Night of the Black Bear

by Gloria Skurzynski

  “Whoa!” he yelled, when the ride started. It moved, all right—upside down! He was loving it, but one part of his brain kept thinking how cool it would be to create realistic virtual-reality graphics like the ones spinning around his head inside the pod. Maybe that’s what he’d do when he got out of college.

  “Cool!” he yelled, when it stopped.

  “Wait ’til I show you what’s next!” Merle shouted.

  The two of them raced down some stairs to an amusement area that had a laser tag arcade—Jack paid for those tickets. The guy in charge put them on the same team. That meant they fought against another team while lights swirled through the vacuum-like space, fog rolled in, and music blasted their eardrums. As they ran around the maze, firing at the other team while they tried to capture the base, Jack’s doubts about Merle vanished—blown away into the game’s rolling fog. Merle was really good at laser tag. He was fast, and the whole thing was such a blast that ended way too soon! Afterward, when they compared their scorecards, they discovered they had nearly the same score. Each had fired 136 shots, each hit an opponent almost 90 times, and both of them earned the rank of Cosmic Sergeant.

  Minutes later, Lily and Ashley approached from the souvenir shop where Ashley’d bought a T-shirt decorated with black bears. If Merle and Jack looked enough alike to be cousins, Lily and Ashley could have been mistaken for mother and daughter. They had the same brown eyes and dark hair, although Lily’s hair was straight as a ruler and Ashley’s curly as a lamb’s. They both wore skirts that hung below their knees and swung as they walked. Maybe that’s why Yonah had liked Ashley from the start: She reminded him of his mother. And maybe that’s why he was less friendly to Jack, because Jack looked something like Merle.

  “I’m afraid we have to leave now,” Lily told them. “I’ll drive you kids back to where your parents are, and then Merle and I will go to the hospital to see Arlene. After that I need to get back home in time to put the turkey in the oven, because dinner shouldn’t be too late tonight. Tomorrow’s a school day.” Merle groaned at that reminder as Lily added, “I’ll get the car out of the parking lot. You kids meet me out front.”

  “Wait, I’ll go with you,” Ashley told her.

  As Jack and Merle wandered toward the entrance, studying every number on their complex laser tag scorecards, an older man wearing plaid shorts and a “Save the Hemlocks” sweatshirt accidentally bumped into Jack.

  “Sorry,” he said. Then, peering at Merle through his bifocals, the man asked, “Aren’t you the kid who was up at Chimneys picnic area last night?”

  “No,” Merle answered abruptly.

  “I recognize you,” the man said. “You were up there with—”

  “You’re wrong. I was here in town. Excuse me, my ride’s waiting.” Merle practically sprinted toward the exit, with Jack trying to keep up. They reached the curb and had to wait several minutes before Lily pulled up in her car.

  “Crazy guy,” Merle was muttering while they waited. “He needs better glasses.”

  A tiny doubt tried to creep once more into Jack’s mind. Why had Merle run like that? But he brushed it aside—he’d had a great time with Merle. He was a good kid. Yonah had to be delusional to suspect him of any crime.

  On the way back they joked around in the back seat, imagining crazy pictures Jack would be able to make with the one he’d just taken of Ashley. Then Merle invented song titles he could change: “Five Hundred Miles Away from Home (And I’m Out of Gas)”, or “Country Roads (Full of Cow Pies).”

  “You do art, I do music,” Merle said. “We’re creators.”

  Lily dropped off Jack and Ashley at Park Headquarters, telling them they’d find their parents in the conference room upstairs. When they got there, they saw Steven, Olivia, Kip, and Blue standing around a table that was spread with printed reports and photographs, although they didn’t seem to be Steven’s photographs.

  “We have at least 30 different species of salamanders in this national park,” Kip was saying. “That’s more than anywhere else. They call our park the Salamander Capital of the World.”

  “Maybe the bears are eating salamanders,” Blue joked, and then he saw Jack and Ashley. “Oh, hi, kids. Come on in. This is interesting—you might learn something.”

  Olivia explained that they were now searching for anything the bears might have eaten to make them aggressive. “This park is an International Biosphere Reserve,” she said. “Plants, animals, and other critters—more than 10,000 species have already been documented within the boundaries of the park, but the actual count could be more like 100,000 species!”

  Steven added, “Right, but at the moment we are focusing on mushrooms.”

  “Mushrooms?” Jack exclaimed.

  “Mushrooms are a long shot,” Kip explained, “but we have 2,000 species of mushrooms in the park, and we certainly don’t know everything about each species.”

  “You ever heard of magic mushrooms?” Blue asked. “Some people take them like drugs, to get high. They’re also called hallucinogenic mushrooms, or psychedelic mushrooms, but on the street they’re just called ’shrooms.”

  “Are they illegal?” Ashley asked.

  “Sure! They’re bad stuff,” Steven answered. “People who use them get delusional. They see things that aren’t really there, or hear things, and in a few cases, they will become aggressive.”

  Kip cut in, “We don’t really know what psychedelic mushrooms might do to bears. Maybe nothing at all. But we’re exploring the data—that’s what science is all about. So let’s look at these pictures once more.”

  As the adults focused again on the materials lying on the table, Jack drifted closer, wanting to get a look. Kip was pointing to a photograph as he said, “Here’s a plentiful growth of mushrooms, and it looks like it’s been disturbed. But I don’t think bears did it. Seems more like some visitor gathered a bunch of them, probably to put on her pizza—a dangerous thing to do, because you don’t know which mushrooms are poisonous. In this magnification, you can see that they were cut off at the stems with a knife.”

  “Where was that photo taken?” Olivia asked.

  “Chimneys picnic area,” Kip answered.

  Jack froze. Chimneys picnic area. Where the stranger in the “Save the Hemlocks” sweatshirt said he saw Merle. Merle…and mushrooms? Yonah hinted that Merle was doing something illegal. Selling psychedelic mushrooms would be against the law, for sure. “I think I’ll go over to the bookstore,” Jack announced. He wanted out of that conference room, away from any more talk about magic mushrooms. He had to think.

  “I’ll go with you,” Ashley told him, “to see if I can find a Cherokee legend. Yonah said there might be one in the bookstore.”

  As they walked along a paved path between the headquarters building and the visitor center, Ashley stopped suddenly. “Look at these butterflies,” she cried, pointing to a flock that clustered together on the ground, moving their blue-tipped gray wings only a little, crawling instead of flying. “Take a picture, Jack,” she begged.

  “I don’t think so,” he muttered, troubled about Merle and mushrooms.

  “Why not? You have your camera—you took pictures at the Space Needle.”

  “Why not? Because I don’t want to,” he growled. “Don’t be dumb, Ashley. Those butterflies are not sniffing the flowers—they’re mating!”

  “Shut up!” she cried. “Why are you being so mean? I heard what you said about me in the car.”

  “What did I say?” He’d honestly forgotten.

  “You told Merle you put my face on a fish!”

  He snorted. “Yeah, well, if you don’t stop bugging me, I’ll put your face on a wanted poster and hang it in the post office.” He walked away then, leaving Ashley to find the bookstore by herself.

  Dropping to the ground under a tall tree, Jack struggled to figure it all out. Was Merle a good guy or a bad guy? The man at the Space Needle said he’d seen Merle at Chimneys picnic area. Someone picked mushrooms at that pic
nic area, and they might have been the kind of mushrooms that made people high. Each evening, Merle biked to Gatlinburg with his guitar strapped to his back, claiming he worked as a busboy. Why the guitar?

  Why did all those clues twist and slither in Jack’s imagination like a bag full of snakes?

  He knew why. It was because a scene from a certain movie wouldn’t stop playing in his memory. That scene with police inspectors asking questions…of a famous singer getting busted for hiding drugs inside his guitar. Stop! he told himself.

  But his thoughts didn’t even slow down. Merle couldn’t be on drugs; he acted too normal. Could Merle be dealing drugs? Not the worst kind of drugs, maybe, but magic mushrooms? That he picked himself? If he did that, why would he put them inside his guitar instead of carrying them in a plain old backpack? That didn’t make sense. None of it made sense. But Jack kept wondering, if Merle was a busboy like he said he was, why did he take his guitar to work?

  Too many questions! No real answers.

  Later, they all gathered together around the Firekillers’ dinner table, squeezed almost knee to knee because there were three Firekillers, four Landons, and Merle. Steven commented, “You’re awfully quiet, Jack. What’s up?”

  Everyone turned to look at Jack, so he had to scramble for an answer. “Turkeys,” he blurted. “I was thinking about the wild turkeys we’ve seen all over the park. Is this one of them?” He pointed to the platter on the table that held a beautifully browned turkey, now sliced into separate pieces. “I mean, was this one of them?”

  “Oh, no,” Blue answered quickly, holding the carving knife in his hand. “Hunting is not allowed in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. In fact, there are very few national parks where it is allowed. You can’t hunt or trap wildlife at all. Not even those animals that are not native to the park, like the wild hogs that keep wandering inside our boundaries. Those hogs are dirty and hairy. They’re about the same overall body size as you, Jack, and they cause a lot of damage to the park’s fragile ecosystem. Sometimes we try to trap the hogs and move them onto Forest Service land, where hunting is allowed.”

  Yonah broke in, “But you kill a lot of them.”

  Blue nodded. “True. You gotta realize, if we find one way out in the back country, it’s too hard to trap it and haul it all the way out, so we euthanize it.”

  “That’s a polite way of saying you shoot it,” Yonah commented pointedly.

  “Euthanize it,” Blue repeated. “Rangers go out at night in the high elevations of the park with night-vision goggles and silencer rifles. They’ll stalk a wild hog that’s been seen along the trail.”

  “And shoot it,” Yonah said again.

  “Recycle it back into the park,” Blue said. “Because other animals eat the hog carcass—bears, coyotes, vultures, crows…. When a hungry bear comes out of its den in the spring and finds a nice big wild hog carcass, the bear figures it’s a gift from heaven.”

  Ashley interrupted, “You said a wild hog is about the same body size as Jack. Well, Jack is 120 pounds. So a bear who ate Jack all the way down to his toes—ha ha!—would look pretty big for this time of year, right? Like the bear in Heather’s photos.”

  “Thanks a lot,” Jack said, “for turning me into bear scat,” and everyone laughed. Everyone except Merle. “But what I think my sister is trying to say,” Jack continued, “is that maybe Heather’s attack bear ate a hog and got fat.”

  “I don’t think that’s likely. But here’s another thought,” Steven offered. “What if the hog died from disease and a bear ate it? Could that affect the bear?

  “Mmmm….” Blue seemed to be considering that. “Well, wild hogs do get diseases like pseudo-rabies and swine brucellosis, but we’ve never been aware of those or other hog diseases inside this park. Maybe a lot farther south, but not here. Anyway, I’ll check with headquarters to find out whether any wild hogs have been put down recently.”

  The dinner-time chatter turned to other things, with everyone talking until Lily announced, “Time for dessert. Even though it’s not Christmas, I baked us a Cherokee Christmas cake. My mother used to make these with hazelnuts, dates, and goat’s milk, but I’ve modernized the recipe a bit since I can’t find any goat’s milk at the supermarket.”

  “I like it better the way you make it,” Blue told her, starting to slice the cake Lily had set in front of him.

  Pushing back his chair, Jack said, “Uh, could you excuse me for a minute? I need to….” He pointed in the direction of the bathroom.

  “Better hurry,” Merle told him, “or I might eat your piece of cake.”

  “Better not!” Jack wanted to get out of there while Merle was still at the table. All through dinner he’d been planning it, arguing with himself over whether he should do such a deceitful thing. Yet this was one chance to either find out the truth, or even better, to put his suspicions to rest.

  Earlier, he’d seen Merle’s guitar case in the hall, lying on the floor near the bathroom door. Moving quietly now, Jack picked up the guitar case and carried it into the bathroom, setting it on the sink counter. He left the door open just a little way so he could hear if anyone came.

  It was an old case, the leather cracked on the outside and the red felt lining peeling away from the inside. Cautiously, he lifted the guitar out of the case, his left hand beneath the neck and his right hand supporting the bottom. Glancing up, he saw himself in the bathroom mirror, and he hated his own image. Jack the mole. Jack the sneak. Why was he doing this? If Merle was in trouble, there was nothing Jack could do to help him. Or was there?

  Holding the guitar with both hands, he jiggled it a little but heard nothing. Then, after shaking it harder and still hearing nothing, he turned the guitar upside down.

  “What are you doing?”

  Jack jumped so hard he nearly dropped the guitar. He didn’t need to turn around, because he could see in the mirror in front of him that Merle stood right outside the partly open door. Jack hadn’t heard him approach.

  “I know what you’re doing,” Merle said, his voice as cold as his steel-gray eyes. “I saw the same movie. You think I might be carrying drugs in my guitar, don’t you? You think I might be dealing.”

  “N-not drugs,” Jack stammered. “Mushrooms.”

  “Oh for cr—!” Merle shook his head and rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “’Shrooms. Like I’d be dealing magic mushrooms in Gatlinburg. Gatlinburg is not New York City, Jack. It’s not even Nashville.” Then, “Hand over that guitar. It’s the only thing I have left from my father, and I don’t like spies touching it.”

  “I’m not—” Jack began, but Merle was already putting the guitar back into the case.

  Merle snapped the case shut, picked it up, and as he turned to go, he said, “I thought maybe we were gonna be friends, Jack. I was wrong.”

  He was halfway through the door when Jack cried, “Where do you work, Merle? Tell me where you work as a busboy.”

  The door slammed shut. Merle was gone.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “Your mother has already left,” Steven said from where he stood between the two beds. Grabbing Jack’s big toe, he shook it hard to wake him.

  “What?” Jack asked groggily. “What time is it?”

  “It’s seven-thirty, lazy boy. Time to rise and shine. You, too, Ashley.”

  Blinking, Ashley rolled over on one elbow. “What’d you say about Mom?”

  “I said she’s gone. She and Kip are on their way to the lab in Knoxville. Jack, you can use my shower. Ashley, this bathroom’s all yours. Move it, kids. After you’re ready, we’ll have breakfast here at the hotel, and then we’re going for a ride.”

  “With Yonah, too?” Ashley asked sleepily, and then, “Oh, I forgot. It’s Monday, so he’s in school.”

  “No, not Yonah. You’re going with me and your brother, if I can drag him out of bed. Come on, guys, hustle, hustle. I’ll tell you about everything over breakfast.”

  “Everything” turned out to be that Olivia and
Kip were taking half a dozen different mushroom samples to the Knoxville lab, more than an hour away, to check them for hallucinogens. Steven, Jack, and Ashley would drive through the park, gathering information and images connected to the bear attacks.

  “Like detectives,” Ashley said.

  “Like biologists or animal behaviorists,” Steven corrected her. “Detectives study crime scenes. No crimes have been committed here, unless you consider the bears criminals.”

  Ashley glanced toward Jack. Again they knew what each was thinking. Yonah had hinted that Merle might be committing a crime. What kind of crime? It couldn’t have anything to do with the bears—how could you commit a crime about bears? Jack gave a little nod toward Ashley, and she got the message: Just don’t mention it to Dad.

  “You be the navigator,” Steven told Jack after they’d driven through the park entrance. So, while his father and sister waited in the car, Jack ran into the Sugarlands Visitor Center to pick up a park map.

  “We’re heading south,” he told them when he got back in the car. “On Newfound Gap Road.”

  As the car wound back and forth around the curves of the road that climbed in altitude, they passed a sign that said “Bear Habitat. Do Not Leave Food Unattended. Regulations Enforced.” And right ahead of that was a second sign with the word “Chimneys.”

  “Hey, slow down, Dad.” Straining to get a better look, Jack saw three symbols beneath the word “Chimneys”: The one on the right showed a tent with a red line through it, meaning no overnight camping. The one in the center indicated that a trail started from somewhere nearby. And the one on the left showed a picnic table. Chimneys picnic area! The place the tourist said he’d seen Merle. “Can we stop here?” Jack asked.

  “Yes, I was planning to stop,” Steven told them. “There’s a trail here we need to take. It leads to the site of that earlier bear encounter.”

  “You mean the attack on the man we saw on TV? The man that had bear-claw marks all down the front of him?” Ashley asked.