During the spring the waters of the creek were dark and cold, a sharp contrast from the milky pool water from which I’d been saving sevies all morning. From bank to bank the stream was more than thirty feet. In the summer, though, with the runoff down to a trickle, the creek bed was mainly dry, littered with rocks and mud and tree branches. The creek itself shrank back until it was only six feet wide, hugging the far bank and deep enough to swim in. That’s where the fish liked to lurk, up under the tree root overhang. From the base of our hill the creek had only another couple hundred yards of independence before it joined the river, adding strength to the flow to town.
I started casting along the banks of the opposing shore, and it wasn’t long before I’d hooked and pulled in a nice little brook trout. I put it in the creel, thinking that a couple more just like it and we’d skip the hamburgers that evening.
A few minutes later I had another one, and then another. Man, they were really biting! I left the creel lying on the bank and moved downstream a bit.
The fourth trout was the best of all, fat and glistening, bending my rod with authority while I wrestled it ashore. I was carefully pulling the hook from its mouth when I got the sense of being watched.
I turned and studied the opposite bank. The slight breeze gave the woods an empty sound, but I knew there was someone there, and I felt the hair on my arms stand up as my skin goose-bumped in alarm.
I gave a start when I looked higher up the hill. A pair of amber eyes met mine, unblinking.
It was a cougar, watching me from a jumble of rocks.
When he saw I’d spotted him, he leaped with nimble ability down the slope, closing the gap between us. With a soaring jump that was almost absurdly graceful, he cleared the part of the creek that was deep water and bounded to a sudden halt in the shallows, making scarcely a spray.
It all happened so quickly I never even had time to gasp. He stopped, staring at me, evaluating the situation. No more than fifteen feet of rocky creek bed lay between us.
There was no retreat possible. Behind me the bank was sandy, capable of supporting some sparse grass but no trees—as if climbing a tree would save me from a cat. If I tried to scramble up the bank the cougar could easily take me from behind. The deep water was too far away and there wasn’t enough of it anyway. There were no good options.
The mountain lion was not running away. His rear end was lowered, his gaze intent. I was reminded of what my dad had said: Ever see a cat jump on a string? That’s what the cougar looked like to me now, a cat getting ready to pounce.
There were no sticks nearby. My rod was handy but so thin I doubted it would be intimidating. What was it Dad said? A bite-sized boy like you could make a tasty meal.
My fear was so strong and real I was sick with it. Stand up big and tall, my father had instructed. What you want is for that cougar to see you as a meal that’s going to cost him, put up a real fight.
I took in a shuddering breath, raising my trembling hands over my head.
The cougar moved again, holding his body low, slinking toward me. There was absolutely no question of his intentions. He stopped, crouching. I stood my ground, quivering.
“Go away,” I said in a whisper.
The cougar stood motionless. His muscles bunched; he sank lower; his lips drew back.
I found my voice. “Grrrr!” I roared at him.
There was no reaction at all.
“Grrrr!”
I watched in terrified fascination as the tension built in the big cat’s shoulders. His eyes were locked on mine. This was it. I braced myself for the attack. I would put up a good fight. I would make him decide that, as meals go, I was too much trouble to bother with.
I swallowed. I would put up a good fight, or I would die.
He was coiling to spring and then he froze, raising his head sharply, his eyes widening. I actually saw the irises turn dark with alarm. The cougar stood still for only a second and then turned and rocketed away, scampering up the bank and disappearing into the brush.
My legs were still weak and trembling. I wasn’t sure what had happened. How had I gone from bite-sized to intimidating in midpounce? I stared after the big cat, terrified he might return, but after ten seconds, then twenty, there was no sign of him.
I was safe.
Then I was enveloped in a moist odor, dank and strong. I turned and found myself face-to-face with the reason why the cougar had broken off his attack and fled.
Standing on two legs, a dozen feet behind me, was an enormous grizzly bear.
chapter
THREE
I THINK now that the shock of seeing the bear and knowing my life was in peril for the second time in less than a minute simply overwhelmed my ability to process emotions. The flash of fear was like a slap: my whole body quaked with it. But then, just like a slap, the sensation receded quickly, leaving me numb. An odd calm overtook me.
The bear and I regarded each other. He was massive, close to six hundred pounds, taller on two legs than my father and immensely muscled in the shoulders. His front legs hung straight down from those shoulders and I took note of the light-colored claws at the tips of his forepaws, four-inch claws that might be the last thing I ever saw.
No wonder the mountain lion fled. There was simply no land animal as fierce as this one, nothing more intimidating or terrible to look upon. I stared at him, quaking, wondering what he was going to do and when he was going to do it.
The bear’s expression was as serene as that of a man regarding a sandwich. I spotted a little drool in the corner of his mouth and assumed this meant he could already imagine what I would taste like on his tongue.
I raised my hands, feeling foolish even as I did so. How could I possibly persuade a bear like this that, as a meal, I would not be worth the bother?
“Grrr!” I growled. It sounded unconvincing, even to me. The bear watched me with a blank expression.
“Grrr!” I roared, showing my teeth, curling my fingers, tensing my muscles.
With a yawn, the bear dropped to all fours and turned away from me and went over to my creel, sniffing at it. As he walked I saw the shimmer of the distinctive silver-tipped fur that confirmed he was a grizzly.
The bear nudged the creel with his nose. I took a step backward. I could see events as they would unfold: the bear would rip apart the creel and devour my trout. While he was thus distracted, I would silently back away until I was out of sight and then run home.
That’s not what happened. Instead, the bear turned and looked at me. His gaze wasn’t threatening or predatory; it was almost expectant. Pleading, even.
We stared at each other, the bear and I. I can’t explain why I didn’t continue to back away. I don’t know why the bear’s expression led me to take a step forward, violating everything my father had told me. I hadn’t yet gotten around to concluding that the bear had saved my life; that would come later, when I was lying in bed recounting the day’s adventure to myself. I just responded to what I saw as some sort of supplication, actually reaching right past the bear’s jaws to pick up the creel.
I popped open the cover and let the fish flop out on the rocks. With almost comical delicacy, the bear pinned the largest one with his paw and bit into it, stripping the flesh away until, bones and all, the fish was gone.
The bear turned and regarded me with those warm brown eyes.
“Well, go on; it’s okay,” I said. With that, as if he had understood every word, the remaining fish were quickly devoured. When he was done, the bear lumbered over to the creek and put his snout down and took a long drink.
It was still a perfectly cloudless August day. The sun on the creek looked like diamonds flung across a black cloth. A euphoria spread through me, the joy of survival, as if every cell in my body was singing a song of life.
My fantasy now was that I would continue to fish, the bear sitting by my side like a loyal dog. I would turn my catch over to him and he would gratefully eat it out of my hand, and we would be friends for
ever.
When I was little there had been a show on TV called Gentle Ben. I couldn’t remember much about it, except that it concerned a boy who had a pet bear.
I could be that boy. I could have a pet bear!
Obviously the grizzly bear had never watched the show, because after taking one last drink of water he waded through the creek to the other side and climbed the opposite bank without so much as a backward glance. I was surprised and even a little hurt.
“Hey!” I yelled without thinking.
The bear stopped and turned toward me, fixing me with that imposing stare.
I gulped. “I could bring you something else to eat, maybe tomorrow,” I said.
I don’t know what I expected in response, but what I got was nothing at all. The bear simply turned away and walked off into the woods.
Once he was gone it was hard to believe he had ever been there in the first place. Had I really just hand-fed lunch to a grizzly bear?
I gathered up my rod and creel and headed for home. I was still in an ebullient mode, excited to tell my father about my encounter in the woods. He wasn’t home, so I put away my fishing equipment and went out to toss tennis balls at the pole barn door. My limbs were full of a kinetic, restless energy, and I threw those balls so hard and straight that they smacked loudly against the aluminum door and came bounding back as if served up by Billie Jean King.
The clink and rattle of gravel behind me drew my attention to the road. I turned around, the tennis ball in my hand.
My neighbor Danny Alderton and three boys I knew from school had already walked past my driveway and were headed down the hill, their hands in their pockets. They must have seen me, but none of them had called out, not even to shout a friendly insult.
“Hey, Danny!” I yelled. I dropped the tennis ball and it bounced around apologetically at my feet.
The boys came to a faltering halt. The way they met each other’s eyes as I approached communicated something I couldn’t interpret.
Gregg was a ninth grader, unpopular with his peers, which probably explained why he was hanging out with eighth graders—Danny, Mitch, and Jerry were in my grade. They were all, of course, bigger than I was.
Living up here on Hidden Creek Road tended to be isolating and Danny, like me, didn’t have a lot of friends. He and I usually did things together, though this summer had been different for reasons never pondered or pronounced. It’s just how it had been.
Gregg was one of those kids who were always in trouble at school. I’d seen him smoking in the woods. I didn’t know anything about Mitch, who had just moved to Selkirk River, and Jerry was a friendly enough guy, though he wasn’t very bright.
“Danny,” I said, singling out my friend, though obviously I wanted everyone else to hear. “I was fishing in the creek today, and you wouldn’t believe what I saw.”
“It’s ‘Dan,’” he said coldly.
My narrative lost its excited momentum. I looked at him.
“Nobody calls me Danny. It’s ‘Dan.’ Charlie.”
His expression was overtly hostile. The three boys with him regarded me coolly.
And I … well, I was absolutely flabbergasted. I had no idea what was going on, why Danny/Dan was acting so strangely toward me.
It was, of course, junior high. Seventh graders arrived at school like sailors washing ashore on a pirate island: they didn’t know the rules; they only knew that after having been the cool sixth-grade kids in a building full of children they were now low-class sevies in a place where the oldest students were technically freshmen in high school. Ninth-grade boys carried themselves like men and the girls had breasts to gawk at. We all wanted to be like them in every way. Some of the boys even grew hair from their faces, a glorious thing. The jostling for position and social survival was agonizing.
That first semester of junior high I lived in a cocoon of polite pity. Everyone, of course, knew that my mother had died the previous April. Teachers were solicitous. Popular girls said hi to me. The guys mostly ignored me, embarrassed because they didn’t know what to say to me. And I drifted from class to class, constantly astounded at how normal everything seemed, how people could behave as if nothing had happened, as if the world had not been knocked off its axis and sent spinning off into the dark.
Over Christmas break it was as if a vote was taken and I was stripped of the social status my grieving period had afforded me. Though it had been only eight months since the funeral, I was now expected to be like everybody else. I was a sevie, a nobody. The popular girls couldn’t even see me. The guys went from ignoring me to ignoring me with malice.
I’d been aware of Danny … of Dan, Dan Alderton, suffering a different yet similarly rough passage, but it wasn’t as if we ever discussed it when we got together. Guys don’t talk about that kind of stuff. We just hoped to ride out the storm.
Everyone was still staring at me. I dropped my eyes. “Sorry. Dan.”
“We saw you throwing your tennis ball at your garage.” Gregg sneered. “What were you doing?”
Well, that was a stupid question. What I was doing was throwing my tennis ball at my garage. “Nothing,” I said sullenly.
The boys all snickered a little at this, as if I’d said something funny.
“Wussy,” Gregg hissed. He turned on his heel and the other boys fell in line behind him. I expected Dan to maybe glance back at me, give me some sort of signal with his eyes, but he was as bluntly uncaring as he walked away as he’d been during the entire exchange. I bit back my hurt.
The odd thing was, watching them go, I longed to be with them. I wanted to swing my arms and walk with the almost simian gate they’d adopted; I wanted to look tough and kick rocks. I pictured myself with them, one of the guys, and my heart unexpectedly ached.
By the time my father got home that afternoon, I’d had time to reconsider what I would tell him about the cougar and the bear. The cougar had probably been, as my father suggested during our game, a young one, newly turned out from the den and not good at hunting. He stalked me because we chanced upon each other, but the likelihood of another encounter was slight. A cougar’s territory can encompass hundreds of square miles. Nonetheless, I didn’t want my father to forbid me from leaving the property the rest of the summer, which was probably what he’d say if I told him about it.
And the grizzly … would my father even believe me? What would he say to the whole incredible story of me feeding brook trout to an animal infamous for its deadly temper? The whole thing sounded ludicrously fantastic even to me, and I’d been there to see it.
What I know now is that when grizzly bears are spotted that close to human habitat they are usually euthanized on the theory that they’ve become unafraid of man and therefore more likely to attack people. Reeducating them is also possible: using firecrackers, dogs, and even rubber bullets to teach the animals the lesson that hanging around houses was a bad idea. The problem is that bears are pretty smart and humans aren’t: we’ll move into a remote area and leave a bag of dog food on our front porch and then panic when we see a grizzly bear helping himself to a meal. The bears often conclude that they like the dog food people and don’t like the rubber bullet people and work to evade the very individuals trying to save their lives.
Back in 1974, intervention was a seldom-used option. A bear that would approach people was considered a problem bear and immediately, one might even say gleefully, hunted down. I didn’t know that, either.
All I knew then was that if I told my father I’d fed a grizzly bear in the wild, he would most certainly not believe me. I pictured the expression on his face when I told my tale. The skepticism.
And if he didn’t believe me, the rejection would break my heart. I was loathe to meet his unloving eyes, to read the doubt, the lack of trust, in them. Just as I’d once told myself over and over that my mother was sure to survive her disease, I now told myself that my father loved me. If I revealed what had happened at the creek, he would treat me like a liar, and he despised
liars.
So I said nothing, which was easy to do in our house. We ate dinner without a word to each other. Dad’s mood was worse than usual, his gaze inward.
I woke up the next morning eager to grab something out of one of the freezers to feed the bear.
The person who sold us the house had been involved in dressing and processing elk, deer, and other wild game. The pole barn had sinks and hoses and big drains and two enormous freezers that my father bargained into the home purchase. I think my father saw those game freezers and pictured himself hunting and freezing a whole winter’s worth of meat every year, but once my mom got sick he lost his taste for killing anything.
Now the freezers were full of foil-wrapped packages. When news of my mother’s disease leaked out, the people of Selkirk River showed up in a constant stream, leaving pies, roasts, hams, and an absolutely endless assortment of casseroles in their wake. Most of it was still there: my dad didn’t really like casseroles.
I hit the breakfast table with a fast bowl of cereal and a mind that had already left the house, but my father came out of his room with the worst kind of news: time to do some chores.
At the word “chores” my limbs grew heavy and I felt all of my energy drain out through my legs. I collapsed onto the couch with a groan.
“First thing to do is sweep the driveway,” he said.
“Sweep the driveway?” I demanded incredulously. “Why? You’re just going to drive on it!”
“It’s got gravel that washed off the road from the last rain.”
“It will rain again!” I predicted.
“Then we’ll sweep the driveway again,” he said, as if this made any sense whatsoever.
After the driveway he decided I should rake up the bark around the woodpile while he washed the wooden chairs on our deck. Then we cleaned house. Then we reset the mailbox, which had been knocked a bit cockeyed by the snowplow that winter.