About the Author

Will Hobbs is the award-winning author of nineteen novels, including Far North, Crossing the Wire, and Take Me to the River.

Never Say Die began with the author's eleven-day raft trip in 2003 down the Firth River on the north slope of Canada's Yukon Territory. Ever since, Will has been closely following what scientists and Native hunters are reporting about climate change in the Arctic. When the first grolar bear turned up in the Canadian Arctic, he began to imagine one in a story set on the Firth River.

A graduate of Stanford University, Will lives with his wife, Jean, in Durango, Colorado.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One

Do you think there could still be any grizzlies in the mountains? Cloyd asked.

Up and out of the yellow pines they rode and into the aspens, their quaky leaves shimmering with the slightest breeze. Out of the blue skies and into the clouds and the rolling thunder. Out of the heat and the stale smell of the low country and into the windblown freshness of the high.

In search of a lost Spanish gold mine.

Up ahead, the old man stroked the white bristles of his beard and rode on without answering. Cloyd knew that the old man was deep in thought. Walter wouldnt give a quick answer to his question about the grizzlies. Walter knew how important it was.

It was the middle of August, and they were following the Pine River Trail into the mountains. Walter Landis led on the sorrel mare, trailing his four packhorses. Cloyd followed on the blue roan, trailing four more.

Around a bend, the old man had reined in the mare and was waiting for him to draw up alongside.

Dunno about your grizzlies, he said. That one you saw Rusty kill, it really couldve been the last grizzly in Colorado.

It wasnt the reply Cloyd had been hoping to hear. Hed kept his dream to himself, that there were others. There had to be. It was too hard, knowing that if he had never talked about seeing the bear, Walters old friend would never have tracked it and killed it. It wasnt something Cloyd could get over. He had boasted to the best hunter, trapper, and tracker in the mountains that he had seen a bear, a huge brown bear.

Cloyd was surprised that Walter had mentioned Rustys name. Maybe the old man thought enough time had gone by to blur the memory or ease the hurt. For his part, Cloyd was never going to speak the mans name. Words had power, and if he never said the outfitters name aloud, he wouldnt be giving even an ounce more power to this man who had so much and deserved so little.

The man who killed the bear.

Of course, Walter continued, nobodys looked under every tree for grizzes. Youve got to figure, theres only one road over these San Juans in a two-hundred-mile swath, and thats Wolf Creek Pass way over above Pagosa. Thats a lot of wild country-big enough to have hid that bear for twenty-three years. Thats how old the lab in Denver said he was, from the teeth or whatever.

Cloyd regretted that his question had led to talk of the dead bear and the man who killed the bear. He shouldnt have asked his question.

It seemed the bitter taste would never go away.

The red-haired man seemed to have gone away, but hating him, that had never gone away.

Rusty never came anymore to the farm on the Piedra River to check in on his old friend Walter. Cloyd understood why. It was because Cloyd was living at the farm. Cloyd was the only one who knew what really happened up there, high on the Continental Divide.

Rusty would have known that Cloyd wasnt living at the Ute group home in Durango anymore, hadnt returned either to his grandmother over in Utah at White Mesa. He must have heard that Cloyd had stayed at the farm to help the old man get through the winter. But hed never come by, not even once.

Cloyd still couldnt help feeling that the bear had showed itself to him on purpose. Because Cloyd was a Ute, because Utes and bears were kin. Because Cloyd had found a turquoise bearstone by the burial of one of the Ancient Ones, and had named himself Lone Bear.

There wasnt a day that had gone by that the grizzly hadnt come to mind, almost always as Cloyd had first seen him: standing at the edge of the meadow in the Rincon La Osa with the dark spruce timber behind, and big as a haystack. The bear was standing on two legs, flat on his feet the way people stand, forepaws at his sides, with those enormous claws. The brown bear was just watching him, squinting for a better look, his head swaying slightly back and forth, his forehead wide and dished out a little in the middle.

More than anything, the bear was curious. Alert and intelligent and curious. Thats the way Cloyd liked to remember him.

But sometimes that other scene came to mind, the one burned into his memory forever. Time and again it would return without his bidding. On one of the terraces above Ute Lake, the bear was turning over rocks along a line of brush as the red-haired man nocked his arrow and bent his bow. It was a moment that would never let go of Cloyd. He was hollering with all his might into the wind, and the wind was blowing his warning behind him, up and over the Continental Divide. The bear never heard his warning.

Up ahead, Walter was riding out of the trees, and now Cloyd also rode out into the light and the greenness of the longest meadow on the lower river. Here the Pine ran smooth over gravel beds of ground granite, and on the outside of the turns there were deep pools where the biggest cutthroat trout could be found. Cloyd paused for a moment as bits of color in the bushes lining the banks caught his eye. Walter, he called, hold...