by Mimi Thebo
Evidently, Mammoth’s Park Service Office is being funny about taking in packages right now, and Tony wants a new pair of Vans—special skateboarding shoes. He can’t order them, so he gives me a little piece of paper with style numbers and sizes. If I can, I’m to get the ones at the top, but if not, the next and the next, and so on.
We’re sitting at the table, and his head is bent over the list as he’s explaining it to me, but I totally get it already. My head’s bent over the list too, just to show him I’m taking it seriously. When he looks up, his nose is only about two inches away from mine, and he looks into my eyes, and my stomach does this dropping away thing.
Jem clears his throat. “You didn’t ask what I want.”
Tony is still looking at me. I’ve looked away, but I can feel his eyes on my face. I say to Jem, “I know what you want. You want all your favorite junk food.”
Dad groans. “Not those cheesy things. They smell like a urinal.”
But even though I’m pretending to interact with my family, really, I’m in another world, and it’s a world where only Tony Infante and I exist. I slide my hand a half an inch closer to his, and he slides his hand a half an inch closer to mine.
“I don’t care what they smell like,” Jem says. “And anyway, you can talk. I’ll bet you bring back beef jerky.”
And then we are touching hands, me and Tony. And he pushes, just a little, with his hand on mine, and I push, just a little back.
And I think I might die from it. My heart is beating so hard that I’m finding it hard to breathe, and I’m starting to get a few black spots.
I pull away and lean back in my chair. Tony keeps looking down at his list, as if he’s studying it, but his lips curl into a secret smile….I’ve got to stop looking at Tony Infante’s lips….I’m going to pass out right here at the table.
Then Tony puts the list into an envelope full of money and hands it to me.
And just for a moment, I stop thinking about how completely gorgeous Tony Infante is, and think.
Money.
Mum and Dad have been giving me twenty-five dollars a week, and I’ve just been throwing it into a drawer.
I run up the stairs and nearly faint on the landing. But even though I’ve got big black spots, I still find my room and the drawer. I bring the money down, using my fleece like a basket.
Tony and Jem count it while I pant at the table. I have almost six hundred dollars. Dad says I can treat him to a movie, and he’ll see anything I want.
What does a bear know about death? The bear has seen many animals die. She has killed thousands of animals to feed herself: young elk, fish, even moths. She has seen other bears die.
But does she know that she will die? Does she even think of herself as a separate being? She perceives the world with her consciousness, but how aware is she that her consciousness forms her perceptions? Does she know those perceptions are embodied in a frail husk of degrading cells? Is she aware enough of others to think that the world might go on without her?
No one knows if a bear fears death. It might be only the pain and the hunger that make her cry, in the den that is now her prison.
—
Jem and Tony drop us off on the snowmobiles, and Dad and I walk about a mile with our packs. It’s like walking into spring. Behind us is land still locked in snow. Here, there are little flowers pushing up. The birds are going crazy. Grass and flowers and birds and being able to walk on the ground. It’s all amazing. It’s so much easier than shoeing that it hardly hurts me at all.
My class is right in the tourist center. I walk in, and everyone turns and looks at me.
I haven’t seen other people for months, and now I have about a hundred of them staring at me. They’re all wearing ordinary clothes: dresses and jeans and T-shirts and striped cotton sweaters. I’m wearing head-to-toe Gore-Tex. I slide my pack down by the wall and push my sunglasses up on top of my head. I try to look normal and give a little smile. And they start talking to one another again.
The ranger at the front looks kind of familiar. He waves at me, and I wave back. And then he waves again, and I can tell he’s calling me forward. He’s saved a seat for me in front. He’s put his hat on it.
So I have to walk down the aisle in front of all these people and hand the ranger his Smokey the Bear hat and sit down. I’m sure my face matches the red patches on my coat by the time I do. He leans over and says, “You probably know most of this already. It’s just a formality.”
The doctor told me that being nervous can make my breathing worse. I notice, now that I’m sitting down, that I’m wheezing a bit.
This girl sitting next to me has bright bleached hair and a nose ring. She smiles and says, “Asthma?”
Not “Hi.” Not “My name is Whatever.” Just “Asthma?”
I blush again. I hate myself for blushing, and I hate her for having no manners. I shake my head. I say, “I’m all right.”
She puts out her hand and says, “I’m Marcie.” And suddenly, I realize she’s got quite nice manners.
I shake it and say, “Darcy.”
“We rhyme!” She laughs. “Where are you working?”
“I’m not,” I say. “I live here. My dad works here.”
“Oh, wow!” she says. “You lucky thing. All year?”
I nod. She tells the guy on the other side of her. Now everybody in the front row is leaning to listen to our conversation.
“What does your dad do?”
“Is that your dad?” the guy asks, pointing to the ranger in front.
The girl on the other side of me says, “Have you ever seen a bear?”
“Have you seen wolves?”
“How deep was the snow?”
It’s like being a celebrity or something. Luckily, the ranger clears his throat, and somebody dims the lights for a PowerPoint presentation, so I don’t have to answer.
I am so hot and embarrassed that I have to take off my coat. I miss the first slide.
The second slide is a picture. Black bear, brown bear.
The ranger says, “The easiest way to tell these two apart is by looks and behavior. The brown bear, which we call a grizzly, has a distinctive hump and is larger than the black bear.”
New slide. Black bear.
“If you see a bear in the woods, and you run and climb a tree, and the bear climbs after you and kills you and eats you, that’s a black bear.”
Nervous laughter. New slide. Brown bear.
“If you see a bear in the woods, and you run and climb a tree, and the bear pushes the tree over and kills you and eats you, that’s a grizzly.”
Utter silence.
Well, he’s got their attention. Now he goes on to talk about the unpredictability of bears, how few maulings there are per year, and how to keep yourself safe.
He talks about respecting bear closure signs on trails, staying at least a hundred feet from bears at all times, and reporting any aggressive bear behavior.
Then he talks about poachers. He shows a picture of some poor black bear with a dirty tube stuck in its stomach, and talks about bear farming. He shows pictures of dead bears with their paws cut off, and talks about how much bear paws are worth in the Far East. Some of the girls start to cry. He tells us how to be alert for poaching.
That’s what happened to my bear, I think. They tried to get her, but she got away. Or maybe she went over into the national forest, and some city person shot her, thinking she was an elk.
When I pay attention again, the ranger is talking about the bears waking up. He tells us about how they eat winterkills or steal kills from wolf packs. He tells us how much meat they need their first few weeks of coming out of hibernation.
It’s a lot more than what I’ve already given her.
Hunger is an injustice. It is insulting. It burns in your belly and knocks on all the doors of your mind. Of course, you are weak and tired, but you are also unhappy. The universe has decided you are not worth keeping. It will not waste any more of its
resources on you.
When you are hungry you must conserve all energy that does not lead to nutrition. But your entire digestive system rumbles and cramps. Your digestive fluid burns. With nothing else to consume, it seems to decide to consume its host. Comfort is impossible.
You must rest, but you can’t rest. You must keep positive and think creatively about how you will find food, but you are deeply, biologically, unhappy.
When you are hungry you feel trapped.
The bear sleeps whenever she can.
—
I am half asleep in the car. Images chase my dreaming mind. My friends, around a table at Pizza Hut, only it’s not Pizza Hut, because they’re all eating bear paws. Outside, screaming bears crowd the plate-glass windows, but I am the only one who can see them, who can hear them cry.
My bear, hungry, shoulder getting worse. Looking for me, waiting for me.
Three dirty men, leading ugly horses. They take my babies. My lovely, funny, round, and furry babies. The babies cry. I charge them. The men have dogs that bite at me. The men put cloth over my babies’ faces, and my babies fall down. I am bitten on my throat. There is a dog on my back, too. I swing and roll.
The men are taking my babies away, on the ugly horses. I run after them. I swipe at the rump of a horse. It screams.
And then I am falling. A hammer blow. A burning. The sound, the smoke. Shot. I was shot in the shoulder. I hide in the brush. I let…I let the men take my babies away. This crushes my heart.
The bear with the dirty tube in its stomach. The bear in the cage. It’s mine. It’s my baby.
It’s my baby. It’s my baby. It’s my baby.
“Darcy!” Dad is shaking me.
I am sweating and panting.
“You were having a nightmare.”
I say, “God.”
Dad offers me a bottle of water, and I gulp about half of it.
“What was it about?”
I drink a little more, just for time to think of what to tell him. Then I say, “Bears.”
“I’ve heard some of those slides are pretty graphic. You okay?”
I nod. “Fine.”
We’re coming into Livingston. It’s a pretty town, but it looks absolutely gorgeous to me. Dad asks, “Hungry? How does a burger and a shake sound?”
“It sounds like absolute heaven,” I say. I’m going to enjoy every minute of this weekend. No matter what.
Whenever Dad gets a burger and they say, “Would you like fries or a salad?,” he always says, “Both.” Today they say, “Would you like coleslaw or fries?,” and we both say, “Both, and can I have a salad, as well?” It’s been so long since I’ve had fresh vegetables. The salad tastes amazing, and I get my favorite blue cheese dressing with full fat. Everything tastes so, so good. In the cabin I’m always conscious that I have to chew and swallow. But in the restaurant I just look up for a moment, and my food is all gone.
I feel like a python that’s swallowed a rabbit whole.
We waddle back to the car, and there’s a jewelry shop. I kind of linger, looking in the window, and Dad says, “Why don’t you go in and look around? We’re not in any tearing hurry.”
And that’s when I see it. It’s a silver ring—heavy, thick, and shaped around the finger like a slightly irregular octagon. Every side has something on it—the carved silhouette of a grizzly, a bear’s paw print with a Montana sapphire set into the palm, a pine tree, a mountain range, a tiny bear claw—inset and enameled. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
Before I know it I’m asking to try it on, and it fits. It’s a little hard to slide over my knuckle, but once the ring is past, it fits perfectly.
Not only does it fit, but it’s comfortable. It’s also handmade, by an artist, and five hundred and forty-five dollars.
I was going to get a haircut. I was going to buy clothes. I was going to buy books.
I have the money, but I can’t afford the ring. Not really.
Dad looks at me and then at the ring. He asks the guy if there’s any discount for locals. He tells the guy that he’s an ungulates researcher and stationed outside at an observation hut in Cooke City.
The guy goes back and talks to a lady.
They tell Dad they could knock off 20 percent.
Dad, very kindly, tells me that makes it four hundred and thirty-six dollars. He knows how bad I am at math.
I could run away with that much money. I could fly home myself.
The silhouette of the grizzly looks just like her. Somebody who has really looked at bears properly has made that ring. Someone who knows what they mean.
I hear my voice say, “I’ll take it.”
Dad gives me fifty dollars. He said, “I was going to buy you a present, for being such a trouper. But I’d really like to help you pay for that. It’s beautiful.”
We check into our motel, and bounce on the beds. We take really long showers. We change into actual clothes. Even Dad puts on a pair of cords and a cotton shirt with buttons. We wash the car. We go to a silly movie and eat candy and drink huge Cokes. I missed an exciting bit, running to the ladies’ room.
Dad is a pretty fun date. I don’t even mind when we go to a climbing store for, like, hours.
He’s gotten us dinner reservations at a restaurant in a little yellow house. It has great Mexican food. At the end of our meal, he asks me how I’m feeling.
I’m absolutely stuffed, again. They kept bringing us chips and salsa, and I think I ate my body weight. But I feel fine.
“Not tired?” Dad asks.
I look at my watch. It’s eight o’clock. In the park that’s usually bedtime for me. “No,” I say, “not tired.”
We walk to the car, and Dad opens this bag on the backseat. He hands me my yellow bikini and a towel.
“We’re going swimming,” he says. He starts driving. We go clear out of town. I hope he’s not taking me hot potting in one of those thermal places in the woods where you have to drop your clothes in the mud and get naked in front of everybody. But then we pull up into an actual parking lot at an actual building. Dad pays for us to go in and then points to the ladies’ changing area.
It’s below freezing tonight, but the changing room is warm. The air, when I come out, though, is cold and wet. Dad’s already in the pool. “Come in quick!” he says. “It’s really warm.”
And it is. It smells a bit like boiled eggs, because it’s thermal water—water heated by the depths of the earth. But it’s lovely and warm.
For a moment I just float on my back. There’s only about twenty people there and most of them are clustered at the edge, drinking beer and chatting. I start to swim. I go through all my strokes: front crawl, back crawl, breaststroke, butterfly. I dive under the water and pinch Dad’s bottom when he’s not looking. I do handstands and flips.
I shout, “I love this place!” Dad smiles, but he’s looking at me kind of funny, too.
Suddenly, I remember my ring, and I panic a little bit, but it’s still on nice and tight.
The moon is a sliver of ice in the cold sky. I wonder what the doctor would think of me getting wet like this. I don’t care.
When we get back to the motel, Dad takes a shower first. I’m on my phone, updating my status: “Taking a break from the wilderness in an actual town. So cool to have concrete under my feet!” and texting Sue and my mates, BACK IN CIVLSATN FOR NIGHT. I tell them about the movie I saw and the food I ate. I take a picture of my new ring and post it.
Dad goes to sleep. I take a shower myself and come back and turn out the lights. Thirty-seven people like my status. The gang is sleeping over at Izzy’s. They’ve been up all night at a party. They send me video of them in their pajamas, squealing and waving and blowing me kisses. They send me one of Izzy with a boy from the local private school, and I text her and ask her if she snogged him. She texts me back and tells me I’m just jealous ’cause all I can snog are moose. We copy everybody into our text, and there’s lots of LOLs.
Then they s
end me a video of them all dancing at the party, and I get up and dance along.
Dad tells me to either put in my earbuds or shut it down—he’s exhausted.
I put in my earbuds and keep dancing. I look at the window at the snow-capped mountains and describe it to the girls, telling them I’m dancing in the motel, that I’m dancing with them, and that they’re dancing with me and the moon and the mountains.
I post photos I took ages ago of the cabin and the snowmobiles and skis and stuff. I tell everybody we’ve still got a three-foot snowpack.
People go crazy over the photos. Sue tells me I look beautiful and that she’s going to start growing her hair out tomorrow.
People are asking me all about how we get food and stuff and if I have seen any wolves or bears. I post a Google Earth link showing where the cabin is. I post a link to the place we went swimming and talk about how amazing it was.
More people ask me questions. People from my old school are following me like crazy, just to ask me questions.
I answer and answer, way past midnight, and fall asleep with my phone in my hand, plugged into the charger.
Chapter Ten
I don’t really understand that something about me is strange until I wake up earlier than Dad.
I never wake up earlier than Dad. Dad wakes up earlier than everybody. Every single day. He’s usually already had a three-mile run by the time my alarm goes off.
I look at him, and he’s still really out of it. So I get dressed in the bathroom and brush my hair into a ponytail and get the key and my bag and quietly let myself out. I walk down the street until I see a coffee place, and I get us bagels and cream cheese. I get Dad a large latte and me some English Breakfast tea with milk. They put it all into a paper bag with handles that makes it easy to carry, so I buy a paper, too. I take it all back to the room.
Dad’s just sitting up, rubbing his face, and I give him his coffee, his paper, and his bagel.
“Oh, man,” he keeps saying. “Oh, wow.” Like I’ve just gone out and killed an elk, field dressed it, and cooked it over an open fire that I started with by rubbing two sticks together. If he gets that excited because I managed to buy bagels, he must think I’m totally useless.