by Mimi Thebo
Jem sits on my bed. We don’t know where to start. We’re all washed and brushed, and we’re just sitting there, looking at each other.
He says, “Her shoulder. How bad is it?”
I think about it. “It smells,” I say. “I think she got shot.” Although I told him everything, I didn’t tell him about my dreams or about leaving my body. I don’t know if I’ll ever tell anyone about that stuff.
Jem shakes his head. “And she can’t get down?”
I don’t have to say. He can see it in my face.
It’s not until he touches my cheek that I know I’m crying. My eyes are leaking.
Jem says, “Don’t worry. We’ll think. We’ll think of something.”
My eyes feel so sore that I lie down and close them. Jem gets up and shuts off my light. At the door, he turns around and says, “Anyway. She’s got enough food for a couple of days, at least.”
As I’m going to sleep, I realize I forgot to say thank you.
What does happiness mean to a bear? Warmth and a full belly? We’re not so sure.
Bears can suffer severe mental health problems in captivity. They pace, they become aggressive, or so passive as to seem catatonic. They lick their fur until it comes away in patches, or they stop grooming altogether. Reproducing is impossible. Self-harm is common.
But other bears adapt well. Those that do, live longer in zoos than they do in the wild. They enjoy puzzles and games from their keepers, and they exhibit moments of joy in their play.
What does happiness mean to a bear?
It depends on the bear.
This bear is a little restless. She has a full belly, and she is warm, but she paces. She licks at her wounded shoulder. At midday she becomes watchful, but in the afternoon, she stretches out to sleep, softly complaining.
—
My blue polar fleece is completely ruined. I told Mum it was cocoa. Everything else is fine, even my gloves. It’s a pity about the fleece because I was going to wear it today. We’re wearing jeans and gaiters and jackets instead of snow stuff. Dad has moved the car up the access road and parked it right where the snow ended last night, so there’s no need to shoe or hike or anything. Bliss.
I am still totally exhausted, and I’m coughing a bit. Mum wants me to stay home and go to the doctor, but Dad, amazingly, says he thinks I’d be better off going with him. I don’t like it when Mum and Dad fight, and from the look on Mum’s face, they will. But I do want to go.
So I have on my new cowgirl jeans and an actual top and my rose-colored fleece and my ski jacket, because I’ll take that and my gaiters off in the car. I have an actual leather bag and not a backpack. I have on earrings and lipstick. I feel nearly human.
Except for the huge dark circles under my eyes and my vampire-like complexion.
I am asleep the moment we sit in the car. In my dreams I reach out for the bear, but I can’t find her. I spend all my dream time looking for her everywhere.
The next thing I know, my dad is shaking my shoulder and I’ve got drool all down my chin.
My shoulder hurts from sleeping on it, and I stretch.
Dad says, “We’re nearly in Bozeman.”
I feel great. That sleep has done me the world of good. I get a mirror and stuff out of my bag to sort out the drool and my hair, and I look great too. I’ve forgotten how nice I can look, sometimes.
Dad keeps looking at me, too.
I say, “Sorry about ignoring you, but I needed that sleep.”
He barely answers me, as if he’s thinking about something else. Well, I’m used to that.
Dad’s postgraduates come in all shapes and sizes. This one, Sally, is blond and Australian and only about an inch taller than I am. She’s very bouncy and cheerful.
I sit in the back and listen to them chattering away about bone density and muscle mass and whatever else they’re observing. They’re copying an observation someone did years back before the wolves came to Yellowstone. There are less deer now, because of the wolves, but Dad thinks that what deer there are, are better deer. That the wolves actually improve the condition of the herd, even as they decrease the numbers.
There’s a lot more to it, but it bores me to tears.
We stop for burgers in Livingston, and I eat and eat and eat.
Then Dad asks me a funny question. He says, “Darcy, health wise: How do you feel right now? From one to ten? If one is dying and ten is ready to do a swimathon?”
I suck on the last of my malted shake, and the straw makes a sucking noise. “Umm,” I say. “Except for feeling so full that I might burst, I’d say ten.”
Outside, Dad says, “Give me twenty jumping jacks.”
This is what he used to do to me and Jem when we were little. Give me ten push-ups. Give me twenty jumping jacks. Do two laps around the garden for me.
I laugh and give him twenty. He smiles at me, so warm and kind, but also thoughtful.
We all get an instinct for when parents are up to something. My instinct is tingling hard.
Sally sits in the back with me on the way up, and we talk about all kinds of things. Jeans, music, school, my illness. The time she broke both arms at once.
She’s lovely and really easy to talk to. But the closer we get to the park, the more I’m willing to just let her talk.
I think I ate too much.
Dad looks back in the rearview mirror at me, and I see him and Sally exchange glances.
My feeling about Dad comes back.
Just inside the gate, Dad stops and takes Sally’s picture at the Yellowstone National Park sign at the entrance. Dad makes me get out of the car too.
“Give me twenty jumping jacks,” he says on the way back to the car. I just look at him. I want to sit down. My shoulder hurts. My knee hurts…actually, every bit of both legs hurt.
Dad holds my shoulders and looks at me. He says, “How do you feel, on a scale of one to ten?”
Sally is looking at me too.
Why are they doing this to me? My lower lip trembles shamefully. I say, “About two or three. Can I get back in the car now?”
I see them talking outside the window, and it’s something about me, I can tell.
All of a sudden, everything seems hopeless. Dad and I will never be close again. Sue will forget me. My bear will die of starvation. And me. Maybe I’ll die too. Maybe one day I’ll leave my body, and I won’t find my way back.
Nothing seems to be helping me.
My head hurts, and I want to cry.
Dad gets back into the car. He says, “Honey, I’m sorry, but Sally has forgotten something. We have to go back to Gardiner.”
Sally sits in back. She says, “Hey, I’m really sorry. I had a blond moment.”
She starts talking about hair, and before I know it, I’m asking her advice about the highlighting kit. I wonder if my hair is light enough to use it. I don’t want to have orange streaks. She’s telling me all about how to test a small patch and about some of her own hair disasters when we pull into Food Farm’s parking lot.
“Can I go in too?” I ask Dad. “Have we got time?”
Jem ate almost all Dad’s beef jerky when he pretended to be sick, so that he could save my life. I get a bunch more, so Dad doesn’t find out.
They’ve got vegan food in there, and I start thinking about how my vegetarianism didn’t last very long. I grab a six pack of Diet Coke, and a cold one for the road.
Dad is leaning against the car. He says, “If I ask really nicely, would you do twenty jumping jacks for me? I swear there’s a real reason for it.”
I roll my eyes. I put my stuff on top of the car and do twenty jumping jacks. “How do you feel?” he asks. “From one to ten?”
I say, “I don’t know. I’m a little tired. Seven? Eight?”
Sally comes out, and he says, “She did twenty. And she says she’s a seven or eight.”
Sally looks at me carefully.
“Okaaaaay,” I say, looking at them both. “What’s going on?”
> “That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Dad says. “I think maybe, just maybe, you might be intolerant to midrange altitudes.”
I’m sitting up front with him, and we’re driving back to the park. He tells me that some perfectly healthy people can’t take high altitudes. That usually the resistance point is eight thousand feet, but that for some people, it’s six thousand. He thinks I might be one of the some people.
It’s interesting at first, but he goes on and on about it. Finally, I tell him that I’m not following him. I tell him that I’m tired.
Sally leans forward with something in her hand. “Six thousand one hundred and twenty,” she says.
Now we’re back at Mammoth, but Dad doesn’t drive down the access road. Sally is going to stay here a couple of days and go through her orientation. Then she’ll be in Cooke City, which is the closest town to the cabin. We usually come into Mammoth or Gardiner, though, because Jem’s school is there, and Mum gets her mail and uses the WiFi there.
Dad looks at me and says, “You going to get out?”
I shake my head—no. Really, I think I might grab a quick nap. Dad strides off in the wrong direction to help Sally, who is struggling with her bags alone. I’d help, but the idea of opening the car door makes my head hurt. So I close my eyes.
Then Dad is back. He opens my door and says, “Honey, I want you to come with me.”
It’s the clinic. I don’t want to go to the clinic. Then we’re with the doctor, and they talk and talk, and the doctor is being really reassuring and nice to Dad, and that seems to make Dad mad, and he starts shouting. And then Sally is suddenly there, and I find out she studied medicine before zoology. She starts using very big words, and I’m on the examination table, so while they’re all shouting, I just lie down and have a nap.
I wake up in a hospital bed, but I’m still in the clinic. There’s a little plastic clamp over my finger and an oxygen mask on my face. A lady I’ve seen at the clinic before asks me to sit up, and I take a tablet.
Then Mum is there, getting me to drink my Diet Coke. I must need fluids if Mum is okay with me drinking Diet Coke. It tastes a little flat, but I like it anyway. I drink about a ton of it.
And that’s what I do for a day. I sleep, drink Diet Coke, and do a lot of wees. Oh, and I take this tablet.
—
I see the doctor and Dad and Sally next day. Dad is in his white camo, so he’s come straight from the hut. I’ve already rebelled against the oxygen mask, and whatever numbers are coming out of my finger made the lady say it was okay to remove it.
The doctor has given me a drug that will help with the altitude. There’s more he’s going to say, but Mum and Dad won’t let him. All through the doctor’s talk, Dad keeps touching me…holding my hand, stroking my hair. He’s spent hours in the clinic, and I’m pretty sure he should be training Sally instead.
Unlike the last six rounds of medication, this drug actually makes me feel better. A whole lot better. Dad tells me that Sally’s coming to dinner and spending the night, to catch up on her training.
I get to go home, too.
I guess I took for granted the lovely smell of the pine trees. It’s so fresh and pretty. The road is open a lot farther now. We shoe in the last little bit to the cabin. In a week, Dad says, we’ll park right outside.
It’s so good to be back and to be able to breathe. I want to run right up the hill and see my bear. I say, “I’m really stiff. Do you mind if I go for a walk?” Mum and Dad look at each other for a little while, but then they say I can.
When they go in the house, I sneak back to the side of the porch and take four cantaloupes from under the canoe, bundling them into my jacket.
This will be the last time I can come here without climbing gear. The ledge is over a yard clear of snow.
From the bottom I call, “Hey!” and out she runs. She looks down at me and gives me that bossy Come here call.
I nearly run up the hill. But it’s tricky at the top. The snow is thin and icy. She’s pacing around when I raise my head. I can just get my elbows up on the ledge. I roll her a melon, and her eyes get big and round. She smashes it with one paw, gobbles it up off the floor. I roll her another and another. And then I roll the last one. She’s got plenty of water, and there’s no big pile of poo.
I stand there and watch her eat the cantaloupe. And suddenly, I realize: I’m the reason she didn’t come down in time. If I hadn’t fed her, she would have had to try harder. And if she had tried harder, and the snow had still been there, she could have come down.
She can’t now.
She looks okay, but her shoulder smells really bad now, even from here. She lies down and opens her arm and calls to me, but I don’t go. So she comes over and cuddles me, and I stroke her big head. I tell her things.
I tell her about being sick and about the tablet and being better.
And then I tell her that I’m sorry and that I’ll think of something to make it better for her.
When I come down, Jem is there, watching me. He gives me a hug, hard and tight. Like he thought I was going to die, or like this is the last time I’ll ever see him.
I look at him, and then I look at the trees, and then I look at the cave, and then I look at Jem again.
And suddenly, I know how to set her free.
I tell Jem about it on the way to the cabin. He stops and brushes the fur from my fleece. He takes off my gloves and beats them on a rock.
And then he turns to me and says that (a) I’m utterly insane, and (b) he’d be glad to help.
When we get back I go upstairs to shower and change. After I dry my hair, there’s a knock on the door, and Mum and Dad come in. They ask to sit on my bed. They ask me to sit down too.
I think they found out about the bear. Or maybe they’re getting divorced. Just when I think this, Mum reaches for Dad’s hand. Dad does his deep breath thing that he does when something hurts. He’s not looking at me, not properly.
Mum shows me my tablets. It’s a twenty-one-day course. She asks me to take my evening tablet and then to count how many days’ medication is left.
I say I don’t have to count it. It’s twenty. One from twenty-one is twenty. I know I’m rubbish at math, but even I can do that.
Then Mum says, “The doctor won’t give you any more. They’re not good for you, if you take them for too long.”
I give kind of a scornful laugh. I say, “Well, what am I supposed to do? Live happily for three weeks and then feel horrible again?”
Mum says, “No. There’s only one cure for acute mountain sickness. You have to descend.”
Descend. It means go down.
I have to leave the park.
Dad lets go of Mum’s hand and takes one of mine. His voice is clear and calm. He says, “Look. While Mum was gone, she talked to Sue’s mum, Mickey.” He clears his throat. “In fact, that was why Mum went back to England. To talk to Mickey in person.”
When she was so busy. And when I thought she had abandoned me. My heart is so full of…feelings. So many kinds of feelings. I think I might just break apart with how many are cramming into it right now.
Dad clears his throat again, and I suddenly realize he’s trying not to cry. “Mickey said if it came to it, you could move in with her and Sue. Mickey kind of thought you wouldn’t fit in here.”
It’s so horrible sometimes, getting what you really want.
Moving in with Mickey and Sue? Going home? I prayed for this. I begged for it. I hated Mum and Dad for not letting me do it last year.
And now that I’ve gotten it, I don’t want it anymore.
Mum stands up and holds me, and I cry a little bit into the soft bit of her tummy. And then I see Dad looking so, so miserable, and I reach out for him, and he stands up and holds me too. I say, “I don’t want to go.”
Mum sighs. “That’s what Daddy said,” she says, wiping my eyes with the tail of her shirt. “And I didn’t believe him.” She holds me hard. “We don’t want you to go either,
” she says. “But you can come back, every school holiday, for three weeks. And we’ll be home ourselves, in just over a year.”
Dad says, “Some people grow out of it. Some people have it once and then never again. You never know.” But I think we all know I’m not going to be one of those people.
It’s dark, or I think I’d run outside right now, to get all the time I can before I have to go.
I’ll miss my family, but we’ll still be in touch.
Forests don’t text. Birds and deer and wolves and…bears…don’t post pictures of themselves. I can’t believe I have to leave this place, just when I’ve grown to love it.
—
“This is probably the worst thing I’ve ever done,” Jem says, sinking the ax deep into a perfectly healthy lodgepole pine tree. “I can’t believe I’m doing this.”
“You’re not,” I tell him. “Not really. It’s me who’s doing it. You’re just hired muscle.”
It’s huge. Plenty long enough to reach the cave. And although lodgepole pines are pretty slim and straight, it seems about as big around as a house right now.
It’s sweaty work. Jem stops and wipes his face. “I don’t think the rangers would buy that,” he says. “Here, you. Time to get the saw.”
Lots of the cabins have old tools in their sheds. Ours has this two-man saw, neatly nailed to the wall. We’d taken it down and oiled and sharpened it. I hope nobody notices it’s missing.
It’s a bit tricky to use, but once we get the rhythm going, it doesn’t take long to saw down the tree.
When it cracks and starts to fall, we watch it go, just like Jem said it would, slowly, slowly down to the ledge.
The bear is not impressed. She shouts in alarm.
I say, “Hey, doofus! It’s a bridge!”
The top of the tree just about fills the ledge. Suddenly, she pushes her way through the branches to look at me. Her face is so expressive. You can tell she’s thinking, What have you done now?
Jem and I can’t help it. We start to laugh.
“What the—” Tony has appeared out of nowhere. His face is pale. He looks at the saw, the ax, and the tree. He says, “Why did you kill a tree? How could you?”