The Third Bear Read Free

supplies. Horley had never seen so much blood. It had pooled and thickened to cover a spreading area several feet in every direction. The mules had had their throats torn out and then they had been disemboweled. Their organs had been torn out and thrown onto the ground, as if Seether had been searching for something. Their eyes had been plucked from their sockets almost as an afterthought.
    John - they thought it was John - sat in the front of the lead cart. The head was missing, as was much of the meat from the body cavity. The hands still held the reins. The same was true for the other two carts, their wheels greased with blood. Three dead men holding reins to dead mules. Two dead men in the back of the carts. All five missing their heads. All five eviscerated.

    One of Horley's protectors vomited into the grass. Another began to weep. "Jesus save us," a third man said, and kept saying it for many hours.
    Horley was curiously unmoved, his hand and heart steady. He noted the brutal humor that had moved the Third Bear to carefully replace the reins in the men's hands. He noted the wild, savage abandon that had preceded that action. He noted, grimly, that most of the supplies in the carts had been ruined by the wealth of blood that covered them. But, for the most part, the idea of winter had so captured him that whatever came to him moment-by-moment could not compare to the crystalline nightmare of that interior vision.
    Horley wondered if his was a form of madness as well.
    "This is not the worst," he said to his men. "Not by far."
    At the farm, they found the rest of the men and what was left of John's wife and children, but that is not what Horley had meant.

    At this point, Horley felt he should go himself to find the Third Bear. It wasn't bravery that made him put on the leather jerkin and the metal shin guards. It wasn't from any sense of hope that he picked up the spear and put Clem's helmet on his head.
    His wife found him there, ready to walk out the door of their home.
    "You wouldn't come back," she told him.
    "Better," he said. "Still."
    "You're more important to us alive. Stronger men than you have tried to kill it."
    "I must do something," Horley said. "Winter will be here soon and things will get worse."
    "Then do something," Rebecca said, taking the spear from his hand. "But do something else."

    The villagers of Grommin met the next day. There was less talking this time. Horley tried to gauge their mood. Many were angry, but some now seemed resigned, almost as if the Third Bear were a plague or some other force that could not be controlled or stopped by the hand of Man. In the days that followed, there would be a frenzy of action: traps set, torches lit, poisoned meat left in the forest, but none of it came to anything.

    One old woman kept muttering about fate and the will of God.
    "John was a good man," Horley told them. "He did not deserve his death. But I was there - I saw his wounds. He died from an animal attack. It may be a clever animal. It may be very clever. But it is still an animal. We should not fear it the way we fear it."
    "You should consult with the witch in the woods," Clem's son said.
    Clem's son was a huge man of eighteen years, and his word held weight, given the bravery of his father. Several people began to nod in agreement.
    "Yes," said one. "Go to the witch. She might know what to do."
    The witch in the woods is just a poor, addled woman, Horley thought, but could not say it.
    "Just two months ago," Horley reminded them, "you thought she might have made this happen."
    "And if so, what of it? If she caused it, she can undo it. If not, perhaps we can pay her to help us."
    This from one of the farmers displaced from outside the walls. Word of John's fate had spread quickly, and less than a handful of the bravest or most foolhardy had kept to their farms.
    Rancor spread amongst the gathered villagers. Some wanted to take a party of men out to the witch, wherever she might live, and kill her.