When I saw my father’s Jeep waiting for me in the parking lot, it held none of the usual dread for me. For once I didn’t approach the passenger door knowing that I’d spend the whole car ride wrestling with the thick silence from my father, seeking desperately to draw him into conversation. I didn’t want to talk to anyone; I just wanted to think about Kay.
My dad waited for me to put on my seat belt before he yanked the Jeep into gear. Safety was his biggest concern, since Mom died.
“How’d it go, Charlie?” he asked.
I shrugged. There was simply no answer to that question.
“Well then. You want to go see what I’ve been putting all my time and money into, lately?”
No, I didn’t, but this was the most engaging thing my father had said to me since We’re going to the Becks’ for Sunday dinner. I gazed at him with eyes that I supposed were as unreadable as Kay’s.
“Okay,” I said.
chapter
FIVE
BEING with my father spoiled my mood, a little—his presence interfered with my intentions to wallow in sweet enthrallment over Kay, the way someone’s radio can rattle you with a competing tune when you’re trying to sing a song of your own. I decided to put Kay away to savor later, like a dessert brought home after dinner in a restaurant.
When my dad turned off on the rutted two-track that led up to the handful of graying, sagging buildings that was Grassy Valley Ranch, my stomach lurched independently of the bouncing Jeep. It was a familiar sensation that upset my insides whenever a strong memory of Mom collided with the unreal reality of her death.
My dad grew up with horses—when we moved to Selkirk River, he made glowing promises about how healthy we’d all be, out in the clean air, riding horses everywhere. I pictured myself going to school on horseback. I thought maybe I’d be sent into town to buy groceries on my own horse, whom I planned to name Flash.
None of that happened. When I got around to noticing I didn’t own a horse, I put a heartbroken tone in my voice and asked about it. (As was true of any good child, I knew precisely how deep to stab my mother and father in their guilty consciences.) And it worked, to a degree: we started taking family trips to Grassy Valley Ranch to rent horses.
Grassy Valley was where my dad met Rod Shelburton, who bought the ranch for the same reason my dad moved us to a thirty-acre property on top of a hill, only the Shelburtons were from Chicago and not Prairie Village. My dad and Mr. Shelburton liked to have what sounded like loud, heated arguments about Vietnam and the environment and Richard Nixon, only they agreed with each other on everything.
More than two years before, when my mom’s chemotherapy ended, the two of us took a horseback ride up into the hills. It was a wonderful May day, wildflowers dancing in front of us as we left the barn.
Normally when we rode, Mr. Shelburton put me on Nanny, a gentle old horse who could not be spurred into a gallop regardless of how many clicks I made with my mouth or unsubtle hints I gave her with my boot heels.
Nanny was sick that day, though, so I was on Ginger, a younger horse my mom didn’t trust. She kept Ginger attached to her horse with a lead, which I felt was insulting for a boy my age. We marched along with me launching a barrage of bitter complaints the whole time, until my mom’s shoulders sagged with the weight of them.
Then I was angry because she didn’t want to ride up to take a look at what boys my age called Dead Man’s Falls (located in an area known to us as Dead Man’s River and close to Dead Man’s Rock), saying she was tired.
“You’re always tired,” I told her viciously.
I brought my contemptuous attitude with me to the dinner table, infuriating my father.
“Charlie, you are being rude to your mother!” he barked.
“It’s okay,” my mom murmured.
“It’s not okay. Go to your room, Charlie. No TV tonight. Let’s see if you can be more polite in the morning.”
The lash of my dad’s anger stung me, but I didn’t let him see any pain in me as I slid off my chair and flounced down the hall as if I didn’t care what they did to me.
I think I know now what that was all about. A restlessness was starting to afflict me, a sense of not being able to fit into my own skin. Manhood was a long way off, but already I was becoming impatient with being a boy. I wanted to ride a horse by myself, without an umbilical cord. And mostly I wanted to push my mother away from me, to gain independence from her, as all men must eventually do.
At the time, though, these irrational impulses came to me like temporary insanity, goading me into churlish behavior and then fading away to leave me stewing in guilt.
The house darkened; my parents murmured; my dad passed my doorway without a word. I heard my mother clink a few things in the kitchen, and then she was in the hallway, pausing at my door.
“Mom?”
She looked into my room. Her face was different, her cheekbones sharper and her eye sockets more pronounced, and of course her hair was nothing more than a wispy fuzz trying to make a comeback on her head, but the smile she gave me was the same. I’d treated her like dirt all day and here she was smiling at me with all the love in the world.
“Yes, Charlie.”
I’d say I was sorry now. God, how I wish I could say I was sorry to my mom, sorry for every single thing I ever did to hurt her. But instead I said, “Aren’t you going to kiss me good night?”
More than a year had passed since I’d asked for—no, demanded—a halt to the nightly ritual of a kiss. But on my mom’s face there was no triumph, nor surprise, nor self-satisfaction. I saw only affection in her eyes as she came in and gently touched her lips to my forehead.
“Good night, Charlie. I love you.”
“Good night, Mom.” I didn’t tell her I loved her back. I don’t know why. If I had it to do over again, I would have said it, and it would have been as true as anything I’d ever uttered.
This memory hit me like a sucker punch when the Jeep stopped at the ranch, the dirt cloud that had been pursuing us engulfing the vehicle, then drifting away like a dog who chases cars and doesn’t know what to do when one stops. I watched the dust but focused on my memories, pangs of something like hunger clawing at my insides.
“What do you think of that?” my dad asked proudly.
I looked where he was pointing. On the other side of a wooden fence a dark herd of maybe twenty-five buffalo were standing around, their tails swishing. Some sort of wooden pathway led from this corral to pass beneath an odd platform above the fence, as if the buffalo were going to walk down the chute and have somebody leap on them from the perch.
“Buffalo,” I said.
“American bison,” my father said. It sounded like a correction, but when I looked at him curiously he nodded. “Buffalo, sure.”
“For rides?”
My dad grinned at me. It was a full grin, unburdened by any death or sadness. “For eating. Mr. Shelburton and I are going to raise buffalo and sell them for meat.”
“Cool,” I replied, though I was hardly sure of the sanity of his statement.
“Beef’s got cholesterol in it, and doctors are saying cholesterol is what gives people heart attacks. Buffalo has a lot lower cholesterol, though we’re calling it American bison because we don’t think people will eat it otherwise. What you’re looking at is the start of a herd we’re going to let get to about five hundred head.”
A red pickup truck was parked out beyond the buffalo pen—I recognized it as Mr. Shelburton’s vehicle. Mr. Shelburton himself was on a horse.
“Hey, Charlie, you going to help us inoculate these critters today?” he called. Mr. Shelburton used words like a cowboy, but his accent was the same as the gangsters we saw in the movies.
I was excited to help until my job was explained to me.
“You can sit on the hood of the Jeep,” my father said to me, his voice singsongy with false promise. I pretty much knew that if I were up on top of the Jeep I wouldn’t be on a horse or anywhere near the “
critters.”
“I got a clipboard here, and every time we inoculate a bison, you call out the number and keep a written tally,” my father continued.
I pictured it in my mind. I’d sit on the front of the Jeep, holding a clipboard, with absolutely nothing to do but watch the two of them maneuver a buffalo down the narrow wooden chute. One of them would lean over from the platform and inject the bison, and then they’d open the door and the buffalo would walk out. I’d make a mark and then call out the number. In other words, I’d be a bookkeeper. “Why can’t I help inoculate?” I demanded.
“Charlie, these are wild creatures, these buffalo. They’re not like cows.”
There it was—no matter what, I had to be kept safe. My dad had buried one family member and was never going to risk losing another.
“Sure ’preciate your help, pardner!” Mr. Shelburton called out to me.
I wonder how my dad’s worry reflexes would react if I told him I’d been cavorting in the woods with an animal so fierce he could eat a buffalo. Among the three of us men, who was the real rancher wrangler? Why, it was Charlie Hall, master of the grizzlies, that’s who.
I obviously wasn’t going to give voice to these thoughts or tell my father anything about the bear. Living with my father was so emotionally dangerous I’d learned to parse truth and dole out only as much information as was absolutely necessary—to do otherwise would be to risk the disapproval that always came charged with the clear and devastating message that with my mom gone there wasn’t a family anymore, nothing to anchor Dad to my life, no connection. Avoiding the conclusion that my father didn’t love me was my main pastime, and I’d withhold any amount of truth from him to keep it from myself.
Of course, I didn’t have the advantage of months of painful psychotherapy then, so I didn’t have any actual insight into why I’d become such an artful dodger of integrity. I just knew that it was always smarter to keep my mouth shut than to give my father any ammunition he could use against me.
I climbed up on the Jeep, clipboard in my lap, and watched as my dad and Mr. Shelburton tried to coax a buffalo out of the corral and into the wooden chute. Before me the Grassy Valley Ranch, more than a thousand acres in all, spread out like a wide green ocean shouldered on either side by rugged, thickly wooded hills.
“Come on there!” Mr. Shelburton yelled in frustration at the beast they were working.
The buffalo herd stood around like parked cars. Flies buzzed at their faces. They were immense creatures, the males taller at the hump than I would be on tiptoes. Apparently, if they didn’t feel like moving, they didn’t move.
Finally one gigantic bull grudgingly bumped his way down the chute. Mr. Shelburton triumphantly leaped off his horse and onto the platform. He had what looked like a sharp stick in his hand—a long-handled hypodermic, most likely. He and my father grinned at each other.
Mr. Shelton stabbed down smartly and then, as they say, all hell broke loose.
chapter
SIX
THE second that long-handled syringe jabbed him, the bull let out a bellow and leaped straight in the air, kicking his rear legs. His mighty hooves slammed the wooden walls of the enclosure with a tremendous boom, rocking the platform and nearly spilling Mr. Shelburton to the ground.
The panic went through the rest of the herd like electricity. They surged forward and the stout wooden fence of the corral broke apart with a ripping, splintering sound. Mr. Shelburton leaped back onto his horse as the platform toppled and the buffalo stormed past him. Many of them smashed into the red truck and it was hard to tell if it was by accident or if they were just plain mad. They hit that vehicle with blow after blow from their butting heads. The headlights broke and the windshield spiderwebbed as the truck rocked back on its shocks.
And then all we could see was the herd’s backsides as they took off at a dead run, their hooves winking black in the dust cloud.
The freight train–like rumble faded as the buffalo, still going flat out, crested a small hill and dipped below its horizon. The only sound was the truck’s tires, two of which were giving up the ghost in a slow hiss. The side of the vehicle was ruined, dented up and down its length. One half of the corral gaped open, wood fragments from the fence lying trampled into the mud. Mr. Shelburton and my father just stared at the destruction, their mouths open, unable to speak.
I stood and cupped my hands over my mouth to shout, “That’s one!”
I made a careful mark on the paper and looked at the men expectantly.
My dad gave me an unreadable stare and then, for the first time in more than a year, he threw back his head and laughed. Pretty soon he and Mr. Shelburton were standing on the ground in the ruins of the corral, their hands on their knees, laughing so hard they could scarcely breathe.
For the first time ever I began to hope Dad and I were going to allow ourselves to enjoy life after all, no matter how unfair it was that we were here and Mom was not.
I had a lot to ponder that night, with the Grassy Valley Ranch and the brief visit by a grizzly bear who seemed to have disappeared as abruptly as he had come, but mostly, as I lay in bed that night, I thought about Kay. My love for her felt like a buffalo stampede thundering through my blood, capable of smashing through any fence I tried to put around it. It made me feel powerful one minute and weak the next. My bones ached with it.
By the time I eased myself out of bed the next morning my dad was back on the ranch. He left me a note telling me that he and Mr. Shelburton had “a lot of work to do.”
My dad has always had something of a gift for stating the obvious.
It was Sunday, a whole week away from the next junior-lifesaving lesson. A car pulled in the driveway around noon. I guiltily snapped off the television—my dad hated when I watched television on a sunny day—and went to see who it was.
Yvonne. She emerged from a Chevy Vega, bending over to pull an aluminum-covered pan from the passenger side floorboards. She nudged her door shut with a hip. She was wearing a knee-length skirt and a white blouse with a big floppy collar. She set the pan on the hood of her car and messed with her blouse in the reflection of her car window. What do you think, Yvonne, that I can’t see you unbuttoning your shirt from in here?
I toyed with the idea of not answering her knock but figured that maneuver would have consequences for me. You could see into the dining area from the driveway—I imagined she’d probably spotted me spying on her. I opened the door and she blinked at me, smiling.
“Hello, Charlie.”
“Hi, Miss Mandeville.”
She suddenly remembered the circumstances of our last meeting. “Are you feeling any better?” Her expression was now one of concern.
“Yeah.”
We stood looking at each other. I not only was not inviting her in, my arm was on the doorjamb to let her know she’d have to physically overpower me to get in the house.
“Is your dad home?” Her moist blue eyes flitted around the empty house.
“No, he’s working today.”
“On a Sunday?”
“He’s working.”
She nodded in defeat. “Okay.” Her smile brightened. “Say, I brought this for you. It’s warm, but not hot. Can you take it?” She held out the pan.
My vast experience with casseroles told me the specimen I was being given belonged to the tuna noodle variety.
I knew exactly what I was going to do with it.
I think I pretty much had given up ever seeing the grizzly again, so I was surprised when I got to the creek and saw him standing in the shallows. His head was darting quickly from side to side as he stared intently into the water, which at that place in the creek was barely half a foot deep. I crouched down by the banks, the casserole, which I had dumped into a paper bag, at my feet. The wind was flowing into my face, keeping my scent from the bear.
All at once the grizzly pounced, making huge splashes as he pursued a fish in my direction, lunging back and forth and bounding with jabbing forepaws ag
ain and again. I was startled by the astounding agility of the bear, the way he could stop that huge bulk in an instant and spring to one side, stabbing those claws into the water. The contrast with yesterday’s buffalo couldn’t have been more stark: both immensely powerful creatures, but with bison it was all about charging in a straight line. This animal before me could just as easily move laterally, turning tightly, graceful as he was strong.
He thrust his snout below the surface, blowing bubbles, then raised his head and sneezed. This struck me as so comical I couldn’t help but laugh a little, but when I did the bear lifted his head and looked straight at me, and then I stopped laughing.
“I brought you some food,” I told him, my voice taking on an involuntary quaver.
When bears walk right at you their amazing muscles bunch under their fur in a way that completely belies their dexterity. If I’d not seen this huge creature leaping about just moments ago I might assume him to be clumsy and slow. I took an easy, careful breath, holding my ground. This close, he looked as big as Yvonne’s Chevy Vega.
I nudged the grocery bag with my feet. “I hope you like it,” I stuttered as the bear stuck his head in the bag, exactly the way he’d held his nose underwater just moments before. He inhaled and the sides of the bag collapsed.
What I now know about bears is that there was no worry he wouldn’t like it. Bears are amazing omnivores. They eat seeds, berries, roots, carrion, and honey. But they also graze like cattle and will attack a moth swarm or an anthill with determination and gusto.
The bear ate the casserole and also the paper bag it came in.
“So, okay then,” I said.
The bear and I looked at each other. I expected the same expression I’d seen in the eyes of the buffalo: black and implacable, seeing me but not assigning me any particular importance in their wild world. But there was something about this bear’s expression that seemed … friendly.
I was friends with a grizzly bear.
Many years later I was in my office when a man phoned from Montana wanting to speak to a “bear guy.” I explained what a bear biologist was, and he seemed satisfied, though not impressed, with my credentials. He was calling with a question. “What,” he asked, “do you feed a grizzly bear?”