know where the animal died. I know Sandra and Owen got out. If I need to hear either of their voices, I can call them. The part I still have trouble with happened before I ever saw their car. I had my headlights on that deer for several seconds. The road was clear enough on the right that I didn't have to stop and move it. I stayed in the cab, picked away around, and kept going. I thought I was passing an animal trying to pull its food off the road, but I'd seen the front of that deer move toward the ditch and then stop. I'd seen the grip close around the ankle. The rest of the animal had stayed below the edge, where a person standing beside the deer would have had to lean forward to see it. By then, Owen was already down the bank with a broken leg, and his car was no longer visible from that bend. I think the deer was back across the road for the next driver. (gentle music)