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Eph at his heels and all of which hurt like hell now.
     He walked back upslope towards the wrecked glider, keeping carefully alert and limping
     a little where the claws had taken the heel off his boot and wrenched the leg. Bears
     usually didn’t travel in pairs, but you never knew. He’d do a quick fix on the footwear
     when he had some time.
    When he arrived the pilot had managed to get herself out of the glider and down to
     the ground, probably by cutting herself free with the knife and falling. Her left
     arm looked to be out of commission, and her face was a mask of blood from a pressure
     cut on the forehead and a nose that was swelling after being smacked into something
     hard.
    Curly leaf-brown hair peeked out from beneath a leather flying helmet with goggles
     pushed up on her brow; her eyes were light blue-green, but what he could see of her
     skin was a sort of pale toast color, save for a little bluish scar between her brows.
     The whole ensemble was probably exotically pretty in a pixie sort of way when she
     wasn’t bleeding and beat-up. And, he judged by the way she’d been facing that bear,
     she was fully capable of chewing nails and spitting out rivets.
    She’d just managed to get up on her feet when he arrived and stopped a couple of yards
     away, and she dropped into a fighter’s crouch with the knife held in an expert grip.
     Cole started to laugh. She was also about a thumb’s width over five feet, and skinny
     with it, confronting his five-ten and hundred and eighty pounds, not to mention his
     crossbow and hatchet and bowie and sword. Her scowl got more ferocious at his mirth,
     but she wasn’t any more daunted by him than she had been by the bear that had been
     about to scoop her out of the cockpit like a nut out of its shell.
    “You are one tough scrappy little bitch, I’ll give you that,” he said admiringly.
    He was also careful to stay out of reach. Nobody was safe if they had a knife and
     were determined to use it.
    “That’s Pilot Officer Bitch to you, soldier,” she said.
    Briefings and rumor had it that westerners talked funny, but apart from the effects
     of her nose swelling shut she sounded pretty much like people from his part of the
     world, maybe a little rounder on the vowels. He looked at the glider caught in the
     rocks and trees, at the pilot, and thought hard. While he did he also looked at his
     left hand; one of the fingernails was standing up from the quick, mostly torn away.
     He absently stripped it loose with his teeth and spat it aside.
    “Dang, that smarts,” he said mildly. “Look, girl . . . Pilot Officer . . . what say
     we call a short-term truce while we fix ourselves up? That bear near enough got a
     piece of me and I don’t think he meant you any good at all, likewise. I’d feel sort
     of stupid if I had to kill you now after going to all that trouble.”
    “You’re Boise, aren’t you?” she said; it wasn’t really a question. “Not a Cutter.”
    “Yup, US Army,” he said. “I’m a Methodist, more or less, if that matters to you.”
    “All right,” she said grudgingly.
    There was a spring seeping out of the rock not far away. He ended up donating some
     material from his medical kit, and then slitting the sleeve of the leather flying
     suit she wore along the seam to examine her left forearm. It was thin, though the
     slight muscles on it were like wire cords, and he couldn’t feel any gross break. She
     hissed as he touched one spot.
    “Ulna,” he said. “Not a compound, and the elbow isn’t dislocated. Nightstick fracture,
     I’d say, right about midway. Doesn’t feel bad.”
    “Doesn’t feel bad to
you
,” she said. Then: “Yeah, that sounds about right.”
    He trimmed some deadwood branches into a set of immobilizing splints, bound them on,
     and arranged a sling. After that she sat sullenly brooding while he used his climbing
     rope and a half hitch around a tree to pull the glider down, breaking off the other