He wanted to say more. He wanted a moment to memorize her face, to smell her scent. Something. But there was no time. Without warning, his grizzly surged to the fore. Survival instinct, probably, because Nanook attacked without sound.
Simon dove to the side, shifting midleap. His mind stepped aside and the animal came to the fore. His claws slipped on the hard concrete. This was not fighting in the woods as he was used to. This was the urban jungle and he had no weapon or protection in this open concrete space.
Nevertheless, he spun and faced a bear fully a third larger than him. Nanook had light golden brown fur and dark narrow eyes, plus sharp claws in paws that looked broader than a human head. And his jaw opened wide to expose teeth that could easily crush a man’s spine. Or even a grizzly’s.
Simon roared and he reared up. Fortunately, he wasn’t stupid enough to attack. Not at his lesser weight.
The whole goal of a bear attack was to grab hold and get access to the neck. The back of the neck, the jaw, anything that a bear’s mouth could crush. Failing that, a good bite that holds could toss a lesser weighted opponent to the side. Maybe expose throat or belly to a well-placed claw.
Nanook went for a brute-force attack. He reared up and pushed forward. Simon had no choice but to meet and grapple.
There was no way to win this, he thought over and over, even as he struggled for a solution. He lost ground in the grappling, as would always happen with an opponent so much larger. Nanook twisted him around and his teeth dug in. Simon adjusted, rolling with the move and using his more flexible body to escape, but it was a losing battle. He’d landed no blows on Nanook and though the bigger bear seemed winded, he showed no signs of stopping.
He felt the rage build inside his grizzly. A dark, feral possession that started to black out his thinking mind. This was the core of his animal, but it would not save him. Though vicious, the grizzly alone could not prevail.
Which left him with a single choice. He could merge his human mind with the animal. Not a distancing, with one in the forefront and the other completely detached, but a complete joining where man and animal survived as one. He never did that because his priorities got screwed up. His human rationality changed in bad ways. Like the time as a teen when he’d nearly killed his best friend. Since then, he simply flipped back and forth, like difference faces of the same coin. Grizzly. Human. Never both at once.
But it was his only hope.
So he did it. And he prayed his friends and his sanity survived.
