A Bear Tale

by Christi Killien

Ms. Diana O’Neil, owner of the deceased dog, is sympathetic to the recently formed Save the Bear movement, which is pleading for the life of the elusive first bear, which attacked a woman and her dog ten miles away and is probably not the same bear as yesterday morning’s Berry Road bear.

  O’Neil points out that her dog charged the bear, and that the bear was not vicious, just bigger. “Jake was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” said the student nurse at Providence Hospital.

  As of Wednesday, the first bear had not fallen for the Krispy Kreme doughnuts set in two traps. Nor have two teams of dogs picked up any scent of the bear.

  Diana had read the article, which had also quoted Greg Harvey, something about reactivating old neighborhood stresses, combining city and country, et cetera. That’s not what she was thinking now though as the Suquamish nurse held up the newspaper photo of one of the traps in the Gig Harbor forest.

  “Does that Krispy Kreme business piss off anybody else but me?” Diana asked.

  “It’s an insult to the bear,” said Sylvia from Suquamish. “We see the power of the bear and feel anger. They were here first, we are intruding. So we must shift the power in our favor with cages and Krispy Kreme doughnuts.” Sylvia’s gray hair was mid-back length and curly and she waved her hands as she talked. “It’s like, here’s this magnificent, wild creature and its last meal is going to be a damn Krispy Kreme.”

  “It’s an advertisement,” Diana said. “Krispy Kreme must be loving it.” The Associated Press had picked up the story, and it got a brief mention on CNN.

  “Well, some of us did a ceremony for that first bear,” Sylvia said and locked eyes with Diana. “To inform it of the traps, and ask it to leave the area. And it seems to be working! We’ll do the same for this Berry Road bear, Diana.”

  And then she invited Diana to her house to do the ceremony together that evening.

  All kinds of spiritual folk were attracted to the Port Madison Indian Reservation hamlet of Suquamish where Chief Seattle was buried. Diana’s parents had lived there for eight years. Janie O’Neil had commuted to Seattle each day on the Bainbridge Island ferry, just fifteen minutes from Suquamish. Diana and her sister and brother knew that ferry well.

  On her drive home from the hospital, Diana thought about how she hadn’t seen Jared for two weeks now, and the truth was that that was not a problem. He had called from Spokane and expressed his sympathies – she’d texted him the news about Jake – and he offered to come visit. Diana had said no, she was so busy. And then she had called Jonah to invite him to Suquamish to warn the bear about the Krispy Kremes, and he’d said Hell, yeah and offered to drive.

  Now she sat next to him in his little red car, it was 6:00 and long dark, they were headed to Suquamish and Diana breathed deeply as they roared onto Highway 16.

  Jonah smelled good. Maybe part of the earthy smell, Diana thought, came from Jonah’s elk-skin drum in the backseat. He’d been to these ceremonies before, he’d said. Nothing officially Tribal.

  “One time,” Jonah said and smiled, “a guy on the beach in Suquamish asked me to bury some sacred stone for him in Salal.”

  Diana laughed. She pictured the beloved local Suquamish character named Toby who was a fixture in the town, a semi-crazy looking Vietnam veteran known for painting a mural of a canoe landing on the wall of the old building that used to house the Tribal Youth Center as well as the alcohol rehab center.

  “Did you do it?” Diana asked. “Bury the stone, I mean?”

  “Heck, yeah. Down at the beach, just like he asked.” Jonah grinned and glanced over at Diana then. “Who knows? Some of this voodoo feels pretty powerful. Especially the drumming.”

  Jonah switched lanes as they approached the village of Gorst and the interchange to Highway 3. Then they were passing Sinclair Inlet and the graveyard fleet of outdated, rusting aircraft carriers docked there forever. Jonah worked at the Puget Sound Naval Base shipyard as a laborer with the promise of some welding. Two years ago when he’d started the two-year welding degree, welders had the country by the balls. It was pick your place, signing bonus, the works. Same with nursing. None of the nurses in Diana’s class were getting job offers now, including her. Neither Jonah nor Diana wanted to talk about their doomed life plans.

  “Jonah?” Diana said. “Do you have a gun?”

  “Why? Are you thinking of shooting someone?”

  “No, but I heard gunshots from your house once.”

  “Yep. Coyotes.”

  “It’s weird, and I haven’t told anyone else about this, but the night before Jake died, I swear, I saw a bear in a tree.”

  Jonah looked over at her and raised his eyebrows.

  “Jake never saw it. The wind was blowing gangbusters and I looked up and there it was. A huge bear! And, my God, I think it was sleeping.”

  “Do you think it was the same bear that killed Jake yesterday?”

  Diana shrugged. “Maybe. Probably. Who knows? But what happened is that I watched it for a while – I was stunned and it seemed kind of surreal, you know? And then there were gunshots. Six of them.”

  Jonah blinked. “You thought it was me?”

  “I didn’t know who it was.”

  “Well, it wasn’t me. Did he hit the bear?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t know if he even saw the bear. It could have been someone keeping the coyotes out of their chickens. I’ll tell you one thing for sure, the bear was down that tree and gone in a flash.”

  Jonah laughed. “Maybe it was Mr. Harvey. I wouldn’t put it past him. He ran down one of our turkeys that got loose last week.”

  “One of your turkeys?”

  “Thanksgiving. We’ve got seventy-three of them. Way too many turkeys.”

  “Do you cut off their heads?” Diana asked.

  Jonah nodded. “Yes, I do,” he said. “But I thank them for their sacrifice first.”

  Diana fell in love with Jonah at that moment on Highway 3 passing the Silverdale Mall. Or at least that was when she first realized it. Whatever else happened, she was in love with Jonah.

  The ceremony turned out to be about honey. Sylvia stood at the opening to her small four-circuit labyrinth which was lit with lanterns. It was dark and cold. The forest loomed around the clearing, which was the site of a 21-foot diameter old growth stump. There were ten participants including Diana and Jonah, who were the youngest. Two others besides Jonah had drums. Diana stood in the circle with the others, and felt honored to be invited to this powerful place.

  Sylvia thanked everyone for coming, especially Diana O’Neil for giving her the idea of the honey with her question about the degrading doughnuts. She talked about how bear energy was, among other things, about discernment and discrimination. Going within and making choices. And they were gathered tonight to celebrate Bear and warn it not to fall for the Krispy Kremes.

  They all joined hands as Sylvia called in the four directions. Jonah’s hand was warm and dry, Diana’s was just the opposite. Sylvia called in The Great Bear, the seven-star constellation of The Big Dipper, but it was too overcast to actually see the stars.

  “Cultures and religions all over the world use ceremony to evoke the help of the Divine,” Sylvia said. “Tonight we use the power of ceremonial symbol to evoke a connection to Bear.”

  She then walked over to a table she had set up with small pots full of blackberry honey. “Honey is the essence of the wild,” she said. “Of trees and before that the bees and before that the flowers. All that wild sweetness, it’s flavored with memory. And when we taste, we can be filled again.”

  Jonah squeezed Diana’s hand. She was crying softly.

  Sylvia told them they were going to take the honey – there was a pot for each of them – into the labyrinth, “Letting the honey gather our powerful thoughts and wishes for bear’s choices as well as our own as we walk the spiral path to the center where all the pots will be emptied into the bowl.”


  Jonah drummed softly as everyone walked the labyrinth, and then one of the other drummers took over so Jonah could enter next to last.

  It was impossible to get the honey to pour completely out of the little pot, but a drop contains the whole so no one sweated the issue for long. When it was over, Diana felt drained but also a little healed. They all then tasted the honey from the communal bowl, so Diana’s and Jonah’s first kiss was honey sweet.

  Diana told her parents at breakfast the next morning that she was in love with Jonah. Neither of them was surprised, nor particularly convinced.

  Alan told of a psychology study where couples who bungee jump together have a resulting soul connection that destroys them. “They think they’re compatible,” Alan said, “but they’re only bonded.”

  Janie asked about the ceremony and wanted to know where in Suquamish, exactly, Sylvia lived. She might have met her at a book group whose leader had died.

  Diana ate her oatmeal. She scanned the newspaper for bear stories. Then she looked up. “The house feels so different without Jake,” she said. His absence was visceral to her. He had a big, frenetic energy and it was suddenly, completely gone.

  “Elvis has left the building,” Alan said softly, and Diana laughed and then she cried.

  Chapter 7