by Will Hobbs
Cloyd let Cocoa and Brownie maul him and pummel him and crawl all over him, just as their mother had let them. He talked to them with words and a stream of noises he could make with his lips. The bears learned fast that the skin on his hands was not as tough as his fur-covered body and that he didn’t like it if they were too rough with their needle-sharp teeth. Soon they knew his moods and his warnings and his commands from the tone of his voice. They could tell when he was playing and when he wasn’t. They couldn’t touch his face with tooth or claw, but if he turned sideways, it was a signal he would allow a quick lick with the tongue.
After the first night the three of them sheltered under the rock overhang on the steep, forested slope below the lake. Besides a good sleeping place, Cloyd had found a perfect arrowhead there, two inches long, surely a Ute arrowhead. It was the Weminuche Utes—his own band—who had hunted in the summers in these mountains. It made him feel good to know that even the wildest places had been familiar to them.
Cloyd was marking the days with a tiny notepad and the stub of a pencil that Ursa had left in her pack. It was dry under his stone roof during three nights of hard rains, as the spruces swayed and creaked in the wind, and the lightning and thunder attacked at intervals all through the night. He was warm in the grizzly skin on a bed of boughs and needles, and the two cubs nestled against him added more warmth still.
Cloyd had made six marks on the notepad, and still he was reluctant to climb out of their mother’s fur. He didn’t want to break the spell. Each day, all day, he foraged with them. This was the time, while food was abundant, when they needed to be eating all they could. Every day was a ceaseless quest for food. He overturned rotten logs for them and watched approvingly as they went along licking up the ants and grubs with their quick tongues. He ate berries alongside them, and watercress along the creek, but he didn’t try the mushrooms they relished. They seemed to know which ones to avoid, but still, the mushrooms were beyond their prime and swarming with tiny, translucent larvae.
Each morning, a new sheet of clear ice covered Lost Lake, but the ice would break up by noon. Cloyd kept fishing for himself and the cubs. He thought about drying some of the fish, but the sun only appeared above the peaks for three or four hours each day, and the peaks drew clouds. This basin was a cold, cold place, and he began making plans to leave. He wouldn’t want to get caught here by a big snow.
It would be up to the cubs whether or not they wanted to follow him out of this basin. It was time for him to be heading back to the old man and the farm on the Piedra. And school, he thought. He hadn’t been thinking about it, but school had already started. School seemed as vague and faraway as it had back in the years he used to take his grandmother’s sheep and goats out into the canyons. When he got back to school, Mr. Pendleton was going to teach him the secret of making fire with the bow drill.
On the bench by the shore of Lost Lake, he unlaced the bearskin and rolled it into a tight bundle, then tied it off. All the time, he had his eyes on the cubs. They were busy playing hide-and-seek, one of their favorite games. Prom their mother’s skull, he took one of the molars for luck, to go along with the bearstone and the Ute arrowhead. As he was placing their mother’s skull in a safe place up in a tree, the cubs were having one of their wrestling and boxing matches, striking each other, dodging, clinching, biting, bristling up and growling in mock battle.
He tied the bundled grizzly skin onto his backpack.
When the moment came, and he called to the cubs to come along, they showed no surprise that he’d shed his grizzly skin. Everything was the same, nothing was different. He turned to go, and they followed.
For them, Cloyd realized, he was a bear.
They were seeing a bear.
He recalled his grandmother’s words from when he was little. In the very earliest time, she’d said, a person could become an animal if he wanted to and an animal could become a person. Sometimes they were animals and sometimes people, and it made no difference.
Climbing into the sky, climbing for that narrow ledge high above the lake of robin’s-egg blue that sat at the deadly foot of Mt. Oso, he glanced over his shoulder and saw the two cubs following close behind, the brown and the cocoa. It felt like he was living with these cubs in the very earliest time.
Cloyd led the cubs across the Ute Lakes Basin, but he stayed miles away from the trail. If these cubs were going to have a future, he had to think like their mother.
The meadows down on Middle Ute Creek had turned gold from the frosts, He could see a big patch of white down there, slightly moving. Sixto Loco’s big flock. Cloyd could see a long, long way into the Rio Grande country. Below the dark spruce forests, the aspens blanketing the mountainsides were beginning to turn gold.
As he crossed the wide tundra fields, the cubs dug furiously in the runs of countless voles, and succeeded in capturing several. Cloyd was content to chew on his own dwindling food supply.
The cubs were also eating the frosted tops and the roots of certain wildflowers. As they grazed at the edge of a parsnip patch, an almost full-grown family of ptarmigans, more white than brown now with fall advancing, exploded into flight immediately in front of them. Cocoa and Brownie looked at each other in surprise, then gave chase. The cubs put on a burst of speed, but the low-flying ptarmigans were fast, and quickly left them behind.
Cloyd was on his way back to East Ute Creek, to a small food cache that Walter and the grizzly woman had left for him, when he glimpsed a rider far below on the trail bound for the Divide. The man had a string of packhorses behind him. Tony Archuleta, Cloyd realized, on his way home after resupplying Sixto Loco. He recognized Tony’s hat, the chaps.
Here was a way to get a message to Walter. He could stay longer with the cubs if he could tell Walter. Cloyd scratched out a note on the little notepad. If he hurried, he could leave the note on the trail for Tony Archuleta to find.
Cloyd told the cubs to stay. He didn’t want them near a trail that people used. He sat them down and pushed their noses down and told them to wait there beside his pack.
At first, when he turned away, they started to follow. Once more he told them, and this time he struck each of their muzzles with a sharp tap as he spoke.
This time they did as he said. They watched him go. He realized as he raced away into the forest that it wasn’t his doing. It was something their mother had already taught them.
At the place where Cloyd intercepted the trail, he knew he had to work fast. He pegged his note to the center of the trail with a sharp stick. Just to make sure Tony couldn’t miss it, he hastily gathered rocks and shaped them into a large arrow, right in the trail, pointing at the note. Then he fled up the slope, into the trees, to watch.
It wasn’t long before Tony Archuleta came along the trail, leading his pack string. Cloyd saw the man with the dark mustache get off his horse, pick up the note, read it, and look all around. But Cloyd wouldn’t let himself be seen. Tony smiled broadly as he tucked the note into his shirt pocket, then kicked all the little rocks free of the trail.
Cloyd returned with the cubs to the camp on East Ute Creek and found it quiet and bare, full of good memories. He wouldn’t stay long. He only wanted to pick up the food left for him and to cache the heavy bearskin. He might return for it; it made a good blanket. Cloyd removed a long, amber claw from a forepaw to add to the tooth, bearstone, and arrowhead.
He followed the stream down into the aspen forests, where the days were warmer and the nights not as cold. If he could stay with the cubs awhile longer, a week maybe, it would increase their chances. The longer he could stay with them, the better.
As he had guessed, there was still plenty of food lower down. The grass remained green in places, and the cubs found good grazing: in the grass and weeds. Brownie and Cocoa slapped at grasshoppers in the air and pounced on the ones on the ground; they even ate moths. Cottontail rabbits were not much trouble for them to catch. They ate the bark from the aspens, they ate rotten mushrooms, they ate willow ro
ots and willow bark. Every day the cubs raked countless chokecherries into their mouths. Cloyd ate just a few. Very many chokecherries would sour his stomach.
The days of mid-September were passing as Cloyd dropped farther still into the tall pine forest, where the cubs robbed squirrels’ caches by the dozens. The pine nuts were bigger and oilier than spruce nuts, and Cloyd began to eat them as well, stashing plenty away in his pack. The cubs were amazingly strong. Mostly they were turning over their own rocks and logs now, often working as a team. Their noses led them to the carcass of a deer. Brownie and Cocoa liked that smelly old carcass.
Brownie and Cocoa were thriving. Cloyd could see that they were putting on weight. He thought they might have gained ten or fifteen pounds apiece since he and the grizzly woman had first seen them. What did they weigh now, maybe sixty-five pounds? The fur around their necks and chests was growing extra long and coarse into a ruff, and just behind their necks that trademark hump that grizzlies have above their shoulders was starting to show.
The cubs found acorns plentiful in the scrub oak, and here and there the creek banks were splashed red with wild roses thick with rose hips. Cloyd had chewed on rose hips in the desert, but the fruits of these mountain roses grew fatter and larger and sweeter.
More and more as the days went by, he was grazing alongside the bears, eating the sweet stems of grasses that they ate, trying out the roots they dug up. He swam with them in icy beaver ponds and fished alongside them in the streams. Lying on his belly where the banks overhung the creeks, he practiced at feeling under the banks for trout that hid in the shadows behind dangling roots. He caught four fish that way, onehanded, under the banks.
One day he was sure his hands were feeling the scales of a big fish. It felt a little funny, but he closed on it and pulled it out anyway. Waiting attentively on the bank, Brownie and Cocoa were just as surprised as he was to discover he had a half-grown beaver by the tail. In midair, the beaver was turning around and trying to bite him. Cloyd cried out and threw the beaver up in the air, trying to get it away from him.
The beaver landed on the bank, where the grizzly cubs pounced on it. The beaver was trying to get back into the water, but the cubs knew how to block its escape route. They took turns attacking the beaver, trying for a hold. The beaver stood and faced. Its teeth and claws seemed like formidable weapons to Cloyd, but Cocoa, with a lunge, caught the beaver by the back of its neck. After a few strong shakes, the beaver was dead.
Cloyd kept a piece of the skin and scraped the fur from it. He would soften the skin and sew it into a small pouch with the big needle in the grizzly woman’s sewing kit, then hang it from his neck by a rawhide bootlace. In this medicine bundle he would keep the grizzly claw, the grizzly tooth, the arrowhead, and the bearstone.
One day Cloyd was surprised to see Cocoa snap her jaws shut on a bee buzzing by at high speed. With a gulp, she’d swallowed the bee. There were other bees close by, honeybees, and the cubs were curious. They soon discovered a cottonwood with a hive in the cavity where a big branch had broken out. The only trouble was, the bees’ nest was about six feet off the ground.
Cloyd wondered how his bears might get at that hive. All he could think of was to offer himself as a ladder. He stood a couple feet away from the tree, then leaned against it. The cubs were quick thinkers. Brownie ran right up his back, with Cocoa barely behind. One stood on his head, one on his shoulder. There was much commotion up there, with all the stirred-up bees and the excited whining of the cubs as they jockeyed for position on his head and shoulders.
Cloyd was stung once on his hand and once on his arm, but he gritted his teeth and held on. With a glance up, he saw Brownie fish out a big piece of honeycomb, and he saw both cubs chewing on the sticky stuff, swallowing honeycomb and bees and all.
He would have liked to stay longer in the lower country. He was keeping track in the grizzly woman’s notepad: it was September the 19th, as close as he could tell, the day the cubs came rushing to him, terrified, and froze behind his legs. His instincts weren’t as good as theirs. Instead of retreating, he advanced, wondering what had spooked them. Cloyd, and then the cubs too, looked down the slope. He saw a man stalking in a crouch, wearing camouflage clothes and holding a huge compound bow at the ready, the kind Rusty had used. “What the hell,” the man swore under his breath when he saw Cloyd and the two cubs at his side.
Cloyd fled, just as terrified as the cubs. He ran as fast as he could. The man chased for a while, and then he quit.
Afterward, Cloyd thought some good had come from this. The cubs had seen a human being, and they had been terrified. Their mother had taught them well. This was good. They would live a lot longer this way.
Cloyd had roamed far from East Ute Creek, up and down the flanks of the mountains above the Rio Grande. Now he started to make his way back to the high country, where it would be safer. At his back he heard the guns of autumn. It was a good lesson for the bears to be fleeing those sounds. He would have to avoid anywhere men could reach on horseback, anywhere hunters might reach from their camps on foot.
Up the steep slopes he led the cubs toward East Ute Creek, through the deadfall timber and across the rockslides and the grassy avalanche chutes. East Ute Creek, where he had said good-bye to Walter and Ursa, seemed like the closest thing to home. But when he was almost back to the old campsite, watching the meadow from the forested slopes above, a party of hunters came riding up the trail, right up the meadows of East Ute Creek. Brownie and Cocoa froze in place and watched the riders pass by far below. Cloyd wished he could stay on East Ute Creek again and fish the stream with his rod and reel. But he would have to lead the bears to safer places.
When the meadow was clear again, he crossed the creek and disappeared with the bears into the timber, heading for the back side of the ridge where there were no trails.
He should’ve stopped for the night earlier, but it was all steep slopes, nothing that looked hospitable. It was dusk. Then, with no warning, Brownie was gone. The earth had swallowed her up. One second she was investigating some small hole on the slope, the next she was gone.
He should have held on to Cocoa: the two of them were thick as thieves. Now Cocoa was gone down the hole too.
His tiny flashlight with its nearly dead batteries couldn’t penetrate the blackness. But he could hear them whimpering, far below.
He’d taken great pains to skirt the flock and the six sheepdogs guarding the flock.
Where was Sixto Loco?
Cloyd had to get a rope. Only a long rope could possibly save those cubs. He didn’t know exactly what he was going to do with it, but he knew he might have to try to squeeze down that hole.
The shadows were growing long, and the flock was moving gradually down the meadow of Middle Ute Creek, headed by habit back to its bedding grounds by the camp.
He could see no movement in the shepherd’s camp by the creek. Where was Sixto Loco?
Cloyd watched from the trees as long as he could. Finally he crept in close to the fire. There was a covered pail on the coals, and the coffeepot was sitting on a flat rock next to the coals. No smoke issued from the little metal chimney sticking out of the tent; the front of the weather-beaten canvas tent was shut and tied in three places. The tent should be empty. If Sixto Loco was sleeping inside that tent, it wouldn’t be closed from the outside.
He felt like he was being watched. Even the thought of this man called la Sombra made the skin on the back of his neck crawl. Keeping low to the ground, he pulled up two pegs at the back of the tent, then poked his head inside.
The floor was covered with woolly sheepskins. A rifle stood in a front corner against a tall pair of snowshoes. At least Sixto Loco couldn’t shoot him with his rifle. Behind the little sheepherder stove, on top of some bags of rock salt, there was the coil of rope he needed….
As he was about to shimmy forward for the rope, he found himself shooting backward on his belly. Something had him by the foot and was dragging him outside.
Cloyd’s heart jumped. The man looked like an old billy goat, and he seemed to breathe fire.
The eyes were reddened and bloodshot, and they gave the sheepherder a fearful look. Dark and lined and leathery, his face showed no hint of mercy. The gray-black beard grew long and unkempt, like Spanish moss from a tree.
Sixto Archuleta might have been close to seventy years old, but his weathering made it impossible to tell. He could have been younger. His plaid shirt was patched in several places. His waist was wrapped with a curious, braided sash attached to a worn piece of leather. On his hip the man wore a bone-handled knife, and there was a blood smear on his jeans.
In a hesitating tone, low and broken as if the man were unused to speech, Sixto Loco said two words in Spanish: “Yuta cayote”
Cloyd was too stunned by the man’s appearance, too afraid to speak.
“I caught the Yuta coyote,” Sixto Archuleta repeated, this time in accented English, with the trace of a smile crossing his broken, yellowed teeth. The man bent down and undid the noose from Cloyd’s ankle.
“Can you talk? You hungry? Don’t just sit there! Throw some wood on the fire!”
Cloyd got up cautiously and then did what the man said. He started breaking branches from the pile near the fire. He was looking for the best line if he chose to run. “Sheepmen hate grizzlies,” Ursa had said. “Don’t let Sixto see your picks and shovels,” Tony Archuleta had warned.
As Sixto Loco was adding grounds and water to the big black coffeepot, he asked with a trace of a grin, “Did that old man you were with find any gold?”