The Princess and the Bear - Mette Ivie Harrison [26]
He pulled himself up to another shelf, using a boulder to his right for leverage. As he tottered, the boulder slipped from his grasp and fell off the cliff. Its fall took several long seconds. The bear did not look down.
He thought how dangerous this journey would have been with the hound.
He took a rest for two breaths, then heard a sound behind him, a scraping.
He turned and craned his head to look down, but he could see nothing. The snow was falling more heavily now, and it made everything indistinct.
Perhaps the wind had blown a small rock, and that was what he had heard.
He was no longer sure of himself. His limbs felt heavy and swollen. He was so tired that he spent much of the time moving forward with his eyes closed, as if half in sleep.
He went on for several more hours, hearing nothing.
The journey was excruciatingly slow. The climb was so sheer that he had taken only a few steps before there was another sheer cliff before him that he had to scale. He forced himself to go onward. If he stopped now, in this snowstorm, he could freeze to death.
But he felt so much warmer when he stopped.
He awoke, startled, and did not know how much time had passed. He could see nothing. Was it night or had the snowstorm become blinding?
His eyelashes had frozen shut. He rubbed at his eyes. Then opened them again.
There was a little light now.
But he still did not know how long he had slept.
And then he heard another sound.
It came from below him, but when he slid closer to the edge to look over, he swayed and nearly fell over.
He crawled back and listened again.
It was not the wind. It was too persistent a sound, too patterned.
Silence, scraping, scraping, silence, scraping, scraping again.
The same sounds the bear himself would have been making if he had been climbing.
Was any predator so desperate as to chase the bear up these cliffs?
He listened again.
There was breathing as well, heavy, gasping breaths, as if from a creature in pain.
It took a long moment before the bear realized that he recognized the register of those breaths.
It was a hound.
His hound.
“No!” The bear bellowed, a mournful cry that stopped the sound of scraping below him. But not for long.
When it began again, he could only think that he must get to the top first, enter the wild man’s lair and finish his business before the hound reached him.
He could not fight her here. It would be her death. His, too, most likely, but it was her life he had wanted to preserve. He had been willing to do anything for that, even make her hate him.
And now it seemed she had been more stubborn even than he had imagined.
He forced himself to climb again, to match his movements with hers, and then to exceed them. He gave himself no respite. This was a competition of speed and dexterity rather than sheer strength. The bear did not know if he would win.
At last he could see no cliff directly in front of him. He stumbled forward, hands outstretched to feel for the edge in case the snow had obscured it.
But this was level ground.
And the snow had lightened up enough that he could see.
There was a long stone shelf here and below him he could see the mountains in a circle, as if this peak were the jewel set in a crown, and extending out from that first circle was another circle, and another.
He could only see the faintest glimpse of the lowlands that he had come from and the forest beyond that.
The wind had quieted.
And still the bear could not hear the sound of the hound climbing behind him.
Was it only a matter of minutes before she arrived?
Or had she fallen?
He could not tolerate that thought.
Perhaps she was resting for a moment.
He had to get to the wild man now. The bear tried to call out and was infuriated by his limitations as never before!
He saw a pine tree ahead and moved toward it.
The closer he got, the more he realized that this was no ordinary tree. It had been trained to grow tight around the edges, with the branches making walls, and one