Bear (3 page)

She was still trying to find the snap of the elbow that would whip the motor to life when Homer veered around the point and drew up beside her.She looked at him in daylight. He had a shrewd face, round ink-framed plastic glasses,very false false teeth, little broken veins in his cheeks. He wore a green drill workman’s cap and a red mackinaw. She liked him.

After he showed her again the knack of getting the engine going, she followed him down the channel.He yelled back to her that the water was low this year, and told her the names of the shoals and asked did she know the difference between a shoal and an island? It had to have a tree to be an island.That was important up here.That island there was where old Mrs. Bird was found almost dead one spring among her eleven children. Her husband had gone out across the ice for supplies in January, must have fallen through. She and the children survived the winter on turnips.They were okay but she was in hospital so long the Children’s Aid had to farm out all the kids, and only one ever came back to see her, though she lived to be ninety-four. People still do get lost, he said, winters when the ice is punky.Homer’s grocery store left a sophisticated taste something to desire, but contained the necessities. It made her glad she had grown up on Campbell’s soup and bologna and peanut butter sandwiches. He sold withered potatoes, knobby carrots and wilted cabbages, but good localcheesea nd pale,creamy butter.He apologized for the vegetables. “I have to get the stuff up from Toronto and it don’t keep. You’ll have to eat turnips and cabbages like the rest of us.“She treated herself to a quart of maple syrup and arranged for him to pick up her mail in the nearest town.He waited on her himself. No one else came in.She was aware ofdoors banging and voices calling in the back ofthe building, but there was no sign of his wife or his family.“How’s the bear?” he asked.“Oh, fine, I guess,” she said, not knowing what else to say. “It looks pretty miserable tied up that way.““Don’t forget,however human it looks, it’s awild critter after all. Don’t get soft with it.““Did they take it for walks?” “I don’t know what the hell they did with it, pardon my French.““It could use a swim.““I wouldn’t fool around with it. You might have to get to know it the hard way. I guess it looks kind of little when it’s all curled up in the shed, but a bear’s a heavy animal. It can knock your head off with a wallop. I bet it weighs six hundred pound.““Didn’t Mrs. Leroy ever take it out?“He grinned. “Oh, she was a funny one. I’ve seen her with that bear. She used to take one of them straight kitchen chairs out to the back yard and sit and just talk at it for hours. Maybe French talk, maybe Cree, I couldn’t make it out.She’s a wonderful knitter, Mrs. Leroy, and on a fine day she’ll sit there and talk and knit a mile a minute. The two of them together, they were a sight to see.” His eyes got shifty again. There was something he had thought of, but didn’t want to say.“It isn’t vicious, is it?““That bear? Jeepers, no. It’s just… well, he’s just a plain old bear, and he’s been on that chain for so many years there’s no telling what would happen if you lethim loose.He might kill you, he might just sit there, he might walk across the yard and take a leak.Mrs. Leroy wouldn’t think very much of you if you let it get away, though, and neither would the farmers further back along the shore.“She promised she would not, and drove the motorboat home alone, back along the creeping river.The water was dark, yet clear and metallic-looking, too cold to trail a hand in.She steered between shoals and islands and reedy shores to her dock,and carried her groceries into the isolated house.That evening, she went upstairs with a rag and polished glass inkwells and penracks and the yellowed globes. She fussed with the telescope until she could see fardown the empty river in the last of the light. Then she lighted the Tilley lamp, put a roll of labels in her typewriter and began the imperious business of imposing numerical order on a structure devised internally and personally by a mind her numbers would teach her to discover.At first she worked quickly, almost desperately. She had a presentiment of an unknown joy awaiting her, a feeling that it could easily be taken away. She must be virtuous and efficient. It was like the smell that scented the air morning and evening, elusive and mysterious. Everyone wants to be Robinson Crusoe and to be a half-hatched Robinson Crusoe is almost unbearable. Ifthe experience is not to be taken away I must begin on it at once, she thought.After an hour, she was shivering. She went downstairs, put on a pullover, put the kettle on. On her way to the outdoor toilet she could see the bear’s night-green eyes following her. As she went through the yard to the back door he got up and grunted. She stood quite still, letting her eyes adjust to the dark so she could see his dark form. He lumbered gently forward, his head lower than his scruff, looking bashfully at her.When he reached the end of his chain, he sat down on his hams and grunted like a pig. Picking her way over the dark rough boards of the woodshed, she went in and got him the scraps from her supper. He lapped them up at once, then looked at her it seemed, beseechingly. She stood as far back from him as she could, and held out a stiffened hand.

He licked it with a long, ridged, curling tongue, but when she tried to pat his head he swung it sideways and away from her. Upstairs again, she cruised the bookcases in the dim light, lovingly turning their square brass keys, gently easing out a volume here, a volume there.The collection was very fine, though it pointed to no scholarly proclivities, and it had been maintained by Cary’s descendants so that it covered the nineteenth century in three languages. Hume. Smollett. Hume and Smollett. Byron, of course, and the other romantics. Sheridan, Dickens. Thackeray. Eliot. No Trollope. Mrs. Gaskell. Bulwer Lytton.Ah,Darwin— but not a first edition. Jane Austen, o fcourse. DeMaupas sant. Lamartine.Goethe, Schiller, a lot more German, though she did not read German.Those credits to womankind, rs.Hemans (‘The boy stood on the burning deck…’) and Eliza Cook (T love it, I love it; and who shall dare/To chide mefor loving that old arm-chair?’). Young’s Night Thoughts. Oh, everything.

She had arrived in her trade because she loved reading. It struck her as she peered into the great bookcases how little reading she did now. Mostly she dealt with undecipherable papers and overwritten maps. As far as books went, she was concerned with their externals only. Here, she would have time to read.She found one volume of the Penny Cyclopaedia produced by the Society for the Promotion ofUseful Knowledge, under the chairmanship of Lord Brougham, lying on its side. She picked it up and a slip ofpaper floated to her feet.

In the Linnaean system, brown, beautifully curled, minute handwriting told her, Ursus comes between Mustela and Didelphis. The order includes Arctos, the true bears; Meles, the badgers; Lotor, the raccoon; and Luscus, the wolverine. Walk: plantigrade; grinders: tuberculated; stature: large. Carnivorous. Frugivorous. Tail generally short. Brain and nervous system fairly developed. Claws for digging, non-retractable. Senses acute. Cylindrical bones more similar to man than those of other quadrupeds, esp. the femur. Therefore able to rear up and dance. Tongue has a longitudinal groove. Kidneys lobed as in bunches of grapes; no seminal vesicles. Bone in penis. In the female, the vagina is longitudinally ridged. Clitoris resides in a deep cavity. Sparks showered from thecedar logs.She checked the handwriting against the samples in her files. It was indisputably Cary’s.When the lamp began to fail she went to bed and dreamt ofwhat she had read on the other side of the paper: saw the Kamchatkanson their high peninsula looking at her through the windows and snow masks they make from the gut of the bear, and heard the whistle of mown grass falling where they slashed it with the sharpened shoulderblade of the bear.

Morning in the city is to be endured only. There is no dawn any more than there is real darkness. There is only, after rainfall or street-sweeping, the sound of tires squealing on wet asphalt. Here, she woke shivering again and raised her nose to the air like an animal. The light in the bedroom was extraordinarily white. She pulled herself out of the Colonel’s baronial bed and went to the window. The world was furred with late spring snow.

It was the soft, thick stuff that excites you unless you are driving or half dead, packing snow already falling in caterpillars off the greening branches. She sniffed again.Snow has its own cold smell.She put her boots on and went outside and peed in it, wondering how many years it was since she had yellowed snow.There was no sign of the bear.He had crawled into his byre to hibernate again.She stood outside, listening. Small birds cheeped. The river sucked at reeds and stones. Branches cracked, rubbed against each other. Bird-feet rustled in dry leaves. Perhaps, too, that was the bear snuffling and snoring in his house.She went inside, hating to disturb the precious felted silence. She filled the kettle, nervously craping the dipper against the pail.She dressed and heard the tearing noises of her clothes. She stomped her shoes on and heard the laces whirring against each other as she tied them up.She scraped the butter knife against her toast. Stirred hercoffee with a jangling spoon.Not everyone, she thought, is fit to live with silence.The bear came out of his shed when she rattled his pan. Wearing the same cowed expression, he scooped his dish towards him with his paw.She held herhand out. He put his muzzle briefly in her palm. Then turned away to eat. Good.They were beginning to be friends. She went upstairs to card and classify in the brilliant light. The Colonel’s will specified that the books were not to be separated from the house. She and the Director had plotted to found a summer Institute, if the property was suitable.Now it looked to her as if the material he owned was all imported.The use of the building by scholars would only be justified if there was local history involved. You do not come to northern Ontario to study London in 1825. Or do you? she wondered mischievously.The snow continued to drop away from the branches, shooting across her sightlines as she worked. By noon it was gone. She put on her boots and went outside to explore.The obvious thing about islands, which one tends to forget once one haslanded on them, is that they are water-creatures. This one was small. Cary’s clearing was bounded by almost impenetrable bush. There was no beach, and here the bush came right down to the shore.To the south of the house, however, a path had been cleared to the southern point, and there, in one of the Colonel’s magnificent maples, a kind of crow’s nest had been built. She climbed its wooden ladder and, shading her eyes with her hand like a cartoon sailor,saw far beyond the river’s mouth to the open reaches of the inland sea.

She found a break in the brush, and entered the forest solemnly, as if she were trespassing in a foreign church. The ground was spongy, creeping and seething with half-born insects, still white here and there with the morning’s snow.She made her way,convincing herself that on an island she could not get lost, to a rise in the land,climbed its littered slope,and found herself standing by a minute pond. Bubbles ofmarsh gas or beaver breath rose lazily from its black depths. She looked up and saw a pair of goshawks high in a dead tree, ill-wishing her.She went back to the house swinging her arms for exercise. She wished it were warm enough to swim.She went upstairs to work. She was, after all, and however chilled, a reliable person. She sat down at her desk and proceeded to record what there was to record. Then, somehow, because she wondered how he would react to the snow, she began to think about the bear.His bigness, or rather his ability to change the impression he gave of his size, excited her. Yesterday he stood there staring at me like a fur coat, she thought, and today he looked like some kind of raccoon. She went to the window to see what he looked like now and she heard a very odd kind of sound: a crooning or mourning.Yet from her aerie she could see nothing.She went downstairs. Out the back door. There, on the stoop satan old, old woman.She was babbling and crooning to the bear. She wasan old indian woman. She looked like the woman who used to peddle bittersweet on the street when Lou was a kid, a toothless old Indian crone in many cardigans and running shoes,ten cents a bunch, and Lou bought it and her mother said it was a waste of money, a form of begging. She was babbling to the bear, who lay half-in half-out of his shed watching her closely. One of his eyes winked once. Lucy Leroy looked round, almost at once.“Alio,” she said, holding out a withered hand, smiling with toothless gums. She was totally withered. Lou imagined the body under the old pinned clothes, imagined its creases and weatherings, the old thin dugs: I will be like that, she thought.But the woman’s eyes were alive as oysters. She held out herhand.“New lady,“she said.“New lady. Good bear.Good bear.““I didn’t hear your boat.“Lucy grinned unnervingly, still holding onto her hand.“Good bear,” she said.“Good lady.Take care of bear.” “I don’t think I really know how to take care ofhim,” she said modestly citified. Lucy’s live eyes crinkled.“Good bear,” she said.“Bear your friend.I was a young girl once. I camefrom Swift Current. Married a man,came here.Now I live on Neebish.He’s a good bear. I am one hundred years old. I can read. I went to the mission school.““And the bear?“Lucy’s face crinkled with ome inconceivable merriment. She did not look one hundred years old, only eternal. “Shit with the bear,” she said.“He like you, then. Morning, you shit, he shit. Bear lives by smell.He like you.“Lou restrained herself from shuddering and heard a motorboat.Lucy stood up.Shecame barely to Lou’s breast. She was old and crooked. “That’s Joe. I go.“Snap, crackle, she was off. The bear didn’t move, and neither did Lou. She had no time to. Lucy was gone, that was all, a hundred years old, gleaming, toothless, and gone.A boat gunned off.Lou squatted and looked at the bear.She thought of the outhouse with its frilled enamel lids. She thought of European toilets with footprints and holes.She looked at the bear and began to laugh. He looked as if he was laughing too.

The next morning when she went outside, the sun, as if to compensate for the aberration ofthe late snow, had real warmth to it. She stood for a moment and stretched in it. It raked her skin through her pyjamas. She thought for a moment, then gingerly tiptoed to the bear’s cabin, hunkered by its wall,and with some difficulty moved her bowels meagrely.The bear, lying with his body inside, his head in the sun, moved its nostrils only. “Come on,” she said, when she was finished the humiliating act. “Come on.” Tugged at his chain. Unhooked the chain from the post.At first he did not respond; then he got groggily to its feet. When she tugged hard, he padded after her. Hoping that he would not run and drag her fatally after him, she led him to the water.He was nervous and passive. There was no tautness in the chain.She kicked off her boots, hitched up her pyjama bottoms and led him gingerly into the water. He sat down and wiggled his matted bottom against the stones. Then he moaned lightly, and put his head down to drink. Finished. Looked up at her for a signal.What should he do? She saw that her feet had turned blue and stepped out of the water behind him, on to thewarm new grass.He trained and went forward, then changed his mind and came back to her.To her this first small rebellion was a return of life, and she rejoiced in it.She let the chain loosen,without letting it go. He lowered himself again into the shallow water, and a great shudder made eddies around him. His short tail wagged out behind him.He edged himself further forward and slapped the water with his paws.She was afraid for a moment that he wouldpull away, but no, when he reached the end of his chain he backed up, relaxed, and sat with his back to her, sniffing the air around him. Impulsively, she scooped water with her hands and poured it over him.He shook and shuddered. She could have crowed. Afterwards on the bank, he shook and wet her through. She laughed, let his chain go entirely and dashed to the house. Found an old brush in the woodshed, sat down and curried him.What a mother I am, she thought.In the afternoon, another slip of paper fell out of another book