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weren’t good enough to sell or anything, but they were good enough for him. When he looked back at this picture he’d remember the solitude, the deep sense of peace.
    No wonder he was having such a hard time finding a job that suited him. He should’ve lived two hundred years ago, been a mountain man. The thought made him smile as he snapped a few pictures, checked the quality in the review mode, then returned the camera to his pocket.
    There was a rustling noise behind him and Danny turned around. His heart almost stopped, and for a minute he felt as if he might pass out, as if all the blood in his head had drained to the bottom of his stomach, which had lodged somewhere near his throat. His mind had to work hard to process what he was seeing, because this was just wrong. Black bear, less than thirty yards away,lumbering straight at him.
Huge
black bear. He’d known there were bears here, but in all his trips he’d never been close to one.
    For an instant he just stood there, blinking, as if somehow his eyes were playing tricks on him and all he had to do was blink fast enough to make the bear go away. No, it was still there, still coming at him. He blinked, wondering—hoping—if his eyes were playing tricks on him. For a wasted precious few seconds he was frozen, his gaze glued on the massive claws as he tried to remember all the tips he’d heard about confronting a bear in the wild.
    Don’t look it in the eye
.
    Slowly back away
.
    Speak in a low, calm voice
.
    Really? Speak to it? Like it freakin’ understood English?
    “Good bear.” His voice shook a little but he kept it as even and soothing as he could, just as he kept his retreat slow and easy. He didn’t dare look behind him, to watch where he was stepping. God, don’t let him fall, not now. “Nice, big bear.” His mouth was so dry he couldn’t swallow; forming the words took incredible effort. “Where the hell did you come from?”
    Good lord that thing was big. Slowly Danny reached down, taking care not to make any sudden, jerky movements that might alarm the monster. He fingered the canister of pepper spray in his pocket and wondered if using it would just make the bear angry, or if it would actually work. The pocket was buttoned, to prevent the canister from falling out as he climbed over rough terrain. He began fumbling with the button.
    Bears were supposed to be wary of people. Everything he’d ever heard about them said that the animal should be going away from him, not steadily moving forward. Danny was careful not to make any threatening moves. He didn’t challenge the animal in any way. The bear
should
be retreating.
    But it wasn’t. Each padding step forward meant he had to take at least two steps back to maintain the same distance betweenthem. His instinct screamed at him to run, but he fought it down. He’d been told that was the number one rule: don’t run. A human had no chance of outrunning a bear, plus fleeing triggered the response to chase.
    Water. That was it. The bear was heading for the creek, and he was between it and its objective. The best thing he could do was leave the trail at a diagonal, let the bear get past him, then put as much distance between himself and it as possible.
    He risked a quick look around him, because leaving the path meant the going wouldn’t be as even, though in this case “even” was a relative term. He edged sideways, to his right, angling upward. To the left was the smoother way, but to the right was a rocky outcropping featuring some big boulders that would take him out of the bear’s line of sight, which seemed like a good thing, if he could just get to it without triggering a charge from the bear.
    He used the walking stick to brace himself as he edged across the rough, steeply sloping ground. The stick … would it do him any good against a bear that big? How much did that thing weigh? Four, maybe five hundred pounds? It could snap the stick with a swat of one of those massive