A Boy and a Bear in a Boat

by Dave Shelton

  “… LOST!” roared the bear.

  The boy fell backwards onto his seat as if blown by a mighty wind.

  “We are not lost!” repeated the bear, “I know exactly where we are. EXACTLY! Here, see this?” He pulled a battered peaked white cap from his suitcase. It had an anchor emblem on the front. “Do you know what this is? Eh?” With a flourish he plonked the hat, somewhat askew, onto his head. “This is a captain’s hat. I am the captain of this vessel and a captain, let me tell you, does not get lost. Are you satisfied now? Are you reassured? No? All right then. Let me show you, since you so plainly can’t find it in yourself to trust the wisdom and experience of a bear who’s been at sea all his life, since the instinct and intuition of your captain apparently aren’t enough, then let me show you.”

  The bear opened up his suitcase again and took out the map.

  “Let me show you,” he said, “exactly where we are …” and he unfolded the map and laid it across the centre seat for the boy to see.

  “Here,” he said, “precisely here. Here is where we are.”

  And he pointed. And the boy looked.

  The map was perfectly square and entirely blue. All of it. There was no land, not even the tiniest island, marked anywhere. At first the boy thought that, down near the bottom left corner, there was a strange circular coral reef, but on closer inspection this proved to be a tea stain from the bottom of the bear’s cup. The map depicted, in its entirety, flat, blue, featureless sea. He gawped at it, imagining the blue map as the actual sea, imagined himself looking down upon it from up in the air, imagined the Harriet, tiny and insignificant, at the spot close to the centre that the bear was pointing to.

  “We really are in the middle of nowhere, aren’t we?” said the boy.

  The bear looked up at him, his anger dissipating as he saw the boy’s deflated expression and the defeated slump of his shoulders.

  “Oh no,” he said. “Not the middle of nowhere. No, not at all.”

  The boy raised his eyes to meet the bear’s. Eager for any shred of comfort, but wary of false hope too.

  “Really?” he said, suspiciously.

  “Really,” said the bear. He pointed again to the spot on the map he had indicated a moment earlier. “You see, we’re here.”

  The boy stared at a small piece of the blue on the big blue map.

  “And the middle of nowhere is here.” The bear shifted his finger an inch or two down and to the right, and tapped the spot a couple of times for emphasis. “We passed through it at about noon yesterday. So you see it’s not so bad.”

  The boy did not seem especially cheered by this. The bear shook off his bemusement and carried eagerly on.

  “And, anyway, soon we’ll be off that map and onto this one,” he said, and proceeded to unfold a second map and place it flat over the top of the first. The boy stared at it. It was, again, very blue. His voice was cracking as he said, “There’s nothing there. Just sea and sea and more sea. What’s the point of even having a map with nothing but sea on it anyway?”

  “I happen to like sea,” said the bear indignantly. “And, in any case, this map is not just sea. Look here.”

  He pointed confidently to a biscuit crumb. The boy said, “That’s a biscuit crumb,” and swiftly ate it.

  “Oh,” said the bear, “Ah, hang on …” and he leaned his face close over the map, squinting hard at it and moving his head around, looking for something. With his nose so close to the paper he looked as if he were trying to sniff it out.

  “Aha!” he cried, at last. “Here it is!” and he stabbed a claw at a spot in the top-right quarter. The boy followed the bear’s claw down to the tip, beneath which he could just make out a tiny black speck.

  “What’s that then?” said the boy.

  “It’s a rock,” said the bear. “So it’s just as well we have the map so we can make sure not to hit it. That’s the kind of responsibility a good captain takes very seriously, I’ll have you know.”

  The boy was speechless. A single tear traced a route down his cheek.

  “No need to cry with joy,” said the bear. “It’s all part of the service.”

  Message in a Bottle

  The bear rowed. The boy sat very still and stared blankly out to sea. His stomach felt as if it was tightly knotted inside him and his mouth felt very dry. He drank the last of the ginger beer. It was flat and warm and horrible and he wished he had a dozen more bottles just like it.

  Once, on holiday at the seaside, he had found a bottle on the beach with a message on a piece of paper inside it. It had come from another country: quite a long way away, his dad told him. He had meant to look it up on the map when he got home but he forgot and now he couldn’t even remember the name of the country. It hadn’t said anything very interesting (so far as they could tell), but he had been excited to think how far it had come to reach him. He decided to write a message of his own. He used the paper bag the sweets had been in and wrote on it with a pencil from his bag.

  When he had finished, he put the paper into the bottle and screwed the top back on. Then he leaned out over the back of the boat and dropped the bottle into the water. He watched it, bobbing there on its side, growing smaller and smaller as they moved away from it. Soon it was just a speck in the distance. Then it was half a speck.

  Then it was gone.

  Smelly

  Time passed. It got darker and a little colder but otherwise nothing much changed. The bear rowed. The boy fidgeted and fussed. He was stiff and restless and, despite his tiredness, longed for some activity. He wanted to stomp about impatiently but there wasn’t room, so all he could manage was some rather awkward shuffling and, still unused to the unsteadiness of the boat, he lost his balance. He lurched against the side and the boat tipped, sending him further off balance. He arched his back, windmilled his arms and just managed to stay upright. Not only that, but he was pretty sure that the bear, head down and concentrating on his rowing, hadn’t noticed anything. Then the boat rocked back the other way and the boy fell, landing on his bottom with a loud thump.

  “Having a lie down?” said the bear, still not looking up. But the moon was full and bright enough for the boy to see him smiling.

  “Hmf!” said the boy.

  The bear pulled his smile in at the sides a bit.

  “You should get some sleep,” he said. “It’s late.”

  “I’m not tired,” said the boy, sitting tenderly back on his seat. Then he yawned noisily.

  “No, I can see that. Are you hungry, though? Do you want anything to eat? I think we’d better save the chocolate for now, but there’s a sandwich left.”

  The bear stopped rowing and reached beneath him for his lunch box.

  “I thought we’d eaten them all already,” said the boy.

  “I thought so too,” said the bear, “but then I cleared out all the tin foil and found this one at the bottom of the box. I think it must be left over from my last trip. So it’s, um, a bit past its best.”

  “What’s in it?” said the boy. He had tried a few of the bear’s sandwiches by now and had grown wary of their eccentric fillings. There had been: tuna fish, peanut butter and pineapple; sprout and honey; chilli pepper, mustard and horseradish; and what the bear called his “Breakfast Special”: bacon, sausage, egg, porridge, cornflakes and coffee beans between two slices of toast. He didn’t relish the thought of anything else along the same lines. But he really was very hungry.

  The bear rummaged in the lunch box and pulled out something bready and triangular. He held it towards the boy.

  “All yours,” he said.

  The boy looked at the proffered sandwich. He noticed that the bear was holding it rather gingerly in the tips of two claws and right at the corner. Despite this, the bread did not bend at all. The boy looked up at the bear. He looked back at the sandwich. It was very difficult to tell what colour it was by moonlight, but whatever colour it was it didn’t seem right.

  “What’s in it?” said the boy agai
n.

  “I can’t remember,” said the bear.

  “Well, open it up and take a look,” said the boy.

  “I can’t,” said the bear. “It’s stuck.”

  The boy looked up at the bear. The bear smiled thinly down at the boy. They both looked back at the sandwich.

  “Is it …” said the boy.

  “What?” said the bear.

  “Is it … only a bit, but is it … glowing?”

  “No,” said the bear.

  They each squinted at the sandwich and leaned in (cautiously) to look more closely.

  “Hardly at all,” said the bear.

  “I’m not really that hungry,” said the boy. “You have it.”

  “That’s very kind,” said the bear, “but I think that I’ll save it for breakfast.”

  And when he put the sandwich away again the boy noted that the bear locked the lunch box, which he didn’t usually do, and seemed to take extra care as he stowed it away.

  They each returned to their usual places.

  “You should get some sleep,” said the bear. “I’ll keep going for a bit. It’s a nice night. Thought I’d row for a while longer and take a look at the moon.”

  “Look at the moon?” said the boy. “Why? It’s not going to do anything, is it? I mean, the moon is just the moon.” But as he said it he looked up at the moon himself and, as there was nothing better to do, he kept looking at it for quite a while. He’d been right, it didn’t do anything, but it didn’t have to, it was just beautiful. It just was. The boy gazed at the moon, longer and harder than he ever had before (because who would spend time looking at the moon when there was a telly to watch and video games to play and comics to read?) and felt, for a moment, calm and safe and sure.

  “Coo!” he said, but very quietly. And then the boy looked at the stars. There were a lot of them, more, he thought, than usual. He wondered where all the new ones had come from. Maybe they were just all the usual ones but they’d all bunched together in the same bit of sky. He twisted his neck looking up at different patches of sky, but they all seemed equally crowded.

  “You can see more stars out here,” said the bear, as if reading the boy’s mind, “because it’s properly dark.”

  The boy lowered his head and looked at the bear.

  “It’s funny, isn’t it?” the bear went on. “With everything else you can’t see as well in the dark, but with stars you can see them better. In towns, with streetlights and suchlike, it’s not dark enough to see some of them, but out here …” He looked up and smiled and either forgot to continue or felt no need. The boy looked up again too. They sat there for a while, quiet and content, drinking in the beauty of the bejewelled night.

  “Do you use them to navigate by?” asked the boy.

  “Eh?”

  The boy looked at the bear, and his neck, stiffened by a light breeze, gave a small ache of complaint at having to move again.

  “Do you use the stars to know which way to go?”

  The bear scrunched his brow.

  “To know which way is north and south and everything?”

  “Ooh,” said the bear, “that sounds clever. How do you do that?”

  “I don’t know,” said the boy. “You’re supposed to be the sailor. I don’t even know the names of any of them.”

  “They have names?” said the bear.

  The boy’s wide eyes were like two more dim stars now, staring hard in disbelief.

  “Yes, of course,” said the boy. “They all have names. And if you know the names and you know which one is which and where they all go then you can tell which direction is which and know which way you need to go. Somehow.”

  “Coo!” said the bear. “That sounds like a lot of hard work when you could just use a compass.”

  “Have you got a compass?” said the boy.

  “No,” said the bear.

  “So how do you know which way we’re going?”

  “I just do,” said the bear. “I know where we are and I know where we’re going. And that’s all, but that’s enough.”

  The boy looked grumpy and suspicious. He was getting cold too. He hunted around huffily, feeling for his coat in the especially dark darkness beneath his seat.

  “Oh,” said the bear, “I do know one thing about telling directions from the stars.”

  “What’s that, then?” said the boy.

  The bear pulled his oars in and stood up, raising his eyes to the deep dark and the dazzle of the sky. He scanned the stars in the patch of sky directly above him, as if seeking something out. The boy stood too, up on top of the middle bench seat, closer to the bear than he normally ever got, to follow his gaze. He was still shorter than the bear, but he could look into his eyes now and see reflected in their dark wetness the wonder and magic and mystery of the night, the stars sparking and sparkling within. Then he looked up again, trying to see what the bear saw, searching the blinking lights as if for clues or patterns.

  “You see …” said the bear, in a distant, quiet voice, as if almost in a trance. He slowly raised an arm.

  “You see …” He pointed at the nameless stars above, “… those three brightest stars there, almost in a line?”

  “Yes,” said the boy, in a whisper, looking straight along the bear’s raised arm and pointed claw.

  “Well, that way …” said the bear.

  “Yes?” said the boy.

  “That way …” said the bear.

  “Yes?”

  “… is definitely …”

  “Yes?”

  “Up,” said the bear.

  There was a long, long pause during which the boy considered a number of things to say to the bear. He came up with something quite good (and very rude), but was still waiting for the bear to stop sniggering naughtily at his own joke when he was overcome by a horrible feeling of nausea. The bear, still giggling, had not lowered his arm and the boy’s face was close to his armpit.

  “Aaaaaargh!” said the boy. “You stink!”

  It wasn’t as clever a thing to say as he’d intended but it worked rather well. The bear looked hurt and the boy was glad of it.

  “I’ve been working quite hard, you know,” said the bear defensively, quickly lowering his arm. “I was bound to work up a bit of a sweat. I’m not surprised if I smell a little … ripe.”

  “Ripe?” said the boy, pinching at his nose and retreating to the back of the boat. “More like rotten! I think I’m going to be sick! Eurgh!” The boy leaned out of the boat and, overacting outrageously, pretended to be sick.

  “Oh! Eurgh! S.O.S.! Mayday! I’m stuck on a boat with a fat, stinky bear! Bleurgh! Send help! Send the coastguard! Send soap!”

  His already unconvincing act was made no more believable by frequent bouts of laughter. Even without looking back, the boy could tell that the bear was hurt, and he no longer took pleasure in the fact, but somehow, now that he had started laughing, he found that he couldn’t stop. He slumped over the side and laughed and howled and beat his fists until he was breathless and hoarse and exhausted. At last he stopped. He felt ashamed and didn’t want to look round at the bear. But somehow, even now, he felt no urge to apologise. So he knelt there staring into the dark water and listening to his breathing and his heart, both slowing.

  Suddenly the water lit up and the boy saw his reflection. There were tears on his cheeks and he didn’t know if they were tears of laughter or of regret. Either way, he didn’t want to look at himself, so finally he stood, embarrassed, still not facing the bear directly but glancing sheepishly at him out of the corners of his eyes. The bear had lit an old-fashioned lantern and was hanging it from a pole he had raised at the front of the boat. The bear sat down and took up his oars once more.

  “You should sleep now,” he said.

  The boy turned away from him, lay down and curled himself up beneath the ragged blanket that the bear had given him on the first night. He closed his eyes and listened to the rhythm of the oars.

  Splish, splish,
splish …

  He wondered what he might say or do to apologise. But before he had thought of anything he was fast asleep.

  Alone

  The boy awoke. He had slept well but he still felt awful. His body ached from another night on wooden planks and his stomach was demanding to be fed, but most of all the boy felt bad about calling the bear smelly. He lay still for a moment, plucking up the courage to say sorry, trying to choose the kindest and best words. Once he was satisfied he’d got them right he started blurting them out as he uncurled himself from beneath the blanket and clumsily rose to his feet, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

  “Sorry I said that you stink, Bear. I mean, you do a bit, but it’s not your fault and I bet there are bears that smell even worse. And I shouldn’t have pretended to be sick because you didn’t really make me want to be sick. Much. Hardly at all. And, anyway, it’s not really your fault. I guess all bears smell a bit stinky, I’m just not used to it. And I guess when you’re a bear yourself you don’t really notice it, so …”

  He was standing now and facing forward. The bear wasn’t there.

  Ridiculously, the boy looked behind himself. Then he stared forward again, making absolutely sure. The bear really wasn’t there. The oars were pulled in and his seat was empty. And in every direction (and the boy checked all of them at least twice) there was nothing to be seen except sea and sky. He found the bear’s telescope and checked again, but it made no difference.

  In a daze, the boy slumped down onto his seat, his eyes wide with shock and disbelief. Perhaps the bear had been eaten up by a sea monster and the boy had slept through the whole thing. How awful! But, no, that couldn’t be it, there weren’t really any sea monsters. It was just something the bear had made up, wasn’t it?

  Maybe he’d been kidnapped by pirates. They still existed, apparently. The boy had seen it on the news. They didn’t have eye patches, wooden legs or parrots these days, but they were still pirates, apparently. And they were definitely baddies. But surely the bear would have put up a fight. And pirates fighting a bear – that would have to be pretty noisy. The boy was sure he would have woken up.