How much damage it would do would depend on if it was black or brown, how large, and how either pissed off or hungry it was. Someone had once likened a bear moving across the ground to a lightning bolt shooting sideways. When they got going they were hard to stop, and when they were pissed off they were even harder to calm down. Most of the time they‘d make a false charge, and back off. Most of the time.

Empirical experience recently obtained had proved beyond any doubt that most of the time didn‘t count in the Park. If this was one of those years for close encounters of the bear kind, Kate wanted to make sure it was two for two for her side. A branch snapped. Brush shuddered.

Unless it was a moose. If it was moose, it was running from something, and barring obstruction or human interference it would just gallop through the clearing and keep on going out the other side. Probably. Of course, whatever had startled the moose might be right behind it. She couldn‘t think of anything else that would make that much noise coming through the woods, but whatever it was it had to be big to be that loud.

Just before the edge of the clearing the lowest branch of a spruce caught on something, jerked free, and flapped wildly. A piece of wood broke with a sound like a gunshot.

Big and clumsy. Her finger tightened on the trigger.

Kate, no! Old Sam‘s shout came at the same moment as the approaching menace smashed into the clearing.

Very, very carefully, Kate unbent her forefinger from around the trigger. She lowered the rifle with stiff arms. The tiny click of the safety was audible to everyone. For a very long moment there was no other sound in the little clearing, all participants frozen in shocked silence.

Then behind her Holly Haynes made a noise, Auntie Vi exclaimed in horror, and Old Sam swore. Kate let go of the breath she didn‘t know she‘d been holding. Mutt looked up at her and gave a soft whine.

The apparition stood on two legs, all right, but they were clad in jeans that were torn and shredded to above the knee. The legs beneath were a welter of bleeding scratches and oozing wounds. These matched the ones on his arms, bare beneath the fragments of what once had been a dark blue Goretex jacket and a T-shirt so ripped and stained the logo was illegible. His right foot was bare, wrapped in what was probably one of the sleeves of the jacket. The other foot was clad in the remnants of a boot, leather laces wrapped around the sole to hold it in place. His face looked like something off the cornice of Notre Dame. One eye was swollen shut and sealed by a rusty brown flow of blood that had cascaded from a crusty slash that had opened his forehead from between his eyebrows to the hairline on his left temple. The other eye was the merest slit, through which he peered around him as if he were shortsighted.