Bear Witness

by Mandy Haggith

  ‘See?’

  I shook my head. ‘What?’

  ‘The cave mouth,’ he said. I couldn’t make it out. ‘Up at the top end of that crack, where the fissure comes in from the right.’

  I saw it. ‘It’s tiny.’

  ‘Yes. Hard to think a bear could get in there, eh? Are you up for the climb? It’s not as hard as it looks, we can go up the side there and along that ledge.’

  We hauled ourselves up and peered into the cave. Petr shone a torch to reveal that it was remarkably tight-mouthed but opened up into a more substantial space within. A scuff of old leaves was scattered among the dust on the floor. It looked dry and snug.

  Above the forest canopy, the ever-present breeze had worked itself up into wind, and there was more thunder. A few fat drops of rain squeezed their way between the dense leaves.

  We carried on upstream. The next cave was in an even more precarious position and we decided not to try to climb up to it. A third, not used every year, Petr explained, was easier to reach. It had a more substantial opening and though it had a deep litter of dry leaves on the floor it was clear that moisture dripped in from above, especially once the rain got going outside.

  ‘Good bed of leaves,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, but that shows it is exposed to the wind. Where leaves can get in, snow can, too.’

  ‘I’m starving, and we’re going to get wet.’

  ‘One last stop,’ he said. ‘It’s close.’

  We made our way back to the stream, followed it upwards around a couple of bends and then crossed it and headed towards a dramatic outcrop of rock. A quick scramble brought us out under a huge overhang with an almost level shelf several metres wide underneath it. It too was half a metre deep in dry beech leaves. I collapsed on them and rolled. It felt as soft as a feather mattress.

  Petr laughed at me. ‘Look,’ he said, pointing to crude paintings on the underside of the limestone ledge.

  All I could manage was ‘Wow.’

  ‘The historians say people have used this shelter for millennia,’ he said. ‘Not bears. It’s no good for the winter, far too exposed for a long winter sleep. They’ll use it in summer sometimes maybe, to shelter. Like us, now, same thing.’

  Rain was beginning to fall in earnest. We tucked into bread and cheese. My shirt and trousers were gummy with sweat. In a sudden urge, I began stripping them off.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Petr was shaking his head.

  ‘Cooling off.’ I stood just beyond the lip of the overhang, where the rainwater streamed off. I let it pour over me, sweeping it down my sweaty legs and washing the leaves out of my hair.

  There was a flash of lightening and an almost immediate growl, then boom, of thunder. Petr was beside me. I shifted so he could get the full force of the water spout and stood outside, letting the rain fall fresh, sweet and delicious on my skin.

  ‘I feel like I’m part of the forest now,’ I said.

  ‘We are,’ he said. ‘Hopefully an intelligent part.’

  ‘I’m not sure about intelligent.’

  ‘You sure look like a wild animal now.’

  Another flash and crash made me jump. ‘It makes me want to scream. Such energy.’

  Petr laughed as I revelled, eyes sparkling. The mountains thundered.

  With some sort of girl-guide good sense I had brought a towel. Petr’s pack contained a sleeping bag, which he unfurled on the beech leaf mattress. We dressed and lay there, dried and languorous, watching the storm. Later, we gathered water dripping off the overhang and ate again. Dusk began to fall.

  ‘Walk back or stay?’ he asked.

  ‘Are you serious?’

  He stretched out his legs. ‘We’re dry here. We have enough to stay warm. Water. Food.’

  I drummed my hands on my knees. I’d never done anything like it. A mad adventure.

  ‘Stay.’

  He nodded. ‘Good answer.’

  In a pause in the storm, we sought out birch bark to light a fire and gathered wood: it was mostly wet, but we found some dry enough to start a fire under the overhang. Stacking sticks around the birch bark, I was glad I’d got the knack of firelighting on my many camping trips as a child. My dad was good for something. I looked up and caught him eyeing me.

  ‘You seem to be settling into the forest,’ he said, as if I’d achieved some special status.

  ‘I feel free,’ I said. ‘You set me free.’

  ‘No. You set yourself free.’

  ‘You helped.’ I bent down and squatted beside him.

  He rumpled his chin and nodded. ‘Maybe I helped a little.’

  ‘Shall we light the fire?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  He shuffled over so I could share the sleeping bag. We sat watching the lightning as the thunderstorm roamed around the mountains. He told me stories about his life and interrogated me gently about mine. I told him about my mother, and cried; we talked about love and fear; he related the trauma of his upbringing by Romanian parents in exile, who could never settle; he showed me the traditional dance his grandmother had taught him so he wouldn’t forget his origins; I confessed to the tricks I had developed to avoid ever having to dance with my father; we laughed.

  As we talked, night crept in. I was stirring the leaves beside me when Petr stilled me with a hand on my thigh. I felt his body lock.

  The musk was like a wet shout in the darkness, a scent barking out of the night, pungent and damp. A big animal moved, just outside of the overhang, passing from the right, across the front of the cave, between us and the stream. Close. Very close.

  My stomach was like a fist.

  The thunder and lightning had stopped but rain guttered from the roof and the stream roared in its bed. The animal could have been trampling noisily, we would not have heard it. But the smell of a bear, especially a wet one, is sufficient signal for the deafest creature. Invisible and soundless, its scent beamed its fierce greeting.

  I reached for Petr’s hand and he squeezed, then released. My pulse raced. Love and fear: indistinguishable.

  Petr rummaged in a pocket and handed me a lighter. I reached over to the unlit fire and sparked a flame on to the birch bark. It sputtered and caught. Light and shadow loomed and danced on the roof, and the world outside the rock shelter switched sheer black in contrast to the flames.

  The musk faded. Out there in the darkness, the wet bear gave up its plan to shelter on the ledge under the overhang.

  I shivered, drunk with emotion. Petr offered me his jacket. I shook my head so he put it on. I fed the fire with the dry twigs and laid a branch on, then moved to sit close by him, wrapping his arm around my shoulder and huddling in to his body heat.

  Through the night we woke often, one or other of us disentangling to throw more wood on the fire. The rain stopped, the sky cleared and stars showed themselves as sparkles on twigs. Small animals scuffled darkly on their night business. An owl hooted nearby for a while. I heard its wing beats wiping through the night, sweeping up hunting messages and scents.

  I listened to the forest’s starlit night chatter, which seemed richer in meaning than any human language, a meaning that could not be articulated, only felt. For once I did not seek to understand. It was enough to lie there, simply being in the forest, listening to rustle, hush and snap; a squeak, a whisper; nothing. Petr held me, his heart a drumbeat beneath the forest’s song.

  When we woke the sun was climbing down the trees from the highest leaves, lighting the tree trunks inch by inch. We brewed some tea, then let the fire die.

  It was a beautiful morning, crisp and bright and sparkling. The whole world was washed clean by the rain. The forest soil exhaled heady wafts of life. Clouds of moist breath feathered on the forested slope beyond, just visible from between the trees. I let my mind roam the expanse of wooded land, miles and miles around in all directions, the vast Carpathian mountain wilds.

  ‘You go today?’

  I nodded. He turned away, a furrow across his forehead I hadn’t seen
before. He started packing up the sleeping bag.

  We walked back to the cabin, finding little to say. There, he lit the stove and after the water heated, he offered me the shower, while he made some food.

  Then there were formalities with Theo, lunch, packing. I was inarticulate with confusion. It had been just three brief days. Just three. I tried to convince myself nothing had happened, but I knew I was transformed. I put my town boots, skirt and patchwork jacket on, and sat on my bed with papers on my lap, trying to project myself back up the train line to my work in Norway and to re-instate the formal methodology for site identification into the forefront of my mind. Petr occupied himself with domestic chores, packing away foodstuffs in the kitchen, banging cupboard doors.

  The day fizzled towards the hour I was due to leave. The time came, and with it, Valentina’s car. Petr and I barricaded ourselves behind bad humour and allowed Valentina to prevent an intimate farewell. He gave me a collegial hug and I was on my way.

  The train journey north passed in a blur. I tried to concentrate on analysis of the data the tech guys in Oslo had sent me, but hours seemed to go by when I did nothing but lie on the bed in my berth, my mind flitting between my mother and the men who seemed suddenly to have disturbed my life. As the train tracked along the foothills of the Carpathian mountains, fantasies of a life with Petr flowed, then clotted. I listened to a Sibelius symphony on my phone, to see if that would get me in the mood for Finland, and wallowed in its unashamed emotion.

  From Budapest to Vienna I chewed over my experience with Yuri. And then thoughts of Malcolm took over. I agonised about the night I spent with him, trawling my memory for glimpses of what, in my drunken state, I had said and done. I kept returning to that hug, the following morning, the way he had held me, his sheer physical strength. That alone was a comfort. Petr Scazia wasn’t the only man who could hug like a bear.

  All this churned up thinking about men wasn’t exactly in tune with my spinsterly pact with Fe-Phi-Pho, but I persuaded myself I hadn’t actually broken the rules yet. Waiting for my connection at Vienna I typed a message to Diana and Frances. ‘Hey D&F, still chaste and enjoying freedom in the wild woods of Europe.’ I tried changing the wording, ‘your trusty friend, enjoying freedom in the forests of Europe’, then scratched it completely. Why was I trying to be conciliatory? What exactly had I done wrong anyway? The memory of the teddy bear weekend put me back into a sulk, which lasted through Germany, almost all the way to the ferry to Helsinki, and was only conquered by burying myself in geographical data.

  Finland could not have been more different from Romania. There were still mounds of grey snow at the sides of roads. It rained all the way to Kuhmo as I travelled by bus from the train station at Kajaani, and it poured almost without a break throughout my three-day visit, not passionately like the Transylvanian deluge, but as insistent as a bad headache. I was given an apartment furnished in blond, utilitarian pine, next door to the Kuhmo Friendship Park museum.

  Next day I met Kuhmo’s senior ecologist. Drima Raito was short and balding, and he softened the effect of his white collared shirt and office trousers with a sweatshirt stretched over his belly, emblazoned with a smiling wolf. In his cluttered office, he tried to charm me into understanding the Friendship Park’s importance. For thirty years he had been studying the migrations of bears across the border from Russia and he worked hard to cram a decade’s worth of his conclusions into each day of my visit.

  We began with historical data and the Cold War period when he had commenced his research. We pored over maps and charts and watched his animated (prizewinning) Xelsia power-show about post-Soviet impacts on the migratory behaviour of charismatic megafauna of Fennoscandia. I took copious notes.

  At night we drank cold beer, ate reindeer steak and I made excuses to retire early. Feeling somehow obliged to use all the facilities provided, I sat sweating in the stuffy electric sauna cubicle in the bathroom of my apartment. Afterwards, I slept deep, black, inscrutable sleeps.

  On the third day, a tall man appeared in the doorway of Drima’s office. ‘Hey, boss!’ he said.

  Drima raised his eyebrows and put down his pen. ‘Tanka, you’re back.’

  A woman poked her head between the doorframe and Tanka. ‘Païvi, too,’ she said, winning a smile from Drima. She slipped into the room and gave him a light hug. She looked a few years younger than me, a blonde, sequinned pixie dressed in pink skin-tight leggings and a multicoloured cycle top.

  Tanka strolled in behind her. He was ageless, his hair cropped convict short, white or blond, so very pale it was hard to tell which, and dressed in loose combat pants and camouflage jacket.

  Drima offered coffee and Païvi followed him out. Tanka took off his jacket and sprawled in a chair near the door. He was wearing a skin-tight T-shirt with a STOP sign slapped over an image of a felled tree and a slogan he told me was Chinese for ‘logging = death’.

  Drima and Païvi returned with drinks and we were all introduced. It turned out Tanka was a national authority on rare lichens of old-growth forests, and he and Païvi had just returned from a month-long survey of a forest area just north of the Kalevala National Park over the border in Russia.

  ‘Did you see any bears?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, some few,’ Tanka nodded. ‘Six, I think.’ He looked to Païvi, who nodded.

  ‘Six in a month, that’s not so many,’ said Drima. ‘My guest here has seen as many in three days in Romania.’

  ‘Romania?’ Tanka looked intrigued. I explained about my trip.

  ‘Bears are the coolest animals,’ Païvi said. ‘They’re like Mother Earth’s messengers. You see them out there in the forest, but only when you really need them, only like when you need to know something. I really believe that. And it’s not just in the forest, you know. Tanka, do you remember that Taiga Terror meeting, when the bear came right down to the conference centre?’

  He nodded indulgently.

  ‘We were, like, getting nowhere, you know?’ Païvi continued. ‘Talking each other’s butts off, making no decisions whatsoever, and this bear comes strolling out of the forest and across the lawn, like, right outside of the conference window and it climbs up this birch tree and starts snacking on the buds. This was spring, you know, when the sap’s rising. They just love those tips.’ I made a mental note. ‘And we all just shut up and watch the bear and this First Nation American guy stands up…’

  ‘Chief Garry,’ Tanka interjected, as if I might know him.

  ‘Yeah, like, Chief Garry stands up and says in his teachings the bear is the symbol of courage and steadfastness. And then the bear came down from the tree and wandered back off into the forest, and wow, that conference, it just turned around. We stopped bullshitting and hit the plans, you know, radical stuff, these big ideas came pouring out, it was amazing. So much energy. And all from that bear, y’know. I really believe that.’

  ‘That’s cool,’ I said. ‘No wonder I’m mad about bears.’ After two days of rain and maps I felt as if the sun had come out.

  ‘You fucked up bad in Norway, huh?’ said Tanka.

  ‘You could put it like that,’ I laughed. ‘I’m on the team to bring them back.’

  ‘Really?’ He looked me up and down as if I didn’t appear properly kitted out for such a role. ‘Are you all academics?’

  ‘Some naturalists and government, too,’ I said.

  He shook his head. ‘Don’t say. And farmers’ representatives. And forest industry.’

  ‘Farmers, yes. Not industry, as far as I’m aware.’

  ‘Activists? Grassroots people? Sámi?’

  ‘Not yet, as far as I know. It’s early days.’

  ‘It’s never too early,’ he said. ‘Predator expansion only works if it’s bottom up. They should know this by now. Norway’s so fucked up. They treat farmers like nobility – they’ve grown into nation of, how do you say it, barons.’ He pronounced it like a Russian, with the emphasis on the second syllable. ‘Lords of Land. To Vanquish Natur
e by Plough and Dominate with Guns.’ He paraded like a mock soldier. We all laughed.

  Païvi said, ‘Humans, bloody humans, we think we know what’s best. But we know nothing sometimes, nothing but how to load a gun. How to kill. How to break things. How to destroy. How to try to take control. But nature isn’t like machines. It doesn’t go when we say go. It doesn’t steer. It doesn’t stop and change direction when we push a pedal here, turn a switch there. It doesn’t need us to fuel it up or fix its carburettors. It’s alive, like us.’

  No one had anything to say to this.

  ‘Where I’m from it’s much worse than Norway,’ I said, eventually.

  ‘Where?’ Tanka asked.

  ‘Scotland.’

  ‘Aah, Scotland!’ His eyes lit up and he leaned towards me. ‘That’s great!’

  ‘Why? Talk about barons, we’ve got the most inequitable land distribution in Europe. The countryside is completely dominated by rich farmers. Our ecosystems are trashed, especially the woods, we’ve no forest worth the name, and the rivers are all dammed for hydro-electricity, we’ve far too many herbivores and no big predators at all.’

  ‘But she’s independent now, yes?’ Tanka said. ‘You can change everything. No longer English colony, is what I hear.’

  ‘What’s this?’ Drima looked blank.

  ‘We had a referendum on independence,’ I said. ‘We’ve had the pro-independence party, the Scottish National Party, in government for years now, and finally the people have voted yes, let’s go for it, leave the United Kingdom, take control of our own affairs.’

  ‘Interesting. Will it make a big difference?’

  ‘Well, I have wondered whether we might be able to start at least talking about reintroducing bears. We have a lynx programme.’ Tanka and Païvi were nodding vigorously.

  ‘The bear is like symbol of rebirth,’ said Païvi.

  ‘Yeah, people keep telling me this,’ I grinned. ‘After our great political hibernation of hundreds of years, let’s be reborn and bring back bears.’

  Tanka asked, ‘Do you have good habitat?’