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I scrambled backward, piss-wet leaves and dirt caking my ass and thighs as I kicked and clawed away from her.

I saw, in my mad scramble, eight short, brown, furry little legs almost hidden in the undergrowth, and thus the source of the mama bear's protective instincts.

Something crashed through the woods—Jax.

He skidded to a stop, standing over my prone form with a massive tree branch in both hands, wound up like a batter at the plate. "HEY!" He shouted at the top of his lungs. "GET AWAY! GO!"

He swung the branch, and the bear roared, a deafening bellow that left my ears ringing and a sob trapped in my throat. Jax only roared back, wordless and feral.

I kept scrambling backward, away, away, trying to shove my one bootless foot through the leg hole of the flight suit so I could at least face my death with my pants on. Who knew where the other boot was.

My heart stopped beating entirely, then, as the bear snarled, head tilted to one side, jaw open to show a mouthful of fangs, one massive paw raking at Jax—he ducked under the paw like a bobbing and weaving boxer, his roar of rage renewed, and swung the branch with all of his power.

And my god, what a strike.

It knocked the bear off-balance, even if only out of shock, and she staggered, slumped to all fours…

And then charged at Jax, teeth and claws first.

I screamed again, this time with words: "Jax! Watch out!"

Jax managed to wedge the branch, as thick as my arm, lengthwise between the creature’s gaping jaws and pushed, forcing its maw wider and wider. The bear twisted her head this way and that, trying to dislodge it, but Jax only pushed harder, feet digging into the earth. He may as well have been pushing at the Empire State Building, however. With a garbled bellow, the she-bear gnashed her jaws together, snapping the branch like dry spaghetti, her head whipping this way and that in incandescent fury that this puny human dared confront her.

Maybe I'm anthropomorphizing a little, though.

She certainly seemed pretty damned pissed off, though. Her roar seemed to carry a note of affront to my ringing ears.

Jax now held two lengths of branch, each roughly three feet long. Defiant, he adjusted his stance, dancing sideways away from me as the bear pawed at him, angling her away from me, giving me a chance to stab my foot through the damned hole at long last and scramble to my feet, frantically tugging the garment into place and then looking for a weapon of any kind.

Our filleting knife was in the backpack, and that was the sum total of our weaponry, except the flare gun, and we'd need the flares for when the SAR bird finally finds us.

Jax lunged as the bear did, twisting to one side in a breath-snatching dodge of a giant, claw-tipped paw, and swung his right hand, cracking the stick across the bear's skull. The piece of branch shattered, but the bear staggered, shaking her head. Jax brought his other hand up in a scything off-hand uppercut that smacked the bear's jaws together with an audible crack, knocking her to her haunches.

"RUN!" Jax screamed at me. "FUCKING RUN GODDAMMIT!"

"FUCK YOU!” I screamed back. “HELL NO!”

I spied a rock under a fern leaf, one of several chunks of granite dislodged in decades past from the wall, each one the size of my fist or bigger. I snagged one and hurled it at the bear. And oh yeah, I was an all-state softball pitcher in high school—tiny but mighty, my teammates used to say, because I could hurl those giant neon balls freaky fast. I pitched a second rock at the bear right after the first, which thumped against her haunch with a hollow sound and a surprisingly dog-like yelp of surprised pain. I did a full wind-up, step, and throw the third time, and this one lanced into her skull, making her stagger again, shaking her great, shaggy head, and roaring in furious pain. Blindly now—as my second throw had impacted near her eye, judging by the way she was shaking her head—she launched herself once more at Jax. My third throw, and my last chunk of granite, had ricocheted off the back of her skull with what a satisfyingly brutal crunch, but now she was hurt and angry enough to not care.

She had Jax in her sights and wasn't about to be distracted until she'd turned him into bloody ribbons.

I lurched toward them, empty-handed and idiotic, unsure of what I was going to do but knowing "nothing" wasn't one of the options. I tripped over a dead-fallen branch; it wasn't thick enough to do real damage, likely, but I might be able to buy him some time.

He was backpedaling as she lunged. A bellow shook the forest, and then I saw Jax catch up against a tree trunk, bounce off of it, and topple backward to his ass.

"No!" I screamed. "HERE! HERE!"

She was fixated, my screeching scream not even registering.

Fuck!

I saw the whole thing happen.

She was on top of him, now. He kicked up at her, shouting wordlessly, lips curled in a snarling rictus, and his foot caught her under the jaw. The kick bought him a split second to scrabble backward, hands flailing at the forest floor for anything to wield in self-defense.

He found a piece of stick and slashed at her with it, but it was barely thicker than my wrist and shattered like porcelain without slowing the mammoth, furious creature.

I watched her retaliate, three-inch-long claws slashing at Jax.