Beardance

by Will Hobbs

  For a while, no one spoke. Each turned within. The fire had burned low, and the chill of the late August night was reaching their bones.

  Cloyd wondered if he could be as brave as Ursa. He wished he could see another grizzly. Even just one more, just a glimpse.

  Cloyd stuffed as much as he could into his big daypack and he followed the grizzly woman up and out of East Ute Creek, over Gunsight Pass, and into the Ute Lakes Basin, a fifteen-miles wide shelf in the shape of a crescent above the timberline.

  The grizzly woman was leading him across the tundra, below the boulder fields and above the swath of mountain willows that covered the entire basin like a living blanket. She would stop and scan those willows with her high-powered binoculars, and she would scan the meadows of Middle Ute Creek miles below.

  Walter had said, “Go with her. Maybe you’ll find the bears.”

  Cloyd was happy to be out searching with Ursa, yet he’d gone with misgivings, knowing he might be away several days. When he’d left the old man alone the year before, Walter had blown himself up in his mine, even though he’d promised not to do any blasting.

  They were eating from the lunch of dried fruit and nuts and cheese that Ursa had set out on the miniature, ground-hugging wildflowers, pink and purple and white.

  A marmot whistled sharply. Cloyd looked up to see a solitary bull elk grazing on the other side of the boulder field. In and out of the rocks and onto the tundra, a mother ptarmigan and her half-grown young were pecking along in their mottled summer plumage.

  “The Tlingit believe that grizzlies can know the future,” Ursa said. “They believe that grizzlies can understand our speech and know what we are saying about them, even from great distances. Do the Utes believe this also?”

  “I don’t know,” Cloyd said. “Maybe they did, I don’t know.”

  “Some of the tribes would hunt grizzlies. Others wouldn’t, like mine up in Alaska and many of them in your part of the country, because they believed that grizzlies are half-human. The ones who hunted grizzlies did so with great respect, hoping to gain power from them. Power to be used in battle or to feed one’s family was a good thing.”

  “You know about all the tribes?”

  “I try to learn as much as I can,” the grizzly woman said with a sigh. “I know very little compared to what there is to know, compared to what’s been lost. When it comes to bears, I want to know everything. Maybe I want to know too much. Mostly, Indian women in the past were afraid of bears, afraid that bears would come out of the woods and take them back with them to be their wives. The Tlingit tell a story about people being related to bears. It’s called ‘The Woman Who Married a Bear.’”

  Cloyd had to think about this. He asked her, “How did it happen in the story?”

  “A girl didn’t follow the rules about the distance that people and bears should keep along the salmon streams. She was picking berries and got separated from her family. A young man came along, a handsome young man, and they began talking.”

  “Was it … the bear?”

  The grizzly woman nodded. “But in her eyes it was a young man. In the old times, there was magic that went back and forth between people and bears. People could look at bears; and see people, and bears could look at people and see bears.”

  Again, the grizzly woman was echoing his grandmother’s words. It was strange and wonderful to think that two tribes so far apart would tell stories so much alike.

  “Her children,” Cloyd wondered. “Were they bears or people?”

  A smile played at the grizzly woman’s lips. “Who knows? Maybe they were whichever was in the minds of the ones looking at them. But the story says that after her brothers came to the den and killed her husband, she returned to her people and lived with them until her brothers made fun of her for being mated to a bear. At that moment she and her children turned into bear and cubs. She killed her brothers, and all the people learned a great lesson of respect as she fled into the woods with her children.”

  “That’s a good story,” Cloyd said.

  “There’s wisdom in all those old stories.”

  “Maybe the bears around here heard you tell all this,” Cloyd said with a chuckle.

  Ursa laughed a bright, musical laugh. “That grizzly with her three cubs—maybe she’d like those old stories. She might come a little closer and give us a look.”

  At their camp, he wanted to ask her something. “You said Indian women were afraid of bears. How come you’re different?”

  “My mother wanted me to have a bear as a spirit helper. She had heard that the people down the coast, the Kwakiutl, knew how to get their daughters the power of the grizzly as food gatherer. They believed that if the right forepaw of a bear is placed on the palm of the right hand of an infant girl, she will be successful in picking berries and digging clams. So my mother did this with me.”

  A spirit helper, Cloyd thought. He’d never heard this expression before. “How did they get a spirit helper, the people in the old days?”

  “By dreaming,” she replied. “All across the continent, people believed that when they dreamed, their souls left their bodies and traveled about in the spirit world. In a dream you could see something that would normally be invisible. You could even visit the spirit home of the bears.”

  “My grandmother talked about spirit bears,” he said, and then he told her what had happened at the Bear Dance, when he had lifted out of his body and up above the Bear Dance and had looked down.

  She listened carefully, and when he was done, she said, “What did you learn when you were out there that you could bring back?”

  He thought hard, and then he said, “I guess nothing.”

  “Well, at least you can dream,” she said, her dark eyes full of fire. “That’s a great thing. On his dream journey, a hunter might learn a design for his quiver that pleased the animals, or he might meet the spirit keeper of the animal he was hunting and be shown a good place to hunt. When a dream came true, it was said that you found your dream.”

  Cloyd stretched out, with his hand behind his head, and looked at the stars. It was a lucky thing he had met this woman. These things that she knew, they were things he wanted to know.

  “I wish I’d seen the Ute Bear Dance,” Ursa said, “but I’ve only read about it. Do a man and a woman still appear at the end of the endurance dance, dressed in the skins of bears?”

  Cloyd was shaking his head. “I don’t think so. I never saw that.”

  “Maybe they don’t do that part anymore. It was to show that the bears had heard the people’s good wishes, that they had wakened from their hibernation and were going out into the world again. It was always held at the end of the winter, to help wake up the bears and help bring spring.”

  “It’s late in May now,” Cloyd said. “Memorial Day weekend.”

  “Show me how to do the bear dance,” she urged.

  He got to his feet, but then he hesitated. “It would be better if you could hear the sounds. Let me try to make the sounds for you.”

  Cloyd found two sticks, and he whittled one smooth and notched the other, carefully and deliberately. The grizzly woman was done with speaking now, and watched with great interest as he whittled the sticks.

  When he was ready Cloyd began to make the rasping thunder, and he was pleased that the sound coming off the sticks was much like it should be. He demonstrated the three steps forward, three steps back, and then explained, “The woman has to ask the man to dance.”

  She came to him, and tugged on the bottom of his rain jacket, and smiled a shy, girlish smile, just like a girl of fourteen.

  At first their steps were small and slow ones. He stepped toward her as she retreated, then she stepped toward him as he fell back.

  Ursa began taking bigger steps, springing to the rhythm of his rasp. Her long braid was flying as they leaped back and forth, back and forth. After they’d danced that way awhile, he showed her his favorite form of the bear dance. Side by side, they faced in opposit
e directions with his hand around her waist, her hand around his. He couldn’t play the rasp, but their feet didn’t need to hear the beat to keep to it. The beat seemed to be coming up out of the earth, way back out of the life of the People.

  After they danced, he played the rasp for a long time, and then she played the rasp for a long time.

  Miles down in the timber, in the deep spruce forest back from the long meadow down Middle Ute Creek, a bear heard the unusual sound of the growler sticks. She had am innate curiosity perhaps greater than any other animal’s, and she was highly curious about this sound. She had spent a good part of the afternoon on a daybed she’d scratched in the earth, after feeding in the morning from the carcass of a cougar-killed deer she’d dug up from under its shallow covering of boughs and spruce needles. Following the mountain lion had paid off for her and her three cubs, and when the cat had returned to feed again, it had been a simple matter to chase it off.

  Curious about this unusual night sound, she led her cubs up the mountain, close enough that she could identify the forms of two human beings, both sitting cross-legged, one making the sound with two sticks. It was curious that this sound came from two human beings. She went to great lengths to avoid people, yet sometimes when she felt safe she would watch them. This sound was new and interesting, and it sounded nothing like the noises that human beings made. It sounded something like thunder, and something like bears. Her three cubs, sitting on their haunches in a straight row, listened with great interest as well. The four of them listened until the sound stopped, and then they turned silently into the night.

  It was Cloyd who spotted them, in the morning, as he glassed all he could see of the tundra fields above the chest-high willow thickets of the Ute Lakes Basin. Along the edge of a boulder field that seemed to flow like a glacier off the Continental Divide, he found them with the grizzly woman’s powerful binoculars. At first he thought he hadn’t seen them at all, that his mind was tricking him with his greatest wish, but he blinked and held the binoculars as steadily as he could and counted the cubs that were lined up, watching their mother dig. One, two, three.

  Even from this distance, over half a mile, Cloyd could catch the silver sheen on their mother’s fur as she dug furiously in the tundra. He knew she was a grizzly. He could even make out the hump on her back just behind her neck. There were stones flying from her claws. She seized a large stone with both forepaws and hurled it aside. Carefully, before he took the field glasses from his eyes, he noted all the landmarks around the spot, the unique pattern of the Divide and the rock flow and the tundra.

  “Ursa,” he said as calmly as he could, and then he gave her a tug on her sleeve. He showed her where to look.

  As Ursa focused the binoculars, a smile came to her lips. She looked a long time in silence. “Cloyd,” she whispered, “we’ve brought each other luck.”

  They packed quickly, and then he followed as she used the wind and the shape of the land to find a place where they could watch without the bear catching their scent. “It’s good she has three cubs,” Ursa whispered. “Two’s more common. Grizzlies have young only every other year at best, and cubs often die.”

  The woman made no sound as she moved toward the spot she had selected. Cloyd imitated her every move. He only hoped, when they gained the spot, that the bears would not have left.

  He wasn’t disappointed. Alongside the grizzly woman, he inched forward on his belly into a cluster of rocks that would shield them from view. When the moment came, he found the mother grizzly digging as vigorously as ever. She had excavated a pit five feet deep and eight to ten feet across. Now Cloyd didn’t need the binoculars. He could even see the dished-out shape of her broad forehead.

  The dirt was flying, and so were the stones. The bear flung a rock as big as a basketball over her shoulder.

  The cubs were no longer lined up and watching. They’d fallen into a three-way boxing, wrestling, and chewing match.

  Brown, cocoa, and gray-black, just as Rusty had said. Their mother would stop and look around every minute or so, constantly on the alert.

  “The cubs look healthy,” the grizzly woman whispered. “Seven months old, probably fifty pounds.”

  Ursa began taking pictures—two, three—very quickly. “For the proof we need, I have to risk disturbing them,” she said, and indeed the mother grizzly stood up on two legs and sniffed the air, looked their way. Had the bear heard the camera’s shutter?

  Maybe, but maybe not. After a long minute, the grizzly went back to her digging. The grizzly woman didn’t take any more pictures. She had her proof. No one could mistake the shape of the mother grizzly’s head, the silver-tipped fur, the hump above her shoulders, the long claws on her front feet.

  Suddenly the cubs were seizing upon small animals—three or four of them, quite alive—that their mother was throwing up and out of the pit. “Pikas,” the grizzly woman said. Cloyd recognized the small rock rabbits that Walter called conies. Several minutes later their mother’s mouth came up with a nest of squirming baby conies, spilling them out onto the dirt for her cubs.

  The grizzly moved away from the rocks onto the open tundra and began to dig up the shallow runs that could be found in profusion everywhere on the spongy grass. Perfect little imitators, her cubs dug furiously on their own. Cloyd had seen the little meadow mice called voles scurrying above ground on occasion, but he hadn’t realized how many could be found in a small area. And he never could have guessed how successfully a grizzly could dig them up. Within an hour the mother grizzly had caught over thirty. Some she flicked the cubs’ way for them to chase in the grass. The grizzly woman said it was the bear’s hearing that told her exactly where to dig.

  Even when she was catching voles, the mother grizzly kept her vigilance, standing up briefly, looking around. Her sight wasn’t so good, but her nose was testing the wind. The brown cub tried to nurse as she stood up, and she brushed it off as if to say, Now is not the time or the place.

  After noon the bear started down toward the timber. She made a daybed just inside the trees, where she lay down, nursed her cubs, and napped.

  By midafternoon the bears were on the move again, and they disappeared deep into the spruce timber. Cloyd was sure he’d seen them for the last time, but the grizzly woman could detect even the faintest signs of their passage. She taught him how to tell even a grizzly’s rear track apart from a black bear’s. Late in the day the grizzly woman was glassing a beaver pond that sat in a little bench above West Ute Creek, and she found them again.

  The big grizzly was rolling and splashing in the pond with all three cubs swimming around her. She began to root out pond lilies for them and for herself. Just like their mother, they held the lilies with both forepaws and crunched on the thick roots. When their mother at last began to swim across the pond, the cubs quickly followed. The brown one swam up onto her back and the cocoa clung to her tail end, while the gray-black swam along behind on its own.

  Cloyd didn’t know what it was, but suddenly he felt strange all over—on his arms, in his spine, on the back of his neck. He began to feel that he was being watched. From the corner of his eye, he tried to see if someone was watching him and Ursa as they were watching the bears. For a long time he tried to look without giving himself away, but he couldn’t see a thing. The strange feeling persisted. At last he spun suddenly to see if he might spy someone or something there in the forest behind him, but he saw nothing, unless it was the suggestion of a moving shadow, a shadow he glimpsed ever so briefly.

  No, he decided. It was nothing.

  The mother grizzly, in her shuffling, powerful gait, ran with her head low to the ground and disappeared with her cubs into the trees. After a while, the grizzly woman said it was time to follow. At any place where bushes or boulders might have concealed the bears, Ursa angled to the side for a clear view so she wouldn’t accidentally come between the grizzly and her cubs.

  Cloyd and the grizzly woman were watching from the trees as the bears reappeare
d along the edge of the meadow of West Ute Creek. Mother and cubs were grazing on the grass and wildflowers, which surprised him. But then he remembered, from a book he’d found at school, that three-fourths of what grizzlies ate wasn’t meat at all.

  For a long time he watched with Ursa as the big grizzly browsed in a patch of tall cow parsnips, eating the flower tops and broad leaves and all right down to the ground. Alongside her, the cubs were clasping shredded pieces of the stalks with their forepaws and eating them like celery. At last, when the shadows grew long, their mother led them into the forest on the far side of the creek, and the bears disappeared from sight.

  Tomorrow, Cloyd thought, the bears might be gone for good. But that would be all right. Ursa had the pictures. Ursa had the proof of grizzlies in the San Juan Mountains.

  Prove one, they’d bring others.

  In their camp that night, Cloyd had the appetite of a bear. The grizzly woman was stirring the powdered cheese into a big pot of macaroni, and now she dished out two large helpings. Then she brought a small bottle of hot sauce out of her pack and sprinkled it heavily on her macaroni and cheese. Cloyd thought he’d try some too.

  The spicy dish tasted good, and it warmed him up so much that he took off his jacket and even his wool cap. He was sweating, and it felt like steam was spouting out of his ears. He felt good. “How soon will they bring more grizzlies?” he asked happily.

  Ursa simply shrugged.

  “But they will bring them back here?” Cloyd asked uncertainly.

  “It’s a matter of time,” she said. “The law is clear. The state and federal wildlife agencies will have a responsibility now to see that this tiny grizzly population we’ve discovered has a future. These four are not a breeding population. They’ll die out in time. There’ll be studies and hearings that could take years, but it will happen.”

  The grizzly woman took off her cap too, and her jacket. She sprinkled some more hot sauce onto her macaroni and cheese and broke into a smile. “I’ve often thought this stuff might save me from freezing to death—maybe it deserves mention in the first aid books.”