Lost Era 05_ Deny thy Father - Jeff Mariotte [136]
Will’s father was one of the volunteers. Will insisted that he should be allowed to go along. His father argued, but not very energetically, and he changed his mind more easily than Will had even anticipated. So they each got a phaser rifle and they joined the hunting party leaving from the campground early on the morning after the attack.
As they walked through the forests and meadows of the wilderness area, weapons at the ready, alert for any signs of the bear, Kyle Riker was more talkative than usual. “This is nice,” he had said. “I mean, not the idea that we have to kill a grizzly before it kills one of us. But being out here in the sunshine and the trees, with a blue sky over our heads, a father and son together… we don’t do this sort of thing often enough, Will. We never have. My fault, I guess, and I’m sorry.”
He had stopped in the middle of the trail then, and laid a hand softly on Will’s shoulder-the kind of physical contact that was rare between this father and son. “I’m sorry for a lot of things,” he had said. “More than you can imagine. I hope one day you’ll understand why I’ve done things the way I have. I hope I’ve made some good choices, even when they haven’t seemed like it. A day like this, being out here with you-Will, you’re a man, look at you! I’m sure there are still things you need to learn, but I’m not so sure that I can teach them.”
He had gone quiet then, more like the father that Will was used to, the one who kept his feelings bottled up inside as if they were poison, and they had continued tracking the bear. When they’d lost the trail for a while, Will had found it by scouting in ever-wider circles until he cut across it, and Kyle had clapped him on the back. “You’ll be fine, Will. You’ll be just fine,” he had said. Will hadn’t realized then-hadn’t realized until just this moment, sitting in his quarters on the starship Pegasus with Marden Zaffos, what Kyle had meant by that. He had known then that he was going to leave, going to abandon Will to his fate. The way Will handled a gun, the way he cut bear track-those were pretty meaningless skills, in the greater scheme of things, but somehow Kyle Riker had decided that they meant Will was mature enough to make his own way in the world.
They had, later that day, found the bear. She had a den, and when the hunting party approached she had growled ferociously and lunged at them. But several of the hunters fired at once, and the bear fell without any human casualties.
Inside the den, though, they found something that cast a different light on things. There were three cubs inside the den-dead cubs, bearing wounds that could only have been made with phasers. None of the campers had claimed to be hunters, and indeed none of them had joined this hunt. But they’d been the only ones out in this area that any of the townspeople knew about.
The hunting party returned to the campground and ransacked the tents until they found the hidden phaser rifles. The campers protested, denied, and then finally, faced with the evidence, admitted their guilt. They had tracked the bear for sport, finding her den and killing her cubs just because they could. It hadn’t occurred to them that the animals were an endangered species, that they had done something stupid and shameful, until it was too late. And when the bear came to their campsite, she was only seeking revenge for her loss.
Will told Marden the story in as much detail as he could remember, and when it was over Marden looked puzzled.
“Are you saying revenge is never legitimate?” he asked.
“Not at all, Marden. I’m just saying it’s something you have to be careful with. It’s more complicated than it looks, sometimes. If you kill Plure, are you the hunters? Or are you the bear?”
Marden shook his head. “Will, that story doesn’t even make any sense.”
“Who said life has to make sense?” Will shot back.