Journey of the Pale Bear

by Susan Fletcher

  He put me in mind of a grasshopper, with his bony legs thrusting up well above the seat, one leg jiggling with pent-up energy. He was not as old as the doctor—maybe three decades, rising four. His feet and hands were unusually large, like a puppy that has room to grow. And, despite his foppish garb, he smelled of animals—of hay and dung and fur.

  He began to speak, and the doctor translated for me.

  The bear was languishing. She did not eat, she did not pace, she did not roar. She lay on the floor of her cage with her eyes dully open, but neither groomed herself, nor lifted her nose to sniff the air, nor paid heed to the world about her. The keeper had seen this down-in-the-midden temper before in captive creatures, and many of them, he said, did not survive it.

  I felt the ragged hole open up in the pit of my heart again.

  The keeper said he had heard that the bear and I shared some uncommon bond. I nodded. This was true, but . . .

  I recalled her easy, galumphing grace, loping through the open meadows. I recalled her joyful romps through the marsh water, covering herself with mud. I recalled how she had plunged into a cold river and emerged with a flopping fish in her mouth. For a time, she had been free.

  The keeper went on. He said that he had tried feeding her all manner of fish; he had tried even veal and pork. He had called on the envoy, who told him ice bears vastly prefer seals, and the keeper had sent out a hunter to trap one. But it hadn’t yet arrived, and meanwhile, the bear continued to decline.

  He stopped for a moment. Looked directly at me. When next he spoke, his tone was beseeching.

  The doctor translated: “Master de Botton wishes to know what else you’ve seen her eat. Something else that he might try.”

  My hands wanted to move to my chest, to hold my heart together, but I forced them to stay in my lap. “It was only cod, on the ship. And I didn’t have to feed her at all, when she was free. I saw her eat fish, and wild eggs, and berries.” The doctor translated for the keeper again and then translated his reply for me:

  “But when she was caged . . . How did you coax her to eat, then?”

  “There was no need for coaxing,” I said. “She ate of her own accord.”

  The keeper gazed at me. He attempted a smile, but it didn’t take.

  I turned to the doctor. “Tell him to hum to her. Tell him she likes to be scratched behind her ears. Tell him to dig his fingers deep, all the way to her skin.”

  The doctor gave me a skeptical look, but translated; the keeper seemed startled to hear it. He asked something; the doctor answered and then turned back to me. “The keeper is astonished that you were able to touch her. He says the only time she shows signs of life is when someone comes near, and then she growls and snarls.”

  So she was alone in there, with no one to hum to her or scratch her.

  To my mortification, tears pricked at my eyes.

  “Ah,” the keeper said, and I needed no translation. Then he leaned forward and asked me a question.

  The doctor sighed, said nothing.

  I tapped his arm. “What did he say?”

  “Listen, Arthur, you can’t bide here in London until the bear decides to eat—it could be months; it could be years; it could be never.”

  I felt a bright, slow current of hope rising within me. “What did he say?”

  “He asks . . .” The doctor hesitated. “Asks if you would visit the bear to see if you can persuade her to eat. But—”

  “Yes!” I said. “Tell him yes!”

  “I’ll tell him,” the doctor said, “that we will consider the matter tonight and deliver our answer tomorrow at the fortress gate.”

  After the keeper took his leave, the doctor admonished me.

  “You’ve chosen to return to Norway, son—you can’t let the bear rule your life.”

  “But no one else can help her.”

  “You heard what the keeper said. Some animals don’t thrive in captivity, no matter what we do. Maybe it wasn’t you, but the seafaring that quickened her appetite—we’ll never know.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Arthur—listen to me! Who knows when we’ll see another ship bound for Norway? You’re a man now. You need to put a stake in the ground—find your place in the world and begin making your way in it.”

  “Don’t you think I know that?” I protested. For so long I had craved to be of consequence in the world. There was no place for me on the steading, and I was denied my birthright in Wales. Now the doctor had offered me another path . . . but the bear needed me. She had stood my friend when I needed her, and after all we had been through together, I was bound to her in ways that nobody else could understand.

  “She is the king’s bear,” I said. “Remember, you told me? A gift from King Haakon. You said if there’s something amiss with her, it reflects badly on our king.”

  “But she’s no longer in your charge,” the doctor said.

  “She is if I’m the only one who can rouse her to eat.” And it struck me that the doctor was a poor one to be making this argument. For I was no longer in his official charge, and yet here he was—feeding me, clothing me, finding me passage to Norway, offering me a living—and paying for it all out of his own purse. And I knew it was no longer a matter of duty with him, but, as with the bear and me, a matter of the heart.

  CHAPTER 46

  The Menagerie

  WE RETURNED TO the fortress the following day. The doctor stated our business to one of the guards, the one who had come at me with a pike. He scowled at me, but sent a courier to fetch Master de Botton nonetheless.

  We waited. I began to pace, consumed by eagerness and dread. Would the bear be glad to see me? Or was her spirit so far broken that she wouldn’t care?

  All about me I heard the ringing of chisels on stone. Flecks of rock dust glinted in the air, and workers scuttled up and down the wooden scaffolding. The doctor had told me that the king had erected a gate turret in the center of the western wall a dozen or so years before. But the turret had collapsed suddenly, as if struck by a quaking of the earth, ruining all of the forebuildings and outworks, as well as the surrounding portions of the wall.

  In a while the gate creaked open, and there stood Master de Botton, who seemed mightily glad to see us. He led us along a dirt path toward the great white tower, but soon veered to the right, into a small grove of fruit trees in the outer bailey.

  I heard the menagerie before I saw it—a medley of shufflings, grunts, and growls. A high, eerie cry pierced the air, issuing from bird or beast, I could not tell. And now came a roar, the likes of which I had never heard in all my days—an ancient, feral thunder of a roar, fathoms deep and dangerous—causing the hair on my head to prickle, and my knees to soften like wax.

  Soon, it came into sight before me—a motley cluster of wood and iron cages set among the trees. I glimpsed a thatch of black fur in one, and the swish of a tufted tail in another, and a striped, doglike beast in a third. An outlandish, humpbacked creature, taller than a horse, stood chained and staked nearby.

  There were more, but I did not stop to study them, nor marvel at their strangeness. My eyes sought beyond, to an iron cage I knew well.

  She was lying on the floor of it, legs splayed out behind, her great, pale head resting on a massive paw. As we neared, I saw her nose begin to twitch, and then her head lifted and turned toward me. She let out a soft grunt and clambered to her feet. And then I was running—running past the striped dog, past the humpbacked beast. I heard the doctor call “Arthur!” but I paid him no mind. I slipped between the bars of the cage and wrapped my arms about her long, soft neck . . . and then I knew beyond the ghost of a doubt that Norway would have to wait.

  CHAPTER 47

  A Heart Can Be Broken

  BUT SOMETHING WAS still amiss.

  Over the next few days I coaxed the bear to eat a little. Bits of salmon, a nibble of trout, a few scraps of beef and pork. But even when I hand-fed her while sitting at her side, it wasn’t enough. I knew how much she
ought to be eating. On the ship, she had wolfed down bucketsful of cod.

  She no longer paced restlessly to and fro in her cage, and I couldn’t feel the hum of the running energy on her. She took small interest in her surroundings, staring dully into the far distance. Sometimes I could cheer her by humming to her and scratching behind her ears, at which she groaned with pleasure and snuffled my hair and neck.

  Recalling what I had told him about the bear’s forage in the Low Countries, the keeper brought her three or four kinds of eggs and some blackberries. The bear lipped each berry from my hand and swallowed it. But she turned up her nose at the eggs.

  I asked the doctor to tell about the rabbit haunch she had eaten in the warehouse in Bergen, and the next day the keeper produced a rabbit broiled to perfection. I held it out to her. She sniffed at it, but only nibbled at a bit of its skin. “Eat, Bear!” I pleaded. “Don’t be a dunderhead—eat!”

  As the days rolled by, the keeper produced a diversity of food for her. A lamb. A fox. A goose. While she sometimes showed interest, she never ate more than a few bites.

  From time to time the doctor and the keeper put their heads together for long, worried colloquies. I heard the word leopard often when they spoke, and I asked the doctor about it. He seemed loathe to tell me, but finally relented. It seemed that Emperor Frederick had given King Henry three leopards some years before. They had lost interest in their food, and in behaving as leopards do.

  “And how did it fall out for them?” I asked.

  The doctor hesitated. Then: “One at a time, over several years, they died.”

  Died. The word struck a knell, deep at the center of me.

  I had thought that if I could stay with the bear at least part of every day, she would recover her spirits. I had thought she needed me—that I would be enough for her, that I could heal her heart. But a heart can be broken in many different ways. A heart can be broken when you yearn for home, or when you’re denied the life you were born to. A heart can be broken by a cage.

  And what of my heart, if she refused to eat? How would I live, if she didn’t?

  The keeper told the doctor that the seal hunter ought to be back soon. He said that ice bears often fasted for months at a time when the sea ice broke up and they couldn’t catch seals.

  I knew very well how my bear loved the taste of seal. She had sacrificed her freedom for it.

  And so I pinned all my hopes upon the seal hunter’s return.

  The bear slept during the heat of the day, and often, as she did so, I helped the keeper feed the other animals in the menagerie. There was a lynx, familiar from home in Norway—and two other cats that were frightfully large and fierce and strange. One was sleek and black; another, tawny brown with a great wide mane. There was the menacing, striped, doglike beast; and the long-necked, humpbacked horse I had marked before. There was a small, waddling creature clothed in black-and-white quills that rattled when it moved; and a lamb-sized, jewel-blue bird that called out like a startled child and fanned its splendid tail feathers in a brilliant and quivering screen.

  These creatures too had been torn from their homelands and confined in cages, and yet they ate and seemed to prosper. The next time the doctor came to the menagerie, I asked him to inquire of Master de Botton about this.

  The keeper turned and regarded me gravely as he comprehended what the doctor was saying. When he answered he spoke directly to me, as he was wont to do when answering my questions, even though I could understand but few of his words.

  “He says he doesn’t know,” the doctor translated, “why one animal thrives and another does not. He deems it may be too cold here for some, and it may be too warm for your bear. He says the food here is not what they would eat in their own lands, and perhaps it does not suit them—”

  The keeper interrupted to say something more; the doctor listened.

  “He says he thinks that some wild creatures, like some people, can’t get past mourning what they have lost.”

  A matter of the heart.

  I nodded to the keeper to show him I understood. I knew it might seem strange, to some, to think that mere beasts might be capable of mourning. But I had lived on a farm for many years. I had seen a ewe bleating for hours over the body of her dead lamb, and a dog moping for weeks after the death of his littermate. Again, I wondered: Was the bear a mother? Did she mourn for her cubs?

  This pricked me in a familiar, sore place. Mama. I couldn’t return to her now, and didn’t know if ever I would. But it was past time for me to try to put her mind at ease.

  That evening, after supper, I asked the doctor if he would take down a letter.

  “For whom?” he asked.

  “My mother. To tell her that I am well.”

  Though the doctor had planned to return to Bergen, he let the ship sail without him. We moved from our chambers in the inn to a small room above a cobbler’s shop, and the doctor began treating patients. In the evenings we supped together at an alehouse nearby. And afterward he began teaching me bits of French, for that was what the keeper and most of the fine folk in this place spoke, and the doctor was as ignorant of English as I.

  Every day I returned to the fortress, to the bear. I had never laid eyes on the king or his court since that first time; the doctor told me that the king had many castles and stayed at the Tower but rarely.

  And then one day the keeper appeared from the direction of the water gate, pushing a cart and calling my name. The seal!

  Such a small, gray, sad, dead thing. Together we heaved the seal into the bear’s cage and shut the door.

  The bear raised her nose to taste the air, as if some faint memory had wafted in on a breeze. Slowly, she heaved herself to her feet. She put her nose down to the seal and sniffed. Then she turned aside and lay back down again.

  The keeper bowed his head.

  I slipped through the cage bars, dug my fingers into her fur, and shook her. “Eat!” I said. “It’s a seal—don’t you see?”

  She heaved out a deep, groaning sigh, but didn’t move.

  CHAPTER 48

  The Parcel

  OVER THE NEXT few weeks, as summer waned, a heavy sickness came to live in my belly and wouldn’t go away. Though the bear’s new fur had grown in after the molt—white as a baby’s first tooth—it soon grew dingy and began to hang loose on her. Clouds of flies came to buzz round her head, and she didn’t stir herself to swat at them. Her eyes grew sunken and crusty. I pleaded with her to eat, held one morsel of food after another in front of her nose. Sometimes she ate a little. But her heart wasn’t in it . . . and it wasn’t enough.

  Often, I recalled what the captain had said about the bear and me making our escape and traipsing through London. It had been a jest, but still . . . I imagined coming to her at night, unlocking her cage, and setting her free. Together, we would wend through the dark streets, ducking around corners to avoid passersby, and standing still—perfectly still—when the night watchman hove into view. We would wait until he passed, then make our way east through the city, leaning into the shadows and whispering our feet against the ground. After a time the bear would lift up her nose, stretching to taste a stray breeze from the North Sea. Then she would veer toward the river delta, hastening her steps. She would slip into the water and strike out swimming for home.

  It was a whimsy—only a wish. But I drew brief comfort from imagining her escape, and it was better by far than facing up to the fate that awaited her.

  One day in September, a courier arrived at our door. The doctor spoke with him in French for a few moments, and then the courier handed me a parcel wrapped in burlap.

  “What is this?” I asked.

  “Someone gave it to the captain of the Queen Margrete, asking that it be delivered to ‘the one who tended the ice bear,’ ” the doctor said. “The captain commissioned this man to find you.”

  The doctor gave the courier a coin; he left. I bore the parcel to the window, where a wash of pale, late-afternoon light seeped int
o the room.

  “Open it,” the doctor said.

  I did.

  It held two objects, each swaddled in a clean, soft rag. When I unwrapped the first, I knew it at once.

  My spoon case.

  Carefully, I prized it open.

  My spoon.

  “Yours?” the doctor asked.

  I nodded.

  They were like old friends, the spoon and its case—so fitting to my hand. I reached for the other wrapped object and found a smooth, rounded chunk of wood.

  A carving.

  A bear.

  I would have known her anywhere. Her long neck; her pigeon-toed front feet. The arrow scar on her shoulder. Her small, rounded ears. Her patrician nose, held up to the air and sniffing, as if mapping the dimensions of her world.

  It was finely done, the carving, with many tiny features, down to the harness spanning the bear’s neck and upper back.

  And here, a scrap of parchment with words on it, writ large. I gave it to the doctor. He brought it up near his face, squinted, blinked. He read aloud:

  Dung Boy.

  Sorry.

  Ottar.

  Why?

  I remembered the quick smile Ottar had given me after I was reunited with the bear. Because I hadn’t hit him? Because I had protected him from Thorvald?

  Who could know?

  I traced a finger across the surface of the wood, following the thin, raised line of the harness. I recalled how I had buckled it that first time in the warehouse; how I had held on to it as the bear ferried me ashore after the Queen Margrete ran aground; how I had sliced through the leather to free the bear in the end. I had fancied that I was releasing her from the emblem of her bondage, but instead, I had delivered her to another cage.

  I clasped the carving in my hand, feeling the old energy thrumming in my blood, and an idea began to take shape in my mind.