Page 16 of Ellen Found
The bear came at them from behind, snuffling, moving fast, and chunky from eating everything in sight. She stopped, its outline barely visible because of a sliver of moonlight from the randomly placed dormer windows overhead, the ones calculated to bring the outdoors indoors. The outdoors indoors...
She grabbed Gwen, but there was nowhere to go. The bear, much closer, came between them and the dining room door. The outside door looked farther and farther away as the seconds passed. They were stuck. The bear kept moving.
“Toss him the meat packet,” Ellen whispered to Gwen.
Misunderstanding her, Gwen threw the packet as hard as she could into the bear’s face. It reared up, roared, and charged.
Gwen screamed and screamed as Ellen snatched her up and backed toward the stairs. She knew she couldn’t outrun an angry bear up the stairs, but they were suddenly desperate, two people out of their element in bear world.
She grabbed Gwen tighter and darted under the stairs instead. Kneeling, she shoved Gwen against the bottom step, forcing her as far in as she could go, and crawled after her. Cramped into the tight space, she threw her arms around Gwen and covered her with her own body.
To her horror, the bear crawled after them. Thank God he was too big, too bulked up for winter. He growled and swiped at Ellen’s back, ripping through her dress and scoring her shoulder. As blood dripped from her shoulder, she cried out in pain and tried to make herself smaller.
The bear wouldn’t stop. Blood meant food. He swiped at her skirt and managed to hook a claw in it. He tugged as Ellen clung to Gwen and tried to wrap her arms around the bottom rung. She sobbed as the bear inched her out farther. To let go and save Gwen? She had no choice.
Through the bear’s deep breathing and Gwen’s screams, Ellen heard Plato growl—Plato, who had vanished after supper to gnaw on mice somewhere.No, Plato, no, she thought as the bear tugged at her skirt.
The fiercest tomcat who ever roamed the mean streets of Butte growled and hissed. She had heard him warn away stray dogs and hiss at carpenters. This was different. This was the sound of life or death, and she knew it.
The bear grunted, then roared in pain. Looking behind her, Ellen saw Plato leap on the bear’s head and claw at its eyes, an impossible task for a cat too small to fight a bear, a cat possessing nothing but puny claws and a heart so big that even the lobby couldn’t contain it. “Plato, run,” she whispered. “Please.Please.”
With a roar that echoed off the distant ceiling, the bear grabbed her cat, chomped down, and flung what remained against a far wall. Tears streamed down her face as Ellen clapped her hand over Gwen’s mouth and held her tight against her body.
She waited for the bear to grab at her again. When it didn’t, she looked over hershoulder at the beast to see it rubbing its eyes where Plato had clawed and bit. The bear whimpered, distracted, unsure.
After years and years, she heard the back door slam open. She watched, dull with pain of the heart worse than the claw marks on her back, as Corporal Reeves went to one knee, took deliberate aim, and fired. The noise reverberated in the huge room and her ears rang. He fired again and once more until the bear lay still.
Ellen felt herself pulled gently from that too-small space. Some primitive reflex made her cling tenaciously to the little girl, even though the more rational part of her brain assured her the ordeal was over. Someone carefully pried her fingers from Gwen, then kissed her hand.
“Ellen, my debt to you is eternal,” she heard before she closed her eyes and wept.
Ellen Found is resilient, but such loss! I have only a glimmer of how sad she is. What can I do?
SHE WOKE UP mere minutes later, clawing and scratching to hang on to Gwen, who was clasped tight in her father’s arms. Corporal Reeves held her in a sitting position as Mrs. Quincy, her face white and her eyes huge, dabbed at her back with a dishcloth.
Lanterns and men filled the space close to the stairs, and it was light enough for her to really see the bear. Just an ordinary bear, but a big one, a bear looking for one last meal before the long winter’s sleep.
Ellen looked harder against the distantwall. She sobbed when she saw the ridiculously small bundle of fur and bones that had taken on a behemoth in the Old Faithful Inn lobby. “Please, someone get Plato. Please.”
One of the privates followed her shaking finger. He knelt, then called to another soldier, who went into the dining room and returned with a dish towel. Carefully he wrapped it around the little body and carried Plato to Ellen, who held out her arms.
“He’s still alive,” the private said. “Not for long.”
Time, merciful time, stood still long enough for her to cradle the demon cat of Butte and smooth down his torn and bleeding fur. “Plato, you should’ve run the other way,” she whispered to her friend, her only friend ever. She had helped him out of his pain in the alley, and he returned the favor moments ago by distracting a monster many times his size and saving two lives. “You thought you were a mountain lion, little buddy,” she said. “And here we were at last, with enough food to eat and a safe place to sleep.”
Mr. Penrose made a little sound when she said that, or maybe it was Corporal Reeves.
She wept over her dying cat, smoothing his fur. Plato put a delicate paw on her wrist finally, as if to say, “That’ll do, my lady friend. I’m all right now. You’re here.” To her stunned amazement, he started to purr and then he died. She marveled that such a small body could hold something as enormous as death, then fainted.
Ellen woke in her own room, wearing her flannel nightgown with most of the flannel gone, her left shoulder throbbing and wrapped in a bandage. His face a study in agony, Charles Penrose sat on her bed, his daughter asleep in his arms but crying out at intervals.
From habit, Ellen looked toward her feet, but there was no Plato, only his wool square. Charles’s eyes must have followed hers. “I wrapped him in a towel,” he said, his voice strained. “I have a carved wooden box in my quarters. I will bury him in a good place.”
“Please put in Gwen’s wool square,” she said. “He liked to sleep on it.”
“I will.”
He didn’t leave, not even when Mrs. Quincy came into her room with something sweet and chocolatey, something Ellen saw thechildren in the Copper King house drink, but which she was not allowed. She took a sip and another, knowing that Plato would have liked it, too. She took tiny solace remembering that for dinner that night, there had been plenty of stewed tomatoes and bread chunks, something Plato loved.
