Beardance

by Will Hobbs

  “Where will they bring grizzlies from?”

  “Probably from Yellowstone, in Wyoming. They’re the closest. You know, Cloyd, your San Juans are the biggest stretch of wilderness south of Yellowstone. There’s room for grizzlies here. That’s why a few of them have been able to survive here for forty years after everyone thought they were gone.”

  When he said good night to her, she said, “I was thinking—just the same as bears are our spirit helpers, we’re their spirit helpers too.”

  “I’m not sure I really have a spirit helper,” Cloyd admitted. In his heart, he knew he didn’t. Having a bearstone once wasn’t the same as having a spirit helper. He hadn’t done anything for bears. One had died because of his careless words.

  “You’re young,” she said. “Cloyd, you could be one who fights for bears. The future looks bleak for bears, all over the world. Fights for Bears would be a good Indian name for you.”

  She read the doubt in his eyes. “You’ll know when you have a spirit helper, Cloyd. You can dream, you already know that. You’ve traveled in the spirit world. I’ve never done that.”

  Ursa thought too much of him, Cloyd knew. He was only who he was. It was good enough to drift off to sleep knowing that there were still grizzlies in the mountains, that more would be brought, that they weren’t going to die out after all.

  He went to sleep thinking of the old man, wondering how Walter Landis was doing this night. Was he feeling well? Was his cough getting better or worse? How much was his leg hurting him? How much did it hurt to lay his body down on the ground? He thought of his sister, who was back at the boarding school in Salt Lake City, and of his grandmother. Her peaches would be ripe now on the high desert at White Mesa.

  Cloyd woke remembering he had dreamed of bears in the night. It was a weird dream, not one he could find anything good about, not one he would tell the grizzly woman about. In his dream he’d been having a conversation with a bear much like the one he’d seen the summer before. The bear in his dreams reached an enormous height and never went down on all fours. They were having a conversation about the foods they liked to eat, and the bear said that his very favorite was people. “Bears don’t eat human flesh,” Cloyd had said, and the gigantic bear had answered, “But I do. I would like your permission to drink your blood and to eat the meat from your bones. I will leave all your bones in good condition for you to put back together.”

  This dream was hard to keep out of his head. He was following the grizzly woman up and out of the trees and into the brushy willows of the Ute Lakes Basin, and he kept having this crazy conversation with the dream bear over and over again. The grizzly woman was once again on the track of the mother grizzly and her three cubs. The bears were moving upslope, toward the Continental Divide, and Ursa was eager to observe them as long as she could. She had only a few more days before she had to leave to travel back to Montana and begin her classes, and she wanted to spend them observing these rarest of North America’s grizzlies.

  In the forest the grizzly woman pointed out logs that the mother grizzly had freshly turned over. Cloyd guessed that Ursa could track bears as well as the redhaired man, or better. Ursa was pointing out bits of mushrooms left uneaten, and holes around the roots of spruce trees where the grizzly had dug up caches of nuts. Above the timberline, there were places where the bear had dug for voles and dug up bulbs and roots.

  Ursa was sure the bears were moving to the southwest, in the direction of the Continental Divide. She guessed the grizzly was going to move on to another basin. “This time of year,” she said as she glassed the slopes, “they have to keep on the move. They have to lay in the fat to carry them through the times when there’s hardly any food around. Oh, no!” she exclaimed suddenly.

  “What is it?”

  The grizzly woman had her field glasses trained on the slopes above Twin Lakes, halfway around the basin between Middle Ute Lake and Ute Lake. “Sheep,” she replied. “I hope our bears are steering wide of that flock. I’m sure they can smell those sheep from miles and miles away.”

  Cloyd could make out the motion, the moving pattern of white on the green mountainside, each individual moving in the same direction at the same speed.

  “Sheepmen hate grizzlies,” Ursa said. “Some kill grizzlies on sight, endangered or no.”

  “Sixto Loco,” Cloyd said, and he told the grizzly woman about the last sheepherder in the mountains, who was a wild man and a crack shot.

  “We’ll just hope our bears steer well away from him. The problem is, Cloyd, the ranchers were probably grazing sheep here in the summers for a hundred years before the Weminuche was declared a wilderness area. But you tell me, who has the greater right, sheep or grizzlies?”

  Cloyd had been a shepherd too. He couldn’t answer without thinking about this problem. For years, he had taken his grandmother’s sheep and goats across the high desert and into the fingers of the canyons. “Do grizzlies kill sheep?” he asked.

  “Some do,” Ursa said. “These few who’ve survived so long here, they must have learned to avoid sheep and man at all costs, but it didn’t used to be so rare for a grizzly to become a sheep killer.”

  “There’s lots of other places for sheep,” Cloyd reasoned, “but nowhere for grizzlies. And the grizzlies were here before the sheep, no one even knows how long.”

  With a wink, the Tlingit woman suggested, “Why don’t you walk over to that Sixto Loco’s camp and tell him those things?”

  Cloyd liked it when she joked with him. He had his answer ready for her. “I’m not the one named Loco.”

  Ursa laughed and said, “We’ll steer wide around him, just like we hope mother grizzly does. With a name like his, I don’t imagine the man gets much company up here.”

  And so they followed the tracks of the grizzlies over the Continental Divide onto the Pacific side, onto the slopes that were drained by Rock Creek. At the head of the basin, the deep crater of Rock Lake sparkled in the afternoon sun at the foot of towering peaks. Rock Creek poured out of the lake, down through the trees and onto a long, boggy meadow flanked on both sides by timber and rockslides and a parade of peaks.

  Cloyd and the grizzly woman sat on the short grasses of the Continental Divide, turned yellow and orange by the frosts, and admired the view. Trading the binoculars back and forth, they found the bears at last. It was the grizzly woman who spotted them as they were sliding down a long snowbank far above the lake. Cloyd was amazed when he had his turn. He looked to Ursa for what she would say.

  “I’ve seen them doing this lots of times in Montana and Wyoming,” she said. “Some of the biologists say they do it to cool off….”

  “But what do you think?”

  “I don’t have a very scientific explanation,” she said with a laugh. “I think they slide down snowbanks just for the fun of it. I’ve seen them slide down the same snowbank two, three times in a row. One time in Montana, I saw a grizzly sit down on his haunches and watch an especially spectacular sunset. The bear watched for twenty minutes. As soon as the sun had set, he got up and left. I remember writing in my notebook, Try and explain that.’”

  Cloyd took his turn with the binoculars, but the bears didn’t reappear. The grizzly woman thought they must be grazing or hunting marmots around the shallow meltwater lake that the map showed up there near the peaks.

  Training the binoculars on the valley of Rock Creek, Cloyd discovered a white sheepherder tent in the trees below the long meadow. Ursa took it to be the camp of the two game wardens who were also searching for the grizzlies Rusty had reported.

  Cloyd exclaimed, “They have no idea how close the bears are!”

  “They can’t be very serious about their search,” Ursa said. “I’ve heard they have horses. Grizzlies can smell horses a long ways off.”

  “But my horse was with me last summer when I saw the grizzly….”

  “I didn’t realize that,” Ursa said thoughtfully. Ursa seemed to be thinking hard about this. At last she said, “Maybe h
e showed himself to you on purpose.”

  Cloyd told himself, That’s what I always thought. But he didn’t tell this to the grizzly woman. It was too painful to talk about.

  “It’s sometimes said that bears even know the time and place of their own death….”

  Cloyd wondered if Ursa was somehow talking about the bear he had seen killed.

  “Maybe that bear of yours,” the grizzly woman said, her eyes full of conviction, “maybe that bear that is dead is your spirit bear, Cloyd, your spirit helper. Wouldn’t it be true to say you haven’t been the same since you met him?”

  “Maybe,” Cloyd said. He was remembering his dream, the one of the night before that he wasn’t going to tell her. The bear in his dream wanted his blood, wanted to eat all the meat from his bones. Maybe the bear he dreamed was the same bear he had seen killed.

  “You feel bad that he is dead, but you can turn your loss into power to do something good, like the old shamans used to do.”

  “The medicine men?”

  “The Tlingit believed that bears could change their shape to become people or other animals. Many other tribes believed this as well. Some shamans, the People said, could do the same. The shamans dreamed deeper and traveled farther than ordinary people with spirit helpers. Shamans with bears as spirit helpers healed the sick with the knowledge they brought back from the spirit world. Bears have the greatest healing powers in the animal world, and they could bestow those powers on a human being.”

  “I wish I knew all these things that you know,” Cloyd said longingly.

  Ursa poked him in the ribs. “I only wish my students back in Montana were half as interested as you are in everything I have to say.”

  “Tell me more about the shamans and the grizzlies and spirit helpers.”

  “Well, Tlingit shamans considered the grizzly spirit too powerful to adopt as a spirit helper, but the shamans of some other tribes became bear-dreamers and did take grizzlies as spirit helpers. They wore the skins of grizzlies, painted themselves with bear-paw signs, and wore grizzly claws around their necks. In their medicine bundles they’d have teeth and claws … they went around the woods eating the plants that bears eat, they shuffled along like bears, they danced like bears….”

  Cloyd remembered that he’d woofed like a bear at the Bear Dance, and his fingers had felt like claws. The memory, along with her words, made the hair stand up on the back of his neck. “How did a person become a shaman?” he asked hesitantly.

  “By fasting like the bear does in its den. By enduring hardship like we can’t even imagine today, cold and hunger beyond our ability to comprehend. At the extremity between life and death, the shaman met his spirit helper, and if he lived, he was changed by his ordeal and he brought back new powers with which to help the people. He, or she, could see into the spirit world for them. Sometimes women became shamans too.”

  Cloyd wondered if Ursa was telling him something about herself. After a long and thoughtful silence, he thought it was a question he could ask. “Are you a shaman?” he asked respectfully.

  Ursa smiled, amused by the thought. “I withdraw from the world when I go out to study the bears, but a few weeks is about as long as I can last before I go back into town for a hot shower and restaurant food.”

  And then she laughed. “When they went out like that, shamans didn’t come back into town every few weeks for Mexican food. To acquire power, you had to withdraw from the world like a bear going into hibernation. True wisdom couldn’t be found around people—shamans didn’t study at the university. True wisdom could only be found in a place that was very special to the person or the tribe, far away from the village, out in the solitude. Solitude and suffering opened the pathways of knowledge that are normally closed to human beings, the pathways to the world of things that can’t be seen.”

  “The spirit world,” Cloyd said.

  “I can tell you a shaman’s song,” she offered. “It’s a grizzly bear song of the Tlingit. The shaman is singing his oneness with the bear:

  “Whu! Bear!

  Whu Whu!

  So you say

  Whu Whu Whu!

  You come.

  You’re a fine young man

  You grizzly bear

  You crawl out of your fur.

  You come

  I say Whu Whu Whu!

  I throw grease into the fire.

  For you

  Grizzly Bear

  We are the same person!”

  Cloyd asked her to say it two more times. He learned it, every word. He didn’t know why, but it was important that he have every word right. As he followed her down off the Divide toward Bock Lake, he was repeating the words to himself over and over.

  He didn’t know why the bears were important to him and not some other Ute kid in Ignacio or White Mesa or the group home in Durango. But he would accept it, just as Ursa had accepted it. He, not someone else, had found the bearstone. He was the one that the great bear, the father of those three cubs, had shown himself to. He was the one who had spotted the mother and cubs. His grandmother would say that none of these things were accidents. He only knew that there was something between him and those bears, something deeper than he could explain.

  In the morning, the grizzly woman was going on her hunches, and she was going fast. Ursa stopped only to glass the cliffs and ledges above. “I don’t see our bears on the mountainsides,” she told Cloyd. “They must have gone up and over. It looks like there’s only a couple of routes they could have used.”

  On top of the “manway,” where a foot trail wound up and through a pass considered too rough and rocky for horses, the grizzly woman looked closely for any sign that the bears had passed this way, and found none. Ursa turned the search west, toward a small, U-shaped gap high above them between two sharp peaks. At thirteen thousand feet, the gap towered above the long snowbank where the bears had been sliding.

  Cloyd followed Ursa along the ledges as they worked their way through patches of tundra and across scree slides, to the nameless meltwater pond high above the deep crater of Rock Lake. In the soft soil along its shore Ursa found the bear’s enormous five-toed print again.

  Cloyd fell to his belly and drank, then followed Ursa up the steep incline of rock and ice toward that gap in the sky. At the grizzly woman’s side, he inched up the final pitch on all fours. They were both going as quietly as they could. At last they bellied up to the gap and stuck their heads over.

  At first glance Cloyd didn’t see the bears. The turquoise lake far below, a rectangular jewel nearly the color of a robin’s egg, captured all his attention. It was called Lake Mary Alice on the map. Its perch was so high and so forbidding, there wasn’t a bit of grass around that lake, only rockflows and boulders and ice. Mary Alice lay in the shade at the foot of Mt. Oso’s sheer north face, vaulting fifteen hundred feet above. An ice shelf, glowing blue, clung to the side of the lake at the bottom of the peak. It was a wild place, primitive and beautiful, unlike anything he had seen in all his days of crawling around in the canyons and the mountains.

  “Glass the outlet,” Ursa said, and handed him the big binoculars.

  Cloyd found the tiny stream flowing out of the lake, and there he found his bears. Big as life through the field glasses, the mother grizzly was splashing in the tiny outlet stream. He thought she might be playing, until he saw her pin a fish with her paw, then take it in her teeth. When she dropped it in the rocks, two of the cubs lunged for the trout at the same time, and the brown took it away from the gray-black.

  “It’s late for spawning,” the grizzly woman commented, “but the ice probably hasn’t been off this lake very long. In the shade of this mountain the way it sits, the surface of this lake must stay open only a few months out of the year.”

  Now the grizzly had caught another, and the third cub, the cocoa-colored one, claimed this fish.

  The grizzly woman turned to Cloyd with a look of deep satisfaction. “The last grizzlies in Colorado, making a bear living.”r />
  Ursa began to take pictures through her long telephoto lens, dozens of pictures. “We won’t be able to get any closer than this,” she whispered. “If we started over this edge, they’d hear us in a second. Sound would carry in this bowl like anything. But we’ve got plenty of proof now.”

  Cloyd whispered, “I don’t see how we could get down.”

  “The map doesn’t show any trails, from up here or from down below. Judging by the contour lines, from down on Vallecito Creek it would be a nightmare bushwhack if you tried to climb up into this Roell Creek Basin. It’s a perfect refuge for bears.”

  The gray-black cub was chasing down a fish that was about to flip-flop its way back into the lake. Now a paw pinned the trout to the ground, and the cub took a bite out of it.

  By midafternoon, the sun hadn’t shone on the lake. Cloyd realized it never would again this year. The sun was too low in the sky, and the peak too high.

  The cubs had long since filled their stomachs, but Cloyd could see through the binoculars that their mother was still fishing and still eating. The gray-black cub came over and attempted to nurse, but its mother with a swat sent it tumbling.

  When Cloyd told the grizzly woman what he had seen, she said that besides being busy, their mother might be starting to wean them from her milk. “They’ve come a long way since the end of January,” she said. “They’re so tiny when they’re born—they’re hardly bigger than chipmunks. The first month their mother’s still snoozing, and they’re nursing and growing and sleeping.”

  The gray-black cub was back at its mother’s side, maybe hoping she would change her mind. The brown cub and the cocoa were ambling out of view, over the edge of the lake shelf.

  It was an amble that saved their lives.

  Cloyd didn’t know what was happening, and neither did Ursa. Out of the blue sky, there came a shearing, explosive crack as loud as close lightning. It sounded like trains colliding, it sounded like a mountain splitting in two. Boy and woman looked at each other in shock and in fear for their lives. “Earthquake?” Ursa muttered.