by Kelly Wacker
“You got it,” the bartender said and turned away to place her order.
“So…” Beth stared at her over the rim of her glass as she took a sip. “What’s up with you and the mountain woman?” She narrowed her eyes. “You’ve been vague, to say the least.”
The bartender slid the beer toward Melissa, and she lifted the bottle and took a swig before answering. It was cold and tasted good. “We’re not talking.”
“What? Did you leave on bad terms?”
“I didn’t leave on any terms.”
“What do you mean?”
Apparently, either news of the shooting hadn’t reached the Southeast or Beth hadn’t seen the story. Either way, she was thankful for that.
“Sula was preoccupied with some…” She considered how to describe the situation ambiguously. “Work stuff. And then it was time for me to go. The semester was about to start.”
“And you didn’t talk about the status of your relationship before you left?” Beth looked at her incredulously.
“Pretty much.” Melissa took a deep swallow of beer.
“It’s been what? Two months now?”
“Six weeks. I know. It doesn’t make sense.”
“Oh, I think I get it.” Beth narrowed her eyes. “Will you indulge me in analyzing you for a moment?”
“Sure?” Melissa said. She didn’t think Beth would have accepted a different answer.
“Everything was perfect between you two. You really liked the mountain woman—”
“Sula. She has a name, you know.”
“Okay, so you really like Sula.” Beth said her name slowly, drawing it out. “And she really likes you. But you have a job here, and she has a job there. By leaving things unresolved, you didn’t risk ending the relationship over the inconvenient matter of mileage.”
It was true. The distance had been an issue for Melissa, but they could have worked it out. Once she’d discovered Sula was a werebear, that such creatures actually existed, it became the least of her concerns. Explaining that to Beth would require a conversation she didn’t want to have, so she simply said, “That’s very insightful, Beth.”
“And that means I’m right, yes?”
“Maybe.”
Beth swatted her arm playfully. “Mm-hmm, I’m right. I bet she hurt your feelings and you hurt hers. You didn’t talk about it, so now you’re both miserable.”
Melissa opened her mouth to speak but couldn’t.
“You don’t have to reply to that, honey.” Beth smiled smugly and set her glass down on the bar. “I can see I hit the nail right on the head.”
“Did you know my name means honey?”
“Hm? What?”
“Melissa…my name is from the ancient Greek. It’s derived from the words for ‘bee’ and also for ‘honey.’ Sula told me that. I didn’t know, it surprised me.”
“Yeah. Bears like honey—Winnie-the-Pooh and all that.” Beth downed the last of her wine. “I imagine the director of a bear-protection agency would know such things.”
Melissa laughed at Beth’s description of the Colorado Bear Conservancy. Maybe the beer had already gone to her head because she visualized bears in witness-protection programs, bears with secret identities. Hm…kind of like Sula. But she wasn’t really a bear, was she? At least not all the time. Just some of the time. Did that make her a human who turned into a bear or a bear who turned into a human? And how exactly was she able to do that? Betty said it ran in her family…
“Earth to Melissa,” Beth said, waving her hand in front of her face.
“Oh! Sorry, Beth…yes?”
Beth gestured to the two large paper sacks on the bar. “My dinner has arrived. I need to go. The bartender said your order would be out soon.”
“Oh, okay. I guess I zoned out there for a moment.”
“Yeah, I noticed.” Beth smiled at her. She grabbed the bags and pursed her lips, giving her an air kiss. “I need to get going. Listen. You have to talk to her. If any more time passes, whatever you have will be irrecoverable. Go home and figure out a way to talk to Sula before it’s too late.”
Melissa opened the door of her car, the heat and humidity hitting her like a warm, wet blanket. Getting out of the car, she slung her messenger bag over her shoulder and grabbed the paper sack with her dinner, remembering her last conversation with her parents last week. Her mother, as usual, asked about Sula. She knew things had fallen apart between them, but she didn’t understand why because Melissa hadn’t explained it in a way that made sense. How could she? Her father kept conversations to safe, tangible things like the weather. Lately, he’d been commenting on how winter seemed to be coming early to Colorado, the evening temperatures were dropping, and the prevailing winds had shifted. First snowfall was usually mid-October, but her father speculated it would be sooner this year.
Perspiration had beaded on her forehead by the time she walked from the car to the front steps of her house. On days like this, when it was so damn humid, she thought it was condensation more than sweat. Here, in the Deep South, it wouldn’t even begin to feel like autumn until close to Halloween, but even then, it was often still T-shirt weather.
She was surprised to find a large box by the side of the front door; she hadn’t ordered anything recently. She carried her things inside and returned for the box. It was heavy. She rotated it to see the label. It had been sent from Colorado…from Buckhorn…from Sula.
While she carried it into the kitchen, Alex followed her, meowing loudly, demanding his dinner. “Just a minute, sweet boy.”
Melissa put the box on the kitchen table, grabbed a sharp knife out of a drawer to slice the tape, and opened the box. Inside was a smaller box, surrounded by packing peanuts. She removed it, and opened it to find something swaddled in bubble wrap. Unrolling it, she gasped when she realized what it was.
In her hands was the dancing-bear sculpture she’d last seen on a cabinet in the room with the pool table at Sula’s house. She placed the sculpture on the table and put her hand back into the box, fishing around in the packing peanuts for a note. Instead she found another, smaller, bubble-wrapped object, an unmarked jar of honey. Taped to it was a note, written neatly in black ink.
The honey’s from Betty.
Melissa stared at the sculpture in disbelief. The bear’s gleaming white eyes, contrasting the glossy finish of the black serpentine stone, seemed to stare back with an intense, focused expression. She couldn’t believe there wasn’t a letter, some kind of explanation. She grabbed the box and turned it upside down, shaking it, spilling the packing peanuts on the floor. Alex pounced, batting them across the tiled kitchen floor as she checked under the bottom flaps of the box, but she found nothing.
Alex began meowing insistently, his hunger overriding his delight with new toys. Melissa fed him, then sat down at the table to eat her lukewarm food in the company of the dancing bear. She hardly tasted her meal, leaving it unfinished as she considered the sculpture. It was puzzling, and like any puzzle, it required a solution. She liked the sculpture, had admired it when she first saw it and said so. Slowly she recalled her conversation with Sula about it. She had described the dancing bear as an Inuit spirit bear. The dance wasn’t entertainment; it was a ritual, one in which the shaman took on the form of a bear. The shaman was a shape-shifter…just like Sula.
Still, Melissa didn’t understand why Sula had sent it to her. She knew this already about Sula, so why just reiterate it? There had to be something else, some other meaning. She was an art historian, for goodness’ sake. She was adept at decoding works of art, so surely she could figure this out. Yet no more illuminating ideas came to mind. She was stumped.
Approaching the sculpture’s message like an unknown work of art reminded Melissa that she had work to do before her class tomorrow morning. She cleared the table of everything except the bear and swept the floor, leaving a few packing peanuts for Alex to play with. Sitting down at the table with her laptop, she began searching for images to complement a lect
ure on ancient Roman commemorative sculptures. Tomorrow included Trajan’s Column, a massive, nearly one-hundred-foot-tall stone column covered from bottom to top with a spiraling band of images carved in low relief. Depicting the Romans’ victory over the Dacians, it was highly detailed, demonstrating all aspects of a military campaign, including leaders giving speeches, the building of boats and fortifications, and the battles. Created as a form of propaganda, it showed the Romans in the best light, as organized and well-equipped. Their enemies, on the contrary, often looked rather unkempt and shaggy. Needing more images to illustrate her lecture, she turned to an academic website with high-quality photographic details of the entire sculpture. As she scrolled through the image gallery, some figures in one section of the column caught her eye.
Four bearded men, clearly different from the clean-shaven Roman warriors, stood out in the crowd. Instead of helmets, two of the men had what looked like wolf heads on top of their heads, and the other two had those of bears. Melissa zoomed in on the image. The men seemed to be wearing animal-skin cloaks with the heads still attached. She had seen this costume before in the illustrated book, Saga av Eydís Bersa, that belonged to her great-grandmother. Intrigued, she clicked on the information button, and after reading a brief description, she went down a rabbit hole of research.
Two hours and another cup of coffee later, she learned that the soldiers were Germanic Scandinavian warriors of Odin, kind of like a military special-forces unit. In Old Norse they were called Ulfhednar, “wolf-warriors,” and Berserkers, or “bear-shirts.” The contemporary expression, “to go berserk,” came from the bearskin-wearing warriors. Described as ordinary before battle, they became overheated, their teeth chattered, and they bit their shields as they were overcome with an all-encompassing rage that propelled them to fight with a ferocity that defied logic. Berserkers terrified the Romans, who fancied themselves civilized and above such barbarian behavior. Melissa imagined legionnaires shaking in their sandals facing such formidable foes. Perhaps it helped explain why the Roman Empire never expanded very far into northern Europe.
Her discovery of berserkers led her in other directions. Though unclear, there seemed to be a connection between them and shape-shifting bear shamans found in ancient cultures all across northern Europe, Siberia, and North America. The relationship between humans and bears seemed to run deep and wide. Although a fearsome animal, the bear represented good, even noble, qualities associated with teaching, leadership, healing, balance, and courage. She was reminded of her conversation with Sula when she said that bears had human-like qualities. She found an article about an ethnologist who had lived with and studied the Inuit in Canada around the turn of the century. A quote from a woman he interviewed riveted her.
In the old time, people and animals lived together in harmony. An animal could be human, and a human could be animal. Sometimes they were the one and the same. There was no explanation and no need for it; it was just the way the world was.
Melissa read the quote several times slowly, letting the words sink in. The last sentence echoed Betty’s enigmatic response to Melissa’s question about why Sula liked bears so much. Sometimes things are the way they are, because it’s the way they are. Melissa closed the lid of her laptop, staring at the dancing bear in the middle of the table. Frozen in a position with one foot on the ground, the other reaching for the sky, it linked the earthly and spiritual realms as she and Sula had discussed. Now she fully comprehended why the sculpture appealed to Sula, for it also represented someone who shifted between the states of human and animal. And it was beautiful.
Having just talked about Picasso and the minotaur earlier in the day, she recalled how archeologists believed that myths could be rooted in the histories of real places. The legendary labyrinth where the minotaur roamed might have been the elaborate palace complex that now lay in ruins on the island of Knossos in the Mediterranean Sea. Melissa entertained the possibility that berserkers were based in reality, too. She had seen a bear transform into a woman, and Betty had explained it as a trait that ran in Sula’s family. Perhaps in the long-ago past, berserkers weren’t just wearing bearskins, pretending to be bears, but they were bears.
Her sense of reality was expanding at a dizzying pace, and the more she learned, the more questions she had, but the pieces of the puzzle were falling into place. Although she didn’t yet have a complete image, she had enough to make some sense of what she was seeing. It had been in front of her all along, but shock and fear had occluded her ability to see it.
The ideas coursing through her mind left her breathless, and her heart was pounding, but not with fear, as it had in the woods when confronted with a Sula as a bear. This was something else, the thrill of observing with fresh eyes, of making discoveries and considering previously unthinkable connections.
Feeling antsy, she stood and got a glass of water, drinking it in several deep swallows. Leaving the empty glass on the counter, she went out the back door, walking slowly into the middle of her tired, overgrown garden. Most of the plants were spent, barely hanging on after the late summer heat that continued well into fall. She reflected on how it had been so easy to start calling Sula “Bear” as a term of endearment. She had so many bear-like qualities, including her love of honey and those agile berry-picking lips… Melissa shivered although the evening air was warm. With sudden unexpected clarity, she understood that she hadn’t been played a fool. She was a fool for stupidly trying to walk away from what, deep down, her heart and soul knew.
While the songs of night insects filled the air around her, she stared into the evening sky, hoping to glimpse the sky bear, Ursa Major, the big bear. But she didn’t see it. A smile crept across her face as she realized she knew exactly where a big she-bear, her she-bear, was located. She wasn’t in the sky circling the North Star. She was to the west and terrestrially bound.
Melissa marched into the house to the kitchen and grabbed her phone to call Sula. Finger hovering over the screen she paused, thinking about all they needed to discuss. No, a phone call wasn’t the right way to do it. This required a face-to-face conversation. Her university was on a four-day teaching schedule, with no classes on Friday, but that day was usually jam-packed with committee meetings. She checked her calendar, and to her amazement, she didn’t have any meetings scheduled this week. She couldn’t help but interpret that as a sign that she was doing the right thing. She put the phone down and went back to her laptop. If she could find a seat on a Friday-morning flight out of Atlanta to Denver, she could be in Buckhorn by dinner.
Chapter Thirty-two
Leaning the snow shovel against the wall by the back door, Sula knocked the snow off her jacket before entering the house. With the second snowstorm of the season, it seemed that winter wasn’t just coming early. It had arrived. She hung her coat and hat on the hook in the mud room and kicked off her boots, shivering as snowflakes slid down the back of her head, under her collar, and melted against her bare skin.
She padded into the living room and lit a fire. The cats followed, jumping up on the chair closest to the hearth, which would soon be the warmest spot in the room. Watching as the logs caught flame, she wished their light and warmth could do more to cheer her. A metallic rattle reminded her to check the pot of chili on the stove in the kitchen. She went in and gave it a stir, then turned down the flame to let it simmer. As she looked out the kitchen window, she could barely see the barn down the hill because of the big, fluffy snowflakes drifting down slowly like little parachutes. She’d need to sweep the front stairs soon, but she wasn’t ready to go back out into the cold.
She picked up her phone from the counter, checking for messages or a missed call. None. On Wednesday she’d checked the tracking number of the package containing the spirit-bear sculpture she’d sent Melissa. It had been delivered Monday, but now, Friday, she still hadn’t heard a word.
After putting the phone down, she picked up the Sierra Club magazine from the stack of mail by the phone and took it to the
living room to read by the fire while waiting for supper. Featured on the cover was a story about the intelligence of black bears that presented interesting new research demonstrating them to be as smart and social as primates. The cover illustration of a thoughtful-looking bear, paw under chin, reminded her of the last email she’d responded to before leaving the office. She’d received and accepted an invitation to be a speaker at an upcoming black bear conference in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee.
Abandoning the magazine for an atlas pulled from a bookshelf, she stood flipping through it until she found a two-page map of the southeastern states. The location of the conference near the national park wasn’t far from the Georgia border. She turned to the state map of Georgia, scanning it for the town where Melissa lived. It was just a few hours’ drive.
A loud pop from the fire drew her attention from the maps in her hands, and she gazed at the dancing flames, her thoughts wandering. She pictured herself driving to Melissa’s house and knocking on her door. She wasn’t sure if she was bold enough to do something like that, though. She was the biggest, baddest beast in the forest, but when it came to matters of the heart, she was as timid as a mouse. Sending Melissa the sculpture was her attempt at a grand romantic gesture, one that seemed to have failed. She wasn’t sure what made her think she would have the audacity to arrive unannounced knocking at her door. If Melissa opened the door, she might just slam it shut in her face, or maybe she wouldn’t even open it.
She put the atlas on the shelf, sliding it back into place. Moving to another section, she looked for something else to read, wanting a novel that would distract her from her own thoughts. Hopefully she could find a story to get lost in for the evening…someone else’s story, one with a happy ending.
Comfortably settled on the couch with a book, Sula responded to a loud sound after the cats, eyes wide, jumped off the chair and ran away toward the back of the house. It was a thud, like something heavy had fallen on the porch. A tree branch, she thought, but then she heard a muffled voice.