Harvest Moon Read Online Free

duty or urgency there, but rather a respect for the owner, Jim
Brewer, and her few coworkers that brought her in early every day.
    “Hey, Jim,” Dawn said as she hung up her coat just
inside the double doors that led into the old, shabby bar. The place could
definitely use a few repairs and a fresh coat of paint, but it was homey. There
was something about the smell of beer, greasy food, and stale tobacco that just
seemed right to her. It was the exact opposite of the life she’d led so long
ago, and it suited Dawn just perfectly.
    “God, girl,” Jim said as he lumbered out from behind
the bar and gave his number one waitress a bear hug. Jim might have looked more
beast than man, with a short, unkempt beard and a healthy beer belly, but at
heart, he was a big old softy. “I’m so glad to see you’re okay.”
    “I’m fine,” she assured him. “I take it you saw the
commotion up the street?”
    “Did I ever,” he said, worry touching the crow’s feet
around his eyes. “Rumor is that it’s some hiker who got tangled up with a momma
bear, but I don’t know about that. This close to town and all.”
    “It’s happened before,” Gabe, the cook for Jim’s bar,
said as he poked his head out of the kitchen. Gabe was in his thirties, married
with a couple of kids. He was a little on the gruff side, but once Dawn got to
know him, she saw he was an all right guy, just rough around the edges.
    “It has?” Dawn asked as she grabbed the small apron
she wore around her waist during her shifts.
    “Well, not the mangled corpse part,” Gabe said.
    “Watch your tongue,” Jim warned him. The two often
acted at odds with one another, but really, they were pretty cool. Get a few
drinks in Gabe and he’d go on about how much he respected the old bear that ran
the bar, and Jim was no different.
    “Sorry,” Gabe said. “But I’ve lived here my whole
life, Jim too, and it’s not the first time a bear has wandered up Main Street.”
    “Has anyone been attacked before?” Dawn asked as she
started to wipe down the bar.
    “Well,” Gabe said as he ran a hand through his shaggy
dark hair, “there was this one time…”
    “A long time ago,” Jim cut in. At nearly fifty, he
wasn’t the oldest man in town, but he was the oldest in the bar. “When I was a
pup, maybe fifteen or sixteen, we had a momma bear come through here a couple
times. Now, most folks around here know that when you see a bear and her
babies, you turn the other way, and that’s what we did. Too bad some kids from
Charleston who were up here looking for work didn’t quite get that idea. You
city kids need to have a healthier respect for nature.”
    Dawn knew he was talking about her. She hadn’t said
she was from New York City, she’d never even mentioned the state, but she did
tell people she was from Cleveland. It was half true. She’d spent three months
there before she’d hopped a train for something new.
    “Did the bear kill them?” Dawn asked. She was so
wrapped up in Jim’s story that she was barely paying attention to the cleaning,
though it didn’t matter much. There was a layer of old beer on everything that
would never come out, no matter how much she scrubbed.
    “Nah,” Jim said. “But those idiot kids tried to run
that bear out of town one night after drinking in this very bar. Of course,
that was long before my pappy passed it down to me.”
    “So, what did happen?” Dawn asked.
    “One kid got mangled pretty bad,” Gabe said, cutting
into Jim’s tale.
    “Hey,” Jim barked at him. “It’s my story, let me tell
it.”
    “But you’ve told this story half a hundred times,”
Gabe laughed. “I could tell it myself.”
    “Don’t you have prep to do?” Dawn asked him. Despite
the mutual respect the two men had for each other, Dawn wasn’t in the mood for
one of their pissing contests and she put her foot down right away.
    “Fine,” Gabe relented. “But I’m telling you, that’s
what happened.”
    Once they were