Chasing the Bear (3 page)

So I stood with my shotgun leveled, hoping that maybe, if he charged and I hit him in the face, it would make him turn. The dog was going crazy, dashing out a few feet and barking and snarling and running back to lean hard against my leg. Everything seemed to move very slowly.

And then my father was beside me. He hadn’t made any noise coming. Later he told me he heard the dog and from the way she sounded, he was pretty sure it was a bear. He had a shotgun too, but it was no better than what I had. But he also had a big old .45 hog leg of a revolver that he always carried in the woods. He took it out and cocked it and we stood. The bear dropped to all fours and snorted and grunted and dipped its head and stared at us awhile. Then it turned around and left.

“My
God,” Susan said. “What did your father say?”

“He said, ‘Dog’s no good for birds for the rest of the day and we probably ain’t either.’ So we went home.”

“And he never said what a
brave boy
or anything?”

“He said I was smart because I’d lived to hunt another day. Then we went home and sat at the kitchen table with Patrick and Cash and I told them about what happened. Cash got up and got a bottle of scotch from the kitchen cabinet and four glasses. Then my father poured scotch in three of them and some Coke in the fourth. And we drank together.”

“You’d acted like a man,” Susan said. “So he treated you like a man.”

“In his way,” I said.

Susan smiled.

“‘That brown liquor,’” she said, “‘which not women, not boys and children, but only hunters drank.’”

“William Faulkner,” I said.

“Very good,” Susan said. “For a man with an eighteen-inch neck.”

“I told you they read to me a lot.”

She said it again, “‘Not women, not boys and children.’”

“Sounds sort of sexist, doesn’t it?” I said. “Ageist too.”

“Maybe we can have his Nobel Prize revoked,” Susan said.

“Good thing was, that whenever I was in trouble, I’d think about that bear and it helped.”

“Because you were brave then?” Susan said.

“I guess, although to tell you the truth, I really think more about sitting around the table drinking soda while my father and my uncles drank their scotch.”

“The ritual,” she said. “More than the event.”

“I guess,” I said. “I thought a lot about it when I was in the woods with Jeannie.”

“Jeannie?” Susan said. “In the woods?”

“It wasn’t what you think,” I said.

I
was hanging outside the variety store with Pearl and some guys when Luke Haden’s car pulled up at the stoplight, with Jeannie in the front seat. I had never seen her riding with her father before. She saw me through the rolled-up window and mouthed the word
HELP
at me.
HELP. HELP.
I started toward the car and the light changed and the car moved forward.

There was a trash truck behind it, much slower to move.

“Pearl,” I said. “Go home.”

Then I stepped up onto the back of the trash truck. There were plenty of places to stand and plenty of places to hang on. We used to ride the trucks a lot. See which of us could get the furthest before some cop spotted us and pulled the truck over and made us get off. I knew from experience that the drivers normally had the right-hand rear-view mirror set wider so they could see the next lane, and, therefore, they never saw us. I stayed on the right-hand side of the truck, peering ahead at Luke Haden’s car. It wasn’t much of a car, a big old Ford sedan, with cardboard taped over the back where the rear window got smashed in. It had been maroon, maybe, when it was new. But what with dirt and rust and stuff it was a little hard to say what color it was now.

The car turned right, onto River Street. I knew that River Street was short, and as the truck slowed at the intersection, I jumped off and ran downhill after the car. When I got to the end, the Ford was parked on the side of the road, empty. There was a path that led to the river. I went down it, moving slower, being more careful. At the end of the muddy path was a little jetty with a couple of rowboats tied to it. I heard the sound of an outboard motor. I stepped out onto the jetty and looked. Jeannie and her father were in a bass boat with her father in back at the motor and Jeannie sitting sort of hunched up in the front.

I stared after them as they disappeared around the bend. I felt something nudge at my leg. It was Pearl; she must have followed the trash truck and tracked me down River Street.

“Okay,” I said. “I can’t leave you here.”

I got into one of the rowboats and gestured Pearl in after me. She sat up front, and we pushed off after them.

There was a single oar in the boat and it was broken, so I had only a short handle with a blade. It wasn’t much use, but I was able to get the rowboat out into the middle of the river, where the current took over. Pretty soon, the sound of the motor faded. I used the broken oar to steer. I wasn’t going to catch them at this rate, but maybe I could find where they went. Besides, I didn’t know what else to do. And if I found them, then what? All I had was a jackknife. I didn’t know what to do about that either. So I just drifted, following Jeannie down the big river, under the dark arch of trees that grew out from both shorelines. I felt like I was in a tunnel, without much choice about where I was going. And with no clear idea of what to do when I got there.

“How
old were you?” Susan said.

“Maybe fourteen,” I said.

“Weren’t you scared?”

“I was terrified,” I said.

“You couldn’t tell the police or your father?”

“I’d have lost them,” I said. “I didn’t know where they were going. I figured when they got to the river that they were going to one of his hideouts. But I didn’t know where that was, not even which direction, you know? Upriver or down.”

“And you had no time to think,” Susan said. “And you were fourteen years old.”

“Exactly,” I said.

“How about the dog?” Susan said.

“She was kind of comforting, actually. She’d been on the river with me a lot over the years, and she liked riding in the boat.”

“Why did you do it?” she said.

“Go after her?”

“Yes. Why didn’t you say, it’s an issue between a father and his child. It’s not my business.”

“I never thought about that,” I said.

“But you were fourteen years old and alone.”

“It seemed like the right thing to do,” I said.

“I’m not saying it wasn’t,” Susan said.

“My father used to tell me, ‘Every person is afraid sometimes. Thing is not to let it run you. Thing is to go ahead and do what you need to do.’ ”

An
occasional turtle splashed off a log into the water as we drifted past. In the front of the rowboat Pearl was very interested in the turtles. As she was with the frogs that jumped or the jays that flew about under the high treetops. On a small island in the middle of the river we saw a huge snapping turtle that made an odd noise, between a hiss and a grunt, at us as we floated by him. Pearl laid her long ears back flat and hunched a little at him.

She’d hunted enough and been trained enough so that she never made any noise in the woods. She’d bark at people from the front porch of our house. But in the woods she never made a sound unless we ran into a drunken bear.

Occasionally we passed a fishing camp or a little summer cottage with a boat dock. And, of course, here and there along the riverbank, with wide empty spaces in between, there were towns and roads and cars and ma-and-pa stores and people doing the stuff that people do. But on the river, mostly, we were as alone as if we had gone back in time.

White perch broke up from under water now and then to snap a dragonfly, and if I looked straight down into the rust-colored water, sometimes I’d see a channel catfish. The river smelled swampy, and along the shoreline among the trees were a tangle of wild blueberry plants and the little thorny vines that I didn’t know the name of that caught at your ankles when you were hunting.

The banks of the river were muddy and the roots of trees that grew close to the river were exposed. Tree roots are not good looking. Once I saw a doe come down through the underbrush and the root tangle to drink from the river, picking her way so lightly it was like her feet were reaching down to touch the ground. Above us all, a hawk circled and banked without any effort. Once in a while he would suddenly drop like a rock into the water and fly off with a fish or a frog. He would disappear for a while and then he would be back, circling and banking effortlessly. Pearl watched him for a long time.

I wasn’t wearing a watch, but the sun was very low when I spotted the bass boat. It was pulled up onto a small muddy area at the edge of a big island in the middle of the river where the river was at its wildest. The motor had been tilted into the boat, so that what I saw was the naked propeller staring out at me.

I maneuvered myself downriver, which was the only direction I could go, past the bass boat and in among the exposed roots of a cluster of birch saplings. I tied the boat to one of the saplings and sat listening. Pearl looked at me over her shoulder. What are we doing?

I put my finger to my lips, though she hadn’t made any noise and I knew she wouldn’t. The woods weren’t quiet. There was the sound of the river and of frogs making frog sounds and birds twittering. But I heard no human sound.

I gestured to Pearl and she went out of the boat among the root tangle and up the muddy bank as lightly, almost, as the doe had come down to drink, a little ways back. I followed her. I got my feet wet and slipped once on the muddy bank, but in a minute we were both standing in a small clearing among the trees. Pearl began suddenly to sniff near the edge of some brush. Then she darted into the bushes and scrabbled around in there a minute and came out with a dead muskrat, whose neck she had just broken.

“Lucky you,” I said to her. “Supper.”

She showed me the muskrat. I nodded and patted her head.

“Go on,” I said. “Eat it.”

She looked at me and dropped the dead animal and looked at me and wagged her tail.

“Go on,” I said.

She dropped her head and nosed it over onto its back and bit into its belly.

“Yum,” I said.

There were some wild blueberries and I ate some while Pearl ate her muskrat. The blueberries weren’t much. But they were better than raw muskrat.

Luke
Haden was kind of a legend among the kids, a big shambling unshaven bear of a man with lousy teeth. The town boogeyman. We were all scared of him. He had a bad reputation as a brawler, although he had always stayed clear of my father and my uncles. I never knew what he did for a living. Stole things, mostly, I think. Poached game sometimes. Odd jobs now and then.

My father said he was “a man who sucked up and bullied down.” Which was probably true. But I was a kid and he scared the hell out of me.

But I needed to do what I needed to do. So when Pearl finished her muskrat, we started to ease through the woods to see what we could see. I could feel the fear in my stomach and hear it in my breathing. I smelled wood smoke and put my hand on Pearl to make sure she stayed with me.

We went toward the smoke.

In a small clearing I could see a fire. Jeannie was sitting on the ground near it, looking at nothing; some sort of lean-to shelter, made of scraps, was set up near the fire. Where was her father? I inched a little closer.

I smelled something. Something grabbed my arm. I made a little yelping noise that I hoped Jeannie didn’t hear.

“What are you doing sneaking round here, boy?” Luke Haden said.

He loomed over me.

“I’m not doing nothing,” I said.

The smell was booze. Not just on Luke’s breath. His whole self smelled of it.

He gave me a heavy shake.

“You better say more than that, boy,” he said. “Or you are in a world of trouble.”

“Honest, mister,” I said.

Luke slapped me across the face and everything hazed for a minute.

Beside me Pearl made a noise I’d never heard. It wasn’t the hysterical barking/growling sound she’d made with the bear. This was a low growl that seemed to come out of her very center and get stronger as she growled.

“Wha’s that?” Luke said, and let go of my arm and took a step back.

The minute he let go, I headed for the woods. Pearl came with me. Behind us I could hear Luke crashing into the woods. But he was fat and drunk. My haze had cleared, and Pearl and I could run like hell. In a minute or so, he gave up.

Pearl and I went to where we’d left the boat. I wanted to get in it and get off the river and run. But I couldn’t. I looked at the boat. Pearl sat and waited.

“I can’t run off,” I said to her.

“Why
didn’t you paddle to the riverbank and ask for help?”

“It was pretty empty country south of where I lived.”

“Still, there must have been towns or a highway or something.”

“Sometimes.”

“So why didn’t you try to get help?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Find a phone someplace and call the police?”

“I don’t know.”

“Call your father?” Susan said.

“I don’t know.”

The trees and grass muted the traffic noise outside the Public Garden. The swan boats glided. The ducks followed. We watched them for a while.

“You were a boy,” Susan said.

“Yep.”

“Up against not only an adult man, but a big, brutish adult male.”

“Yes.”

“Because Jeannie was your friend.”

“Yes.”

“Did you think you loved her?”

“No,” I said. “I knew she wasn’t the one.”