Beardance

by Will Hobbs

  Cloyd tunneled back eight feet before he started making the sleeping chamber. As he chipped out dirt and rock and pushed it behind him, the cubs pushed it out the rest of the way. All the while he talked to them. “This is where you’re going to make your big sleep. Any day now. You go in here and fall asleep real soon, Cocoa. You got that, Brownie?”

  Without food he couldn’t work, and so he used up the last of it and the last of his matches.

  Late the third day the work was done. The den extended fourteen feet into the mountain. Strong roots in the ceiling convinced Cloyd he’d made a den that couldn’t collapse on the cubs. The sleeping chamber was round, six feet across and four feet high.

  Every day after that, he visited the den. He would go inside the den each day with the bears, bringing soft branches with him, hoping they would lie down on the branches and go to sleep for the winter. They joined him in lining the den with more spruce boughs, but they showed no interest in staying inside the den. They would soon go outside to play on the slope, while he would try to call them back into the den.

  Somehow they knew. For some reason, the time wasn’t right.

  Or else they didn’t have the idea at all.

  He was so hungry, he’d often stumble from lightheadedness. But he was so close now, he couldn’t turn and leave. Any day now, the cubs should den up.

  The day came when he had his chance at the solitary elk. He was kneeling behind a bush when the elk appeared in the little clearing along one of the paths it had been using. Cloyd had been daydreaming that he was standing in a hot shower and letting the steaming water pour over and over him. Suddenly he saw, like an apparition, the immense antlers, the great head, the dark ruff around the neck. With a few more steps, the elk was standing in full view, not twenty feet away. Then the bull began to dig in the snow with a front hoof. Cloyd bent the bow back, trying to get enough force behind this one piece of stone to find the animal’s heart….

  Before he was quite ready, the bow made a cracking sound. He let the arrow fly anyway. The elk was gone.

  At once he realized that he had forgotten to thank the animal for its life. Even when he slaughtered goats and sheep, he had always done that.

  Cloyd didn’t see the elk after that. In the night it snowed again, and even the last stubborn solitary bull elk in the high country knew it was time to leave.

  It wasn’t a big snow, only six inches. But four or five days in a row, these snows came. When he could venture out, he gnawed on willow bark alongside the bears, and once they led him to a thicket of serviceberries where the berries had dried in place rather than dropped to the ground.

  It turned much colder, and the wind blew until he thought the spruces might break. This cold was worse than any he had known before. He was wearing the bearskin again. He laced it tight with parachute cord around his limbs and up his belly and chest. The cold still found his bones, but it couldn’t kill him. Every day he led the cubs to the den, and went into the den with them and begged them to stay.

  Their stomachs were shrinking, he knew. The grizzly woman had said that for a week or so before hibernation, they ate almost nothing and didn’t need food.

  But he did. He was starving. His body had turned on him some time before and had been eating its own fat and then his muscles. He had his chance at a snowshoe hare with the sling, but it was white against the snow, and his stone barely missed. “Sleep, bears,” he pleaded, “while I still have a chance to go home.”

  It was November now, Cloyd guessed, but he’d forgotten some time before to make the notches in the stick and so he’d lost track. The temperatures were dropping below zero, how far below he couldn’t guess. The creek was iced over except for pockets here and there. As he walked about, the snow crunched loudly under his boots. The nights were so much longer than the days. He slept in the den with the cubs now. He should have thought of it sooner, but he hadn’t been thinking well. It was so much warmer inside the earth and out of the wind. The air in the confines of the den was warmed by the breathing of the bears, and his own breath. Inside the earth, with his clothes and the bearskin and the two blankets, he wasn’t cold.

  The nights were long. Cloyd’s sleep was starved and restless. He’d lie awake remembering White Mesa, the aromatic sagebrush, the smell of juniper wood burning. He’d drift into sleep seeing the shapes of the mesas and the slickrock rims of the hidden canyons. Above the mesas and the canyons, Blue Mountain would be riding on a cloud. He could hear his grandmother’s and his sister’s voices, like music. They were gathering piñn nuts. He was calling to them, but they couldn’t hear him. He could hear a raven thrashing by, but he couldn’t see it. The moon was rising over a sheer red wall. A goat was blatting, and water was trickling over a pour-off.

  Twice in the den, he dreamed of the farm. The first time, it was raining and raining and would never quit. The cottonwood trees, bare except for a few golden leaves, were collapsing into the raging river. The old man was standing there, watching the river eat away at the headgate, where the big valve in the concrete gate let the water into his ditch. Every minute huge chunks of dark earth were tearing loose and collapsing into the river. “There’s nothing we can do!” the old man cried, and he threw up his hands. Then the river broke through and it went tearing down the pasture in a surging flood. The house and the barn were immediately stranded on an island, with the river raging by around both sides. Before he woke, Cloyd saw the water all gone, but so was the big barn, and there was nothing but boulders where there used to be hayfields and pastures and an orchard.

  The second time he dreamed of the farm, he’d just gotten off the bus from school where it dropped him on the highway. He walked that mile to the farm all night in his dreams, knowing somehow that he would find the old man dead inside the house when he eventually got there.

  It wasn’t only in the den that Cloyd dreamed. He dreamed in the daytime too, in the sunshine or in the shadows or with the snow falling on his hair. There was nothing to do now but wait, wait for the cubs to den or for his own body to eat itself up from the inside.

  There hadn’t been one certain day that had come along when he’d made this decision to stay until the end. It was all the days passing, one day after the other, as he’d grown accustomed to his hunger and accepted it. He knew now that he would die here. He would never have the strength to leave. It was a strange fate for him, that he would choose this death, that he would die for these two bears. Yet it was a death that belonged to him, and he could accept it.

  Next summer the grizzly woman would return, and she would find these bears alive.

  Every day now, Cloyd stood in place for long periods of time, doing the steps of the bear dance in place. Barely moving his feet, he danced the three steps forward, three steps back. He was dancing himself into the dream that had started when he’d found the bearstone, maybe even before that, when he was little and first heard the thunder coming off the big resonating drum, the scratching and growling of bears.

  As he danced himself into a trance every day, his traveling soul would leave his body, as it had left his body the time he had risen above the Bear Dance and seen the dancing from above. His traveling soul soared above East Ute Creek, and he could see three bear forms down there—two cubs and the grizzly with a human face standing upright, barely shuffling its feet, three steps forward, three steps back.

  His traveling soul lifted up, up, until it was soaring over the Divide, above the Window, above the Rio Grande Pyramid. All the world was cloaked with snow, all the thousand peaks were softened and all the valleys softened, and it was a world more silent and restful than any he had ever known.

  When the light turned down every day, he led the cubs back up the steep slope to the den.

  He began making notches in the stick again, but his mind no longer turned the notches into meaning. He no longer differentiated between the dreams of his denning sleep and his waking dreams on the meadow. It was all a dream that he was living inside of now, a dream not far f
rom death.

  Yet his body was stubborn and had reserves greater than he would have known. He was still standing, still doing the bear dance.

  His traveling soul was out of his body and up on the Divide. The sun was high in the sky; the berries were ripe; he was eating sweet berries in a thicket high on the Divide. With no warning came a terrible roar, and he fell back onto the ground. An enormous bear with brown fur tipped with silver was standing over him, and it had an arrow in its neck and one in its chest. Blood was streaming from the bear’s wounds and from its mouth, and it was shaking its head back and forth and roaring horribly.

  “What do you want with me?” he said to the bear.

  “Who are you?” the bear roared.

  “I’m a Weminuche Ute,” he answered. He knew that he owed this bear for something and that his time had come to give back. “I know why you have come,” he told the bear. “I give you permission now.”

  He watched from outside as the great bear tore the flesh from his bones and left them scattered and gleaming on the ground.

  Now the bear reappeared with no arrows and no blood streaming from his wounds.

  He didn’t know where the song came from, but he knew there was a song he was supposed to sing to this bear, and he knew the words to the song. He sang,

  “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 in the fire.

  For you

  Grizzly Bear

  We are the same person!”

  The bear was pleased with his song. “Here, I will help you,” the bear said, and together they began reassembling his bones. When his skeleton was fully reassembled, the bear touched each of his bones and called them by name, and new flesh grew on his bones.

  He was himself again.

  Now the bear had the head of a bear and the body of a human being. “Who are you?” Cloyd asked.

  “I’m the keeper of the animals,” the bear-man replied. “Listen carefully. There is one animal, white as the snow, that stays among the peaks even in winter. Take your best weapon and climb high until you find this animal. You have my permission to take him to sustain your own life.”

  When Cloyd’s feet came to rest, he remembered every detail of his dream.

  The following morning he shed the bearskin and told the cubs to stay behind. They watched him go. He could still see them down there on the snowbound meadow, far below, when he had cleared the tree line and was inching toward the Divide.

  He wasn’t wearing the snowshoes. These slopes had already shed their snow once, and the snow didn’t lie deep enough as yet to slide again. He couldn’t climb but two or three steps at a time before he ran out of air and out of strength. He barely had the strength to lift his legs, but he kept climbing.

  With a glance over his shoulder he noticed his tracks, and, it was curious to note, he was leaving the tracks of a bear.

  He was living inside the spirit world now.

  After a time the Window came into view high above him. Toward the Window he climbed, the center point of his spirit world. Vaguely he knew he’d been there before, that it was important to him, this towering gap in the sky. He’d been there more than once. But he couldn’t remember when or how, or what had happened there.

  And so the Window drew him on and up. When he’d nearly reached it, and the towering rockwalls on either side seemed to take up all the world except the gap of sky between them, he sat down and looked back the way he’d come. There were peaks strung all along the horizon, jagged snowbound peaks that seemed familiar, but he couldn’t remember their names. He wondered why he had come here. He wondered what he was doing on the top of the world, when it was all cloaked in winter.

  He sat there a long time. He couldn’t think of a reason to go up or to go down. After a time something odd caught his eyes, something on the slope not so far away. Two strips of black in the snow, curling away from each other. Raven feathers? Now they were moving as if they were alive, and moving in unison. He blinked and looked closer. An animal was moving toward him from across the slope.

  A mountain goat, he realized. The “feathers” were the black horns of a mountain goat. Then he remembered who he was and why he had climbed this mountain. Slowly, he took the sling from his waist and fitted a stone to it, keeping another ready in his left hand.

  The white goat kept coming on, along the trace of a goat path, walking right toward him. Now he could see that there were two more goats following at some distance.

  The leader was a yearling, filled with curiosity. Its winter coat had grown out long and shaggy, and all Cloyd could see to aim at were the horns and the eyes and the nose.

  When the goat was thirty feet away from him, it stopped and stood still, nibbled the lichens on a rock, then turned its head sideways as if to give him a better target. Cloyd thanked the goat as he had thanked the many goats he had slaughtered when he was growing up with his grandmother, and then he whirled the sling.

  The stone sank into the soft spot behind the goat’s eye. The goat stood for a second, and then all four legs collapsed. Cloyd went to it and bled the goat with his knife. The animal’s quivering ceased.

  The liver was warm, and he chewed it slowly. At first it came back up, but then his stomach began to accept it.

  Slowly, slowly, he carried the goat down the mountain on his shoulder, dragging it when he fell under its weight. As soon as he got down, he would skin it. He could make a hat out of that shaggy fur, a hat big enough to pull down over his ears.

  The cubs were not as interested in food as he had thought they would be. They ate the heart and a few scraps of fat, but that was all.

  When he denned with the cubs that night, he didn’t dream. He was filled with purpose. All he could think about were the components of the bow drill. He’d come very close to making fire on the blacktop behind the school that next-to-last day of the school year. He’d made plenty of smoke, almost fire.

  The next day he worked all day long at making a bow drill. The bow itself was only a third of the size of his failed hunting bow. Parachute cord was fine for the string, his teacher had said. His best arrow, cut short, would make a good drill. One end of the drill would turn in the brace he was carving for his palm. The other, sharper end would turn in the tiny socket he dug out in the soft board he’d shaped from a dry piece of spruce.

  He worked hard on his tinder, shredding bark and mixing it with needles and the finest of twigs.

  The hard part had always been transferring his coals from the board to his tinder. That’s when his coals had always gone out.

  Seven times, the same thing happened. He’d worked all afternoon making tinder and working the bow. The daylight was going, and he was all out of hope.

  “I don’t mind failing,” the old man had said, “as long as I tried my best.”

  Haven’t I tried my best? Cloyd thought. What else can I do?

  Just then, he had an idea of his own. It was a simple idea, maybe a good one.

  This time he dug a little depression in the ground, and he placed his nest of tinder in the depression. When his kindling was ready, he began to work the bow back and forth, faster and faster, as the cubs sat attentively and watched.

  He was making plenty of smoke, and the fine coals that were being produced in the soft spruce were falling out of the socket and into the nest of tinder. He kept making that bow sing. More and more coals were falling into the nest, without the need of being transferred from the board, and the tinder itself was smoking.

  When the moment was right, he blew on the nest of tinder.

  And it exploded into flame. He could see in the cubs’ eyes, they thought he’d made magic.

  He went to sleep with a warm belly. He’d made plenty of coals and then
smothered them so they would burn slowly all night. But even if they weren’t still alive in the morning, he could make fire again with the bow drill as the old Utes had.

  The next four days, the cubs wouldn’t eat any meat at all. They went in and out of the den, sniffing the wind, pacing. Cloyd could tell a big storm was coming in. Maybe this storm was what the cubs were waiting for.

  The snow started to fall in the evening and fell hard all night. This was powder snow, the kind he remembered from midwinter at the farm. It fell for three days, and the cubs watched one evening from the tunnel as it covered up all their tracks into the den.

  Apparently they were satisfied. No enemies would track them to their den. When they went to sleep that night, Cloyd heard their hearts slow down, beating more slowly than he had ever heard before. Their breath came much less often. In the morning, their hearts were beating even slower. He said good-bye to them, each one aloud by name. They didn’t stir. He knew he could leave them now.

  “Good-bye, Cocoa,” he said again. “Good-bye, Brownie.”

  He squeezed quietly through the tunnel toward the soft light, and they didn’t follow. Before he started down the slope, he watched a long time. The snow was beginning to pile up around the entrance, and it was quickly covering his tracks.

  This was the big storm that was the proof of winter, the storm the bears had been waiting for. There’d be no melting here on these shadowy slopes until spring.

  He knew what he had to do. He would cook up all the goat meat he could carry, he would fashion a pack out of canvas and rope, and he would start over the Divide. At its shortest, the route down the Pine River was twenty-five miles long. But he would travel far out of his way to avoid the avalanche chutes.

  He waited three days after the storm. He could hear the snow sliding off the peaks, and he could wait until it had settled down.

  Then he started out. If anyone had seen him, they would have thought they’d seen a snowshoeing grizzly.