A Bear Named Trouble
Page 6
JONATHAN taped the last box and carried it out to the trailer they would pull back to Anchorage.
"Can we go now?" he asked.
"To the zoo?" His mother smiled. It was a tired smile. They had been packing and loading for two days, but it was, nonetheless, a smile. "Sure," she said. "Our last official act before leaving Duluth will be a walk through the zoo."
Jonathan and his father had flown back to Duluth to help Mom and Rhonda pack. Now they would all drive to Anchorage. But first—Jonathan did a little jig right there on the sidewalk—they were going to visit Trouble!
How thrilled Jonathan had been when his dad had told him that the Lake Superior Zoo would take Trouble. The Duluth zoo even had a celebration when the bear arrived, complete with a band playing "Ya Got Trouble" from The Music Man. Jonathan wished they had been back in time to see it.
Dad said that when the veterinarian tranquilized Trouble to give him a thorough check, she'd discovered his broken jaw. That was probably the reason, she said, he'd been searching in town for food in the first place. The jaw was healing, and she'd pulled a couple of misaligned teeth. With that taken care of, Trouble could eat—with gusto—everything the zookeepers fed him. Apples, carrots, potatoes, meat, fish ... all of it.
And now, at last, Jonathan would see Trouble in his new home.
"I guess we're ready," Dad said, and they all piled into the car and headed for the zoo.
When they arrived, Dad settled Rhonda into her chair, and Jonathan took charge of pushing. She loved having him push, because he ran with her when she asked him to, something their parents rarely did.
"All set?" he asked.
"All set!" she replied. And they took off, parents trailing far behind.
They came around a corner and through a cement tunnel and screeched to a halt in front of the bear display. And there he was, in all his brown furry glory. Trouble!
"That's him?" Rhonda asked.
"Yep," Jonathan said. "That's Trouble!"
"He looks so..." She stopped and studied the brown bear. He was busy dismembering and eating an orange and didn't look up.
"Happy?" Jonathan filled in for her.
"Yeah," she said. "Like he likes being a zoo bear!"
Jonathan studied the brownie, too. Trouble had finished the orange and was now concentrating on some bread slathered with peanut butter. He did look like any properly zoo-bred bear. As though this were the life he had always lived. Or maybe the one he'd been looking for.
"Hi, Trouble," Jonathan said, tapping the glass that separated them from the large area where the bear was displayed. "How you doing, pal?"
Trouble sat back on his haunches and looked at his visitors for the first time. He licked peanut butter off his nose, then ambled over to the window. Putting a paw on the glass that separated them, he peered, first at Rhonda, then at Jonathan.
Jonathan put his hand on the other side of the window to meet the paw, and he closed his eyes. He was inside the bear, inside Trouble.
He could taste peanut butter on his tongue, feel his satisfied belly.
"He's looking at us," Jonathan whispered, looking down at Rhonda. "And you know what he's thinking?"
"What?" Rhonda asked. Her eyes were shining, as they always did when he started the game.
"Home," Jonathan said. "Trouble is thinking, 'At last, I'm home!'"
Rhonda grinned and reached for her brother's free hand. "And we're going home, too, aren't we, Jonathan?"
"Yep," he said, turning back to watch their parents' slow approach. They looked happy to be together again, too. "The whole family. We're going home!"
***
Trouble watched the humans as they moved away. Whether he recognized the boy and remembered him would be impossible to know, but something held his attention. Only after they were out of sight and their scent no longer wafted back to him did he return to the feast waiting for him in his spacious rock-and-water home.
But now something else prompted him to lift his head and pause. From back in the holding area unavailable to the zoo's visitors, anus other bear's voice rumbled. Trouble had been aware of the other brownie's presence from the beginning. The keepers who brought him food, who moved him out into the open enclosure and back again into his snug den, those same keepers watched over that other bear, too. Trouble could hear her at night in the den next to his. He could smell every place she had been when he came out into the open display.
And so he waited, patiently, in the way of bears, for the time when they would meet—for the day when, at last, he would no longer be alone.
* * *
Epilogue
A Bear Named Trouble is based on the story of a real bear, now residing in the Lake Superior Zoo in Duluth, Minnesota. As a young brown bear in Anchorage, Alaska, he earned the name Trouble by repeatedly breaking into the Alaska Zoo.
No one can know for certain what prompted him to dig his way into the zoo. Part of the motivation may have been that his mother had, no doubt, sent him off on his own that spring. He was about three and a half, the right age for her to decide it was time for them to separate. Since he was entirely alone, the young bear probably had no siblings to share his new life, and clearly, he was lonely. Loneliness must have brought him to the zoo to visit Jake.
His jaw had been broken in some accident we can only guess at, so he was probably searching for easy food, too.
On one of his excursions, Trouble did kill Mama Goose, who was, indeed, a favorite of the children who visited the Alaska Zoo. He didn't eat her, only killed her, probably because she was doing what geese do best, making a great deal of noise.
When the zoo personnel captured him at last, a television reporter and a ranger from the Fish and Game department were waiting outside. If Trouble had managed to emerge from the zoo before the curator could dart him, he would have been killed as a nuisance bear.
It is true, too, that Trouble was taken to Minnesota in the hold of a passenger plane, a service donated by Northwest Airlines, and that 40,000 pounds of fresh salmon accompanied him on the journey.
And the young bear did, indeed, arrive at the Lake Superior Zoo in Duluth to a band playing "Ya Got Trouble."
It is unusual to bring mature animals from the wild into a zoo, but the Lake Superior Zoo took a chance on Trouble to keep him from being put down. In return, he has adapted very well to his life there. Sometimes he even taps on the glass to get visitors' attention.
The already resident female grizzly, named Phoebe, started off as something of a challenge for Trouble. The first time the two bears were put in the display area together she trounced him pretty thoroughly. They were then separated for a long time but now are back together. At this writing, Phoebe remains dominant, because she is still bigger, but the two have become easy with one another. Trouble, at last, has what he was searching for ... a companion.
The one aspect of Trouble's story as it is told here that is completely fictional is Jonathan and his family. I wanted to follow Trouble's journey through a child's eyes, so I created a boy who dreams his way inside animals.
My special thanks to Katie Larson, education director at the Alaska Zoo, Pat Lampi, curator at the Alaska Zoo, and Mike Janis, director of the Lake Superior Zoo, for their generous help when I was gathering information for this book.
Discovering and writing Trouble's story has been a special privilege.
* * *