About this story
Between one bear scare and the next he tells you what he saw as Professor Smith: a student reddening in a lecture hall, cities burning, a barricade failing floor by floor, and a final walk that left him alone on an empty road with no one else left living that he knew of.
How it opens
Sixty years after the Scarlet Death, a forest had swallowed the old railway to San Francisco.
Edwin, trains once crossed this embankment faster than any hunter can run.
You call the rail useless, yet its marks and this coin still tell me their dates.
A grizzly blocked the trail, and your bow could only irritate it at that distance.
Hare-Lip should move the herd while I draw it back into the trees.
Choose
Strike the rail and use the noise to turn the bear away.
Let the dogs harry it while we lead the goats across the washout.
Abandon the goats and keep every person together.