Weaver
“It’s bad.”
I looked at my friend. “How bad?”
Creed shook his head as he uncrossed his arms. “Romeo was out walking with Brawny, his dog. He saw the bear attacking something, and at first he thought it was an animal. When he got closer and realized that it was a woman, he started getting the bear’s attention. He shot him once he got him away from her. Bear is dead. He got rescue there within ten minutes, and they air-lifted her off the mountain and brought her here. I followed behind with a sample off the bear…they think the bear had rabies.”
I closed my eyes.
As if things couldn’t get worse.
“She asked for you just before she passed out,” Creed murmured.
“They’re testing it?”
“Yeah.” Creed cleared his throat. “It’ll be positive, though. I got a few reports of a bear sitting in the area that was exhibiting erratic behavior. I was out searching today, which was why I was able to get to the scene so fast.”
“Fuck,” I said.
“As for her wounds…” Creed hesitated. “They’re really bad, man. She is sliced to ribbons. They’re in there now giving her the rabies shots. Cleaning her up. But fuck, man. It really doesn’t look good.”
I scrubbed at my face, my entire being absolutely ravaged.
How could that spunky, beautiful woman have been attacked? And so brutally at that.
“I didn’t know bears could get rabies,” I murmured.
“Usually, they can’t. They’d have to be bitten by something that had rabies. And that doesn’t happen often with bears,” Creed muttered.
Creed would know.
He was a game warden for the state of Montana. He was also well-versed in the wildlife in the area as well as in several other parts of the world. He knew all about what was and wasn’t possible.
My stomach was in knots.
“Have you called her sister?”
“She’s there.” He jerked his chin toward a small door where a doctor was talking.
I left immediately, wanting to hear every word.
“And what injuries does she have?” Nettie asked.
“Other than the obvious—a shit ton of claw and bite marks? She’s got eight broken ribs from when the bear was stomping on her with his paws.”
“How do you know he was doing that?”
“The 9-1-1 call,” he answered. “I listened to it. I thought it might help me to navigate the multitude of injuries.”
“Oh,” Nettie said.
“She has a broken arm in two places. She has a concussion that we’ll be watching. We think the bear bit her head, and the impact of the bite made her snap her head back to the ground.”
Just the image he was putting into my head was making me nauseous.
I barely knew this woman.
I shouldn’t have been as invested as I was.
