Number One Nears the End
Adams was badly wounded and laid out on a pile of blankets on the ground when the stranger hiked unannounced into his camp. He was in the middle of deliberations with himself over whether to get up and walk until he passed out, or just stay were he was until something came along and ate him. For some number of days, he spent his time fingering the wound edges along his arm, gazing up into the tree canopy, losing and regaining consciousness. His small stock of dried venison had developed a disagreeable coppery flavor, and the strength to chew it was leaving him, but so was his appetite, so he decided that everything was counterpoised. The pain was almost ignorable, like the tickling sensation of the huge and glossy black ants walking over his lips and fingers. His arm throbbed somewhere in the distance.
On perhaps the fourth morning of this, he heard heavy boots marching toward him through the underbrush. He gripped his Colt and waited. The intruder looked to be about six feet tall, 180 pounds, and from the way he walked on his right foot, Adams surmised that he had either a nail in the sole or a very serious plantar wart. His beard was long and matted, as was his hair, and his outfit was torn, but he carried a relatively new rifle and had a pistol in his belt. The skin of his arms was an unnatural bronze color, the same color as his hair. Adams slowly lifted the Colt with his good arm and drew a bead on the stranger’s face. The only part visible was an eye, the rest of his features obscured by beard hair, so Adams aimed somewhere into the thatch. If the intruder was stupid enough to pick a fight with him, then he planned on blowing part of his face off as an opening instead of killing him quickly.
Adams tried to yell, but it came out as a wheeze.
“If you like walking and breathing and shitting, you’ll stop right there and lay your weapons on the ground, because Number One says you could die at any second.”
Adams always called himself Number One. Everyone else was Number Two. If you crossed him seriously enough, before shooting, stabbing or clubbing you, or at least making you run away with no clothes, he’d say “You’re Number Two. Fuck off back to your shithole.”
The intruder seemed impressed in spite of the command’s weak delivery and he slowly set the rifle, two pistols and three knives of various lengths on the ground. Then he pulled down his buckskins and unstrapped from his thigh what looked to be a short bladed sword. He told Adams that his name was Shasta, and that he’d been hiking down from his home in Idaho along the Emigrant Trail alone, seeking his fortune.
“How old are you, twenty?” asked Adams.
“Seventeen,” said Shasta.
“You look just like me, only seventeen,” said Adams.
“I know who you are,” said Shasta. “You’re Grizzly Adams, the famous bear-wrestler.”
“Listen man,” said Adams, “No one calls me that. No one calls me Grizzly or Griz or Little Griz. My name’s John, and you can call me Mr. Adams, or Sir, or if you ever write anything about me, such as a biography or pulp novel, you may refer to me by my initials, JCA. The nicknames are embarrassing.”
“I can’t write or read,” said Shasta.
“Nonetheless,” said Adams.
“Understood,” Shasta replied.
Adams was an old man, and had recently returned to the wilderness of California to try to relive a bit more of the free mountaineering lifestyle before he died. In years past, he’s parlayed his supernatural wildlife skills into a sizable business, selling and trading bears, elk, cougars, wolves, deer and creatures Adams referred to as Black Hyena Bears. Alive or dead, he sold them first to local Indian villages, and then to white settlements, for ring fights and meat. He became a gifted animal trainer, so gifted it was spooky. Sometimes he scared himself when a bear looked him in the eyes and seemed to talk to him directly in his brain. After a questionable partnership with a famous circus promoter in New York, who robbed him and traded on his name, he finally realized how exhausted he was. He sold everything at a loss to the circus, left his wife, and rode a horse back across the country to the mountains of his youth in order to die in some kind of peace.
“As you can see,” said Adams, “something tore up my arm.”
Shasta pulled his pants up and sat across from Adams, Indian-style. Adams asked him to pour cold water on his wounds, which was the only treatment he would allow himself.
“It looks bad from here,” said Shasta. “It’s like an anatomy lesson.”
Adams had fought to the death a particularly vicious mother wolf with nothing but a small knife. He was not, as a rule, looking to tangle with man-eating creatures any more. Though he thought himself as tough as ever, he could sense that his reaction times were not as lightning-fast as they once were, as if he were growing foggy around the edges, with the center still clear. He was not as in touch with his surroundings as he once was, and no longer as quick, either.
“These stovepipe legs of mine,” he said.
The wolf had torn up his left forearm after he stumbled into the middle of the dinner she was sharing with her two cubs, each of which seemed to be about the size that she was, though it was hard to tell due to the fading light in the pine trees. All he saw were grey and white blurs. They were eating a deer, slightly rotten, and he knew that he should have smelled it before he was standing in it. He raised his arm to shield his face and the she-wolf tore through it, attempting to break it off. He managed to stab both cubs, then the mother. The pain in his arm, he knew, was amazing, but he couldn’t feel it. He was coated in blood and twigs. He passed out and dreamed some kind of continuation of recent events in which the screams of the wolves kept on screaming as he bled to death from his shredded arm arteries.
“God damn,” said Shasta. “How did you stop it from bleeding?”
“The second cub covered my arm with mud and spit. He wasn’t dead, just stabbed. I couldn’t move, and he made about twenty trips to a nearby creek. Before he went away, he looked at me and said, may you recover in a timely way.”
“Hmm,” said Shasta. He bent forward to examine the gash in detail. It was bright red and black, with some crust of mud still adhered to certain areas of muscle tissue. It smelled like cheese. He poured more water on it.
“If you were not my absolute hero and role model,” said Shasta, “I would be herewith convinced that you are fucking out of your tree.”
“Listen up, whelp,” said Adams. “You are now reminding me of my father, who was an ignorant shoemaker, and an asshole. You kind of look like Dad, and it’s angering me. He never believed what I told him either. His way of showing affection was to increase the beating and fondling sessions from weekly to several times a day. He tried to turn me into a shoemaker too, even though I told him I thought making shoes was stupid, and that he was stupid. He’s how I got to be so invincible in spite of my small size. It’s the one gift that he gave me. Invincibility. Pain stopped bothering me. The ability to speak with animals came from a bunch of witches that I moved in with when I ran away from home. They lived next to a little pond, about a mile from my house, called the Dingle Hole. Everyone in town knew the place was haunted, perhaps by Satan himself, and stayed away from the whole area, so naturally that’s the first place I went. They had a tent and I slept in the bushes adjacent. There were five witches, occasionally more, and they all looked the same and gave me lots of hugs and too much food, mostly trout and squirrel. Contrary to popular belief, witches are nurturing caregivers. Every Saturday a man would arrive with no head. He walked up out of the pond and fucked all the witches at once, in a big writhing ball, like snakes. I watched. At night fiery orbs of light floated over the surface of the pond.”
“Shit,” said Shasta.
“Okay,” said Adams. “If you’re my father returned to me from the grave to torment me in my state of weakness, then what you’re going to do at any moment is punch me in the head so that I’m off my guard, and then move on to some molestation. Maybe we should get it over with.”
“If I’m your father,” said Shasta, “it’s news to me.”
There was a moment of silence, and Adams’ mind drifted, and he recalled a time during his heyday when he and a few associates had narrowly missed killing or bagging the strangest animal he had ever seen. It looked like a giant hedgehog with the head and feet of a bear. Adams was well ahead of the other hunters when he caught sight of the strange animal, and he decided to take it on by hand, so that he could get a better impression of how it would behave. When he charged up to it on foot, knife drawn, it raised its head from the muddy hole it was digging with its nose and claws and lifted up along its spine some short, porcupine-style quills. He hesitated, just for a moment, and the creature dematerialized into the underbrush through a puncture hole of shredded branches.
Adams rallied his companions and they gave chase into the trees. The animal was easy to track due to the trail of destroyed foliage that it left in its wake. The men were quickly forced to leave their mounts behind because of the density of the vegetation and some big granite outcroppings, so they ran, Adams in the lead, trying to catch up. Unexpectedly, at the bottom of a hill, Adams looked up and through the trees saw the animal above them, breathing heavily, tongue out, looking back at them.
“That’s a fucking coyote, you cock,” said a scrappy hunter named Redding. “You said it was some kind of monster.”
Adams ignored him, transfixed on what seemed to be their quarry. It appeared to be getting bigger, walking its front legs up a tree trunk. It was stretching itself, but it was also shedding its fur at an amazing rate, the hairs falling around it like a heavy grey vapor.
“What in the name of Jesus,” said another party member, “is wrong with that dog?”
Then, there was a naked man standing in its place, teenaged, skinny, shivering.
“A caterpillar,” someone said.
Adams felt his vision going dark.
“You are going to die,” said some one else, the voice very close.
“You’re in my personal space, asshole,” said Adams. Some-one was feeding him carrion, the rotten deer. He opened his eyes.
There was the stranger’s face, framed by trees.
“Shasta,” Adams mumbled. “What the hell are you doing, still here? Get lost.”
“You need nutrition,” said Shasta. He was forcing Adams’ own swollen arm into his mouth, and the vinegary flavor of sick blood flooded his tongue. The arm was bloated, the skin stretched tight.
“The infection has spread throughout your body, into your eyes and brain,” said Shasta. “That’s obvious.”
“Fine,” said Adams, and lost consciousness.
