by Ryan Gebhart
I take my feet out of the stirrups because my arms and my body can’t take any more. And so I let go, slamming against the ground. I go tumbling down the hill. My hand reaches out and latches on to the stem of a sagebrush, pulling the plant out. I claw into the dirt until my fingernails scrape across a lodged rock.
I scream. And . . . I stop. Dizzy, I stumble to my feet and search for Gene. All I see is Crazy Eyes turning right onto the trail and vanishing beyond the hill.
“Gene?” I look all around. “Gene!”
The only response is the echo of my voice. Then the silence returns.
“Gene!”
Oh, God, he’s gone. I’m by myself. I look up to the top of the hill. He was right behind me.
A form appears at the summit, and relief sets in.
But it’s not Gene.
The grizzly bear charges toward me at full speed.
Don’t run. Don’t run. Don’t run.
Play dead. Curl up in a ball. Put my hands around the back of my neck.
The bear charges and I don’t see her, but she’s an avalanche that gets louder. Closer. The ground trembles.
I peek. The bear slides past me. She can’t control her momentum.
She looks at me from below, panting, and huffs her way back up. Her steps are slow.
Don’t scream. Don’t fight her. Don’t do anything.
She’s here! Oh, my God, I can feel her shadow. It’s heavy and warm, and I will not scream. I swallow it down, and it’s like shards of hot glass in my throat. My heart is pounding so heavily and it’s way too loud.
Shut up, you stupid heart! Shut up!
A weight presses onto my back — her paw. The points of her claws touch me, but they don’t sink in. She doesn’t move for a thousand years and then she smacks me.
I go rolling.
Stay curled up. Keep my hands around my neck.
There isn’t anything else I can do, and if I die, maybe I was meant to die in this place.
And then something stops me. A willow bush. I’m not dead yet.
I should say something. I need my last words, even if no one’s around to hear them. What should they be?
I make one eye open. The path is three feet away. And then I hear a glorious sound — a thundering blast from Gene’s rifle, and it’s so loud it has to scare Sandy away.
It doesn’t scare her away because there was no gunshot. It was only in my head.
The grizzly bear is breathing the smell of death onto me.
I love you, Mom. I love you, Dad. And Gene. And Bright. And I never got to know you very well, but I would have been a good boyfriend for you, Karen. Heck, I even love you too, Ashley.
No words come out of my mouth.
Sandy paws at me again, and something sharp slides down my back and I’m just whatever about it.
Just go ahead and get it over with. I’m not here to hurt you or your cubs. And I’ve done everything I was supposed to do, but if you’re going to kill me anyways, there’s nothing I can do to stop you.
She grunts. It’s a frustrated sound, like she’s bored with me.
A hundred years of her tired, atrocious breathing pass, and a warm glob of drool lands on my face.
Then it just comes to me. “Why do you have to be so mean?” I whisper, so quiet I’m not sure I say anything at all. Those will be my last words.
I’m going to die being my stupid whatever self, a smile on my face. Maybe this is what happens just before you die — you get delirious. This is something beyond being scared.
I remain perfectly still.
I don’t know how much time has passed, but I open my eyes and see no sign of the bear. Where did she go? Am I dead? I have to be — this doesn’t feel like the same world. And all the colors are different. Everything is bright and disorienting.
Sandy didn’t eat me. Why didn’t she eat me?
I try and stand, but my left leg buckles. I look at my hand. There is no nail on my middle finger, just a red-and-white fleshy patch dripping with blood. But nothing hurts.
The front of my jeans is soaked in pee.
“Gene?”
He could be lying dead on the side of the trail.
I hobble to my feet and hurry toward North Fork with a gimpy left leg.
“Gene?” I say it louder.
I pass the bend. On the opposite side of the creek and sprawled across the rocks is this soaked, frail old man. For a second, I think he really is dead.
“Gene!”
He looks at me. He struggles to get up, but he stumbles in the current.
“Tyson!” he cries. “I thought you were dead!”
I splash through the icy creek.
“I’m sorry,” he says, his voice breaking. “I tried to turn my horse around, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t hold on, and she threw me off. I tried to come for you.”
“I’m okay. Gene, look, everything’s fine.”
“We shouldn’t have done this trip.”
“What? Why?”
“Why? It nearly killed you!”
I kneel beside him, the frigid water rushing around me. “Let me help you up.” I sling his arm around my shoulder. We’re both about to collapse back in, but I drag both of us onto land.
“Tyson, what happened to your back?”
His words bring to life a searing pain slicing across my skin. “Huh?” I try to look over my shoulder. “What is it?”
“The bear clawed you.” He smacks me on the back of the head, hard. “What the hell were you doing, pulling out your rifle? You never do that! That’s why that damn bear charged. You pissed her off good. Dummy.”
I force a joke. “We could have gotten a grizzly head to hang up.” It comes out like a whimper.
“I’d rather have your stupid head on the wall.”
“I’m sorry, Gramps.”
He sighs and puts his arm around my shoulder, bringing me in for a hug. And he keeps me there. He says, “Look at me. I’m a useless old fart, and I couldn’t control my horse. And I want your grandmother back. And for Pete’s sake, I don’t want to have to piss every goddamn thirty minutes.” He wipes his face and says, “It goes by so fast. One minute you’re in middle school, then the next you’re all by yourself in a nursing home.”
I can’t think of anything that will make him feel better or change the situation. I’m not wise. I don’t know what it’s like to be old.
I don’t really know much of anything.
Into his jacket I say, “What are we going to do about the horses?”
“They know how to get home. They go where the food is.” He glances at my back again. “We ought to get Nancy to check you out. Those claw marks look deep.”
“Will it scar?”
He nods. “You’re going to look like a badass.”
I give a tired wink. “That’s because I am.”
We hobble toward the ranch, soaked and freezing, and my mind is really blank and clear, but I’m thinking about everything. What am I going to be like when I’m twenty years old? Will I be working at McDonald’s, or will I be in college? Am I going to get married when I’m thirty, divorce when I’m forty, retire when I’m sixty?
Will I live in a nursing home when I’m seventy-seven?
I could die tomorrow.
He goes, “By the way, you made two mistakes today.”
“What’s the other one?”
“You called me Gramps.”
My face tingles, all warm and weird. But it wasn’t a mistake. I know who he is. He’s the same person he’s always been — he’s family. He’s my grandfather.
The ATV comes hauling up to the property line. Mike is driving and Nancy is sitting behind him, her arms around his waist.
“What happened?” Nancy says. “You boys are drenched.”
The sun is high and it’s got to be sixty degrees out and Gramps and I are still alive. Everything is fantastic.
Mike says, “You guys didn’t come across Sandy, did you?”
If I tell t
hem where she’s at, then the Forest Service will kill her. A grizzly bear — the coolest animal to ever exist — will die because of me. Should I say anything? I mean, Sandy let me live, and it’s only right that I return the favor. But who’s to say she won’t hurt someone else?
Can’t there be a third option?
I breathe in through my nose and out my mouth, and I can’t regret this decision. I say, “We spotted her between Purdy and Hackamore.”
Stunned, Mike says, “We’ll get on the CB and call it in. You guys need a lift?”
Gramps looks at me and says, “What’s another two hundred yards?”
“And don’t mention our names,” I add. I don’t want Dad finding out through a newspaper blurb that I lied to him.
When the rumbling ATV retreats, Gramps says, “You did the right thing, telling them about Sandy.”
“It doesn’t feel like the right thing.”
Gramps puts his arm around me and says, “Welcome to adulthood.”
God, being an adult sucks. You have to make all these horrible decisions. If you don’t kill a majestic grizzly bear whose only fault was that she loved her cubs, she could attack someone else. If you don’t screw over your Taylor Swift–loving best friend, you’ll never hear the end of it from your teammates. If you don’t spend the rest of your life in a nursing home, your kidneys could fail tomorrow.
It’s funny — I’m not mad at anyone anymore. We’re all doomed to be adults.
We pass the wooden fence and the orange sign and reenter civilization. I want to ask Gramps about all those secret grown-up conversations he had with Mom and Dad before they put him in the nursing home. But today’s been heavy enough.
I say, “Hey, Gramps, how old were you when you got your first kiss?”
“Uh, that would be Dorothy McCoy, the homecoming queen from Abilene.”
“I thought you met her fifty-nine years ago.”
“Good memory.”
“But that would make you eighteen.”
“Seventeen, actually. A week before my eighteenth birthday.”
“You got your first kiss when you were seventeen?” My whole world tilts. I always pictured Gramps flirting in his high chair.
He says, “I was a pretty awkward kid. All my friends were playing baseball and meeting up with girls, but I wasn’t what you’d call athletic, and I was downright terrified of girls.”
“Wow, really? I guess you are my grandfather.”
He smiles.
“So how’d you change?” I say.
“My folks, my three sisters, and I were in Texas to visit my grandparents, and I met Dorothy waitressing at a burger joint. I knew I would regret it if I didn’t ask her out. I took her to the county fair. I called her my little Texas bear. Oh, and Tyson?”
“Yes, sir?”
“The bear thing? Calling them a Texas bear or a sweetie bear? Don’t stop. Girls love it.”
The buckskin is standing outside the barn, eating from a flake of hay. Her pack saddle and panniers have been removed and are sitting on the ground. My elk’s head is still strapped to the saddle.
“Hey, at least we managed to get the rack,” I say.
Gramps unties the head from the saddle and pulls a set of pliers from his multitool. “Only two North American animals produce ivory. One of them is the walrus.” He rolls up his sleeves, pulls back the elk’s upper lip, and latches on to a shiny tooth near the front. With a bunch of firm wiggles, his wrist and arm muscles tightening, he gets the tooth free. The root is deep and covered in gore.
He puts it in my palm and says, “The other is the elk.”
“This is actual ivory?”
“Yes, sir. Every elk’s got two of them. I know of a place just south of Jackson that can clean them up for us.” He removes the other one. “Cool, huh?”
“Very.”
It takes Nancy about an hour to dress the gashes on my back. And as I sit there with my shirt off and the alcohol stinging my wounds, I think about Brighton. Even though he’s got more muscle than I do, he isn’t stronger than me. He sucks at kicking, he’s desperate to have people like him, and he puts makeup over his zits. Oh, and he’s a raging yamhole.
I wouldn’t want to hang out with anyone else.
I’ll still be friends with him. I mean, life’s too short to hold stupid grudges. But I’m not going to let Bright off the hook for telling his football buddies my secrets. There’s only one punishment to fit the crime.
“She must have liked you,” Mike says.
I look up. “Huh?”
“Sandy. Looks like she was just playing with you. Like a cat does with a toy mouse. She must’ve felt a bond.”
“Just call me Grizzly Kid,” I say, paying homage to Timothy Treadwell the Grizzly Man, and get a laugh out of everyone.
We don’t have time for hanging out — it’s Sunday afternoon, and I have to get home so I can get some studying in, even though the whole concept of school seems so . . . civilized.
I get cleaned up in the ranch’s icy shower and put on a fresh set of clothing, tossing the dirty stuff away. We thank Mike and Nancy for everything and then load the elk meat and the head into the bed of the truck.
We get back on the Gros Ventre Road. It’s so different from the horrifying and winding dirt trail we came in on, even though it’s the same road. It turns out it’s actually pretty and rustic and not scary at all. We pass vast pastures filled with horses, and mountains of different colors. We drive tire-deep through four creeks. At one point on a nearby hill, a pack of pronghorn antelope stares us down for a minute before we get too close and they gallop away. Gene flags down a pickup truck that’s got a dead black bear in the bed. The driver shares his hunting stories and talks about how afraid he was that he’d run into Sandy.
I yawn, not because I’m not interested. I’m just really, really, really tired.
Gramps pulls over at a lookout point where hundreds of feet beneath us is a massive lake. A whole forest of treetops is poking out of the water.
“That’s Slide Lake,” he says while taking a pee off the cliff. “Great place for trout fishing. Back in the 1920s, a massive landslide blocked off the river and flooded the entire area. Beautiful, isn’t it?”
It’s a perfectly blue day, and in the distance the white-capped Grand Tetons watch over us. This is a place I’ll want to take my kids and my grandkids to.
Somewhere before we reach the main highway, I pass out, and I don’t wake up again until the truck comes to a stop and Gramps shifts into park. The sun is already setting.
We’re back at the nursing home in Rock Springs. Everything we just did — the horseback riding, the elk hunt, the bear attack — feels like a distant dream.
“What about the meat?” I say.
“I left it with a processor back in Jackson.”
“Really?”
“I didn’t want to wake you. Now, either they can ship it all to Rock Springs, or we can split it fifty-fifty and they’ll deliver to the house.”
“Then Mom and Dad will know we went hunting.”
“It’s your call.”
Yeah, there really isn’t any debate. Dad will say I’m grounded until I’m eighteen, but he’ll forget or lose interest in a few weeks. Hopefully.
I say, “Let’s do it. What about the rack?”
“It’s your elk. Besides, I got what I came for.”
He reaches into his coat pocket and pulls out the two elk ivories, already polished up and fashioned into simple necklaces. “I stopped by my friend Rod Husky’s shop in Hoback Junction. He’s a jeweler — fixed these up for us in an hour.” He hands me one and says, “One for you. One for me.”
I put it on and check myself out in the vanity mirror. Not gonna lie, I look hot. “These will be like our BFF necklaces.”
“What’s BFF?”
“Best friends forever.”
Gramps smiles and laughs, and as hard as he’s trying not to cry, his eyes are getting red and sad. “I’m going to miss
you so much. I really wish I could live with you and the family, but . . .”
But I already know. There’s no going back to the way things were before. His broken kidneys aren’t magically going to fix themselves. Maybe if we were rich, he’d be at home in his reclining chair watching Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! while his home dialysis equipment pumped away. And then he could go about his daily routine, living his golden years with his family by his side.
The Sunrise Village Nursing Home is his new life.
I say, “I’m going to visit all the time. I bear swear.” I hold my hands out and make them into claws.
He takes his claws and interlocks them with mine. And we growl.
It’s dark by the time Mom and Dad arrive at the nursing home. They ask a hundred questions about our trip to the Targhee National Forest, but I don’t say much. I’m too tired to lie and too tired to tell the truth.
The five of us have dinner at Red Robin. As Mom and Dad are going on about their adventures in Rock Springs, I just sit there, taking the skin on the top of my hand and folding it together so it’s all wrinkly like I’m some seventy-seven-year-old man who fought in Korea, saved a beautiful woman and her son from a deadbeat, worked at a feed and tractor supply store for over thirty years, and loved everyone.
We drop Gramps off at the nursing home. We each take turns giving him a hug and a kiss and then we say our good-byes. I want to tell him that he’s going to get better and that maybe someday he’ll live with us again. But I can’t lie to him. All I can do is say, “I love you, Gramps.”
When I get home from school on Tuesday, there’s a blurb from the newspaper cut out and taped to my door:
Killer Grizzly Bear Is Found and Slain
The 25-year-old bear known by locals as Sandy, who killed two hunters from Ohio, was found in the Bridger-Teton National Forest on Monday by the Forest Service, who then put her down. Autopsy revealed human remains as well as elk carrion, most likely a recent kill from a hunter.
“I found that this morning,” Ashley says, standing outside her bedroom door. “Thought you’d be interested.”