Earthly Worlds

by Billy Wright

  The pine trees began to give way to redwoods, and the air grew cooler, moistening with the scent of dew.

  “Look, Daddy!” Cassie said, pointing at some bushes that sported profusions of pinkish-red berries catching a shaft of sunlight. “What are those?”

  As they approached, he said, “They look like raspberries.”

  “Really? I never seen raspberry plants before!”

  “Can we eat some?” Hunter said. “I’m getting hungry.”

  Liz and Stewart checked them out.

  “They look ripe to me,” Liz said. “And there are so many!”

  Cassie reached for a handful, eyes gleaming with hunger. “Hey! They got stickers!” She yanked her hand back, stung.

  “Yes, so be careful,” Stewart said.

  Cassie’s face twisted. “The green ones are yucky!”

  “Well, don’t eat those,” Liz said.

  “This is great,” Hunter said. “I was getting hungry.”

  “Scouting is hard work,” Stewart said, shrugging off the unwieldy weight of the backpack, stretching out the kinks in his back and shoulders. This unexpected find pleased him. It would take a little pressure off their food supplies. He ate several mouthfuls himself. The way the raspberries burst with sour, gritty sweetness in his mouth, so plump and juicy, made him crave the next handful. He had been getting hungry himself.

  In their respite, he surveyed the area and it came to him that these trees were like nothing he’d ever seen. Many of their trunks were ten feet in diameter, and they stretched so high into the sky he could not easily gauge the distance.

  “What’s wrong, babe?” Liz said, studying him.

  “These kinds of trees don’t grow in Arizona.”

  “Well, maybe we’re in Utah now. We’ve hiked a few miles.”

  “They don’t grow in Utah either.” He looked high, trying to determine how tall this tree was.

  Birds flitted among the branches, singing, chirping, whirring, squawking, little bursts of movement and color. At least, he thought they were birds. But some of them didn’t move like birds. They were too quick and distant for him to distinguish details, but some of them moved more like dragonflies, some of them more like bats. But they were too big to be dragonflies, and bats were not usually active during the day.

  “Hey, Dad,” Hunter said, “check out the side of this tree.” He was looking at the opposite side of the redwood tree.

  Stewart circled the raspberry bushes to see what the boy was looking at.

  A patch of bark on that side, reaching about ten feet up and six feet wide, had been worn almost smooth as if by incessant rubbing, except for a series of gashes scratched deep into the bark, parallel gashes in groups of four.

  Hunter saw them, too. “What are those?”

  “This tree belongs to someone,” Stewart said, a tingle of wariness raising the hairs all over his body. “Probably the raspberry bushes, too.”

  “Who?” Liz said.

  Something about the gashes troubled him even more than what had certainly left them. Stewart took a few steps back to get a fuller look. The scratch marks reached almost ten feet from the ground. And there seemed to be a pattern to them, almost in the shape of a rune. But that couldn’t be.

  “Who?” Liz repeated.

  “A bear,” he said. A big one.

  Chapter Eighteen

  “A bear!” Cassie squeaked. “You said there wouldn’t be bears!”

  “Don’t worry, honey,” Stewart said. “It’s probably not close since the dino-moose was just around these parts.” He had no idea if that was true, but he couldn’t have Cassie losing her marbles two days’ walk from anywhere. If everybody kept calm, he had one less thing to worry about.

  Liz gave him a pointed look, however, as if to say she didn’t quite believe him. “It’s best to keep moving, though, in case he comes back,” she said.

  His lips pink with raspberry juice, Hunter wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, gave a little burp, and said, “What do we do if it shows up?”

  “Don’t turn your back and run,” Stewart said. “Speak softly and back away the direction you came. Keep your eye on it so you can watch what it’s doing. And most of all, stay together. Big groups are scarier to bears.”

  “How do you know this, anyway?” Liz said.

  “My junior year of high school,” Stewart said, “the science teacher was—”

  “Kind of a barf-head,” Liz said. “I remember.”

  “What Mom said. I ever tell you about the bet we made?”

  “Oh! About getting an A?”

  He nodded. “Not just an A, but all A’s.”

  Hunter said, “What was the bet?”

  “See, the science teacher hated me. He thought I was stupid because I loved to play football and I didn’t try that hard in school. Too many teachers like Principal Snyder. I had too much else to worry about.”

  “Like what?” Hunter said.

  “Like whether I was going to get anything to eat that day. By this time, I had run out on my last pair of foster parents.”

  “Why, Daddy?” Cassie said.

  Because it was either leave or set his foster father on fire while he slept. The man had taken to beating him with a wire coat hanger to “whip that sass outta that boy,” threatened him with telling the police he was a thief and sending him to juvie. All Stewart had done was to demand to be fed on a regular basis, and when meals were withheld for no reason, he sneaked into the kitchen late at night. And Stewart could be mighty scary, even at 16, all two hundred fifty pounds of him. And he knew it. But he couldn’t tell his children that part of the story. So, he said, “They were really mean to me. Terrible people. Anyway, one day, the science teacher called me ‘stupid’ in front of the entire class. I was tired of his crap, and I made him a bet in front of everybody. If I ended junior year with all A’s, he would buy me tacos every day for the entire summer. If I didn’t, I’d drop out of the football team senior year. We were studying biology. I wrote a paper on the behavior of bears. It was the best paper I ever wrote. I got an A on it. And I got an A in Mr. Barf-head’s class. And all my other classes that year.”

  Liz chimed in, “Your dad made the school paper for that.”

  “So did Mr. Barf-head pay up?” Hunter asked.

  “I made sure he did. I went by his house every day. I think by that time, maybe he’d changed his mind about me. And it’s a good thing, too. Those tacos were pretty much the only thing I had to eat that summer. He had me do a few odd jobs around his house a few times, paid me a little for it.”

  What he had never told his kids was that he’d lived on the street for a while, sleeping in parks, until he finally found a part-time job and eventually made enough money to afford a room in an honest-to-goodness boarding house. He’d had no idea such things still existed, but he’d found one, befriended the lady who ran it with a few odd jobs, and lived there during his senior year of high school.

  “So, I know a lot about bears,” Stewart said. “But let’s keep moving, huh?”

  ***

  They kept onward, following the path of the stream, which grew narrower the higher they climbed. The water was so clean and clear, they didn’t hesitate to drink it.

  On breaks, Stewart and Liz pored over the map. While its dark lines seemed to clearly mark their path up to now, it could not assuage their worry over whether they were doing the right thing by following it at all. Now that they were firmly in the wilderness, with at least a two-day hike back to civilization, the pressure Stewart felt continued to increase. At some point, this could easily go from a family bonding experience to something much, much worse. The children’s spirits were still high, though. The sense of adventure dampened the complaining about the endless walking and climbing. He had to give the kids credit; they bore their loads without a single whine.

  The “something worse” came sooner than he expected, at about midafternoon when the stream disappeared, despite the map showing it should still b
e there.

  The four of them just stood and stared at the cleft between two massive boulders, from which the stream sprang, bursting from the mountainside itself.

  Stewart stepped right down into the cleft, which stood perhaps ten feet high, five feet wide, watching his footing on the slick, wet rocks. The stream was narrow enough here that he could leap across it, but he couldn’t follow it into the mountain.

  He sighed and scratched his head.

  They let the kids munch on a bit of lunch while he and Liz conferred out of earshot.

  “Did we take the wrong stream? Have we missed a fork?” Stewart asked.

  “There haven’t been any real forks. A few tiny ones that Cassie could step over.” Liz scratched her head and sighed. “I just feel like things have gotten very weird. I mean, those aren’t even birds up there.” She pointed into the canopy high above where the bat-winged things and dragonfly wings flitted and buzzed loud enough to echo all the way down. She gave him a hard look. “I feel like we’ve wandered into Neverland or something.”

  He nodded, took a deep breath, let it out. “Yeah.”

  “Which may explain the lack of cell phone reception,” she said.

  He nodded. “Can you feel something in the air? Like static electricity?” The sensation of all his little hairs standing on end had been with him for a while, as if the air itself was poised for something. “Magic maybe.”

  “You think that’s magic?” she asked.

  “I don’t know what else to call it. Power. Potential. Energy. But it’s not like electricity either.”

  Just then, a sound sent claws of ice skittering up his spine.

  A deep, rumbling chuff. Like an old man rolling over in bed, but an old man that stood nine feet tall and weighed over half a ton.

  There was no mistake. It had been the sound of a bear. And it was close, within a hundred yards. Since a bear could outrun a thoroughbred, it could cover that distance in a handful of seconds.

  Liz had heard it, too, and she clamped a hand over her mouth, eyes springing to the size of hubcaps.

  Squeezing her arm, he dragged her back toward the kids.

  “What do we do?” she whispered.

  “We run,” he whispered back.

  “What? You told us not to!”

  “Maybe it hasn’t seen us yet. Maybe we can get out of its path, let it go its merry way.”

  Hunter and Cassie watched their parents approach, eyes widening with alarm, sensing that something bad was coming. They had heard it, too.

  “Dad, what—” Hunter managed to say before Stewart clamped a hand over his mouth.

  Liz scooped up Cassie and both their packs and began to run away from the sound.

  “Go!” Stewart hissed to Hunter.

  “Where?”

  Stewart pointed after Liz, then grabbed the cooler containing most of their food.

  The chuffing growl sounded again, closer this time.

  Hunter bounced a couple of times as if gathering his momentum, staring at his Dad, staring into the forest, then he spun and ran after Liz.

  A thought crossed Stewart’s mind like a shooting star, bright and brief. Maybe he could distract the bear, which was certainly already coming this way, with a package of hot dogs.

  That’s when he heard the thump of its movement on the forest floor, great clawed feet tearing up the carpet of pine needles. It felt so close he could hear its breathing, or maybe he was imagining that.

  He flipped open the cooler, snatched a package of hot dogs, ripped it open, and flung them away from him in a twenty-foot arc. Having to search out each individual frank by smell might give the bear enough pause for Stewart and his family to get away.

  For good measure, he threw out several hot dog buns as well.

  Then he slammed the cooler shut, snatched a handle, and took off running. Liz and the kids were almost a hundred yards ahead of him now, dodging among the pine trunks. Liz had put Cassie down but gripped her arm, half-dragging the girl along. He could hear Cassie sobbing with fear.

  They angled downslope, which lent further speed to their feet. But he had no illusions about being able to outrun a bear.

  The slope steepened, forcing him to slow down and watch his step or else lose it.

  Then he looked up, and his heart skipped a beat. Liz and the kids were gone.

  And he didn’t dare yell out to look for them.

  He increased his pace again, struggling to catch up, slipping and sliding on pine needles as he went.

  But then he rounded a wrinkle in the slope and found them, kneeling next to a group of boulders leaning together at odd angles.

  At the sight of him, Liz’s eyes brightened, and she gesticulated for him to hurry. When he reached them, she said in a hushed voice, “Hey, look! We found a cave!” She was still panting from the run.

  “We could hide in here,” Hunter said, down on all fours as he peered through the small entrance.

  “Yeah, or we could be trapped in there,” Stewart said as he came to halt.

  Liz said, “A bear couldn’t fit through that opening.”

  Hunter’s voice echoed as he crept inside. “And there’s a rock right here we could move over the opening like a door. And it’s really big in here, plenty of room.”

  “Are you sure it’s not a den for something else?” Stewart said.

  “Doesn’t look like it,” Hunter said. “I don’t see a nest or anything.”

  A rumbling chuff echoed down the mountainside, and that made the decision for Stewart.

  “Let me check it out,” he said. He dropped the cooler, shrugged off the pack, and wormed his way inside.

  Hunter was right. The opening was barely big enough for him to fit through. A bear couldn’t without considerable digging, if at all. The chamber amid the boulders was about the size of the interior of their tent, the floor covered in a couple of inches of old pine needles. Ribbons of sunlight peeked between the boulders, so if it rained, they would get wet, but the opening was the only way in, and there was indeed a stone about the size of a car tire he could shift to block the opening.

  Wriggling back outside, he said, “All right, everybody inside.” He found them all looking up the slope toward another chuffing growl. “Now!”

  That spur was all they needed. Seconds later, the kids were inside, dragging their packs in behind them. Liz went next, tugging her pack through the tight opening.

  Stewart tried to shove the cooler through the hole, but it would not fit. He had to leave it outside. And he could hear the bear’s footfalls now. But he wasn’t about to leave the bear any more of their food, so he opened the cooler, chucked its contents into the cave, then shoved his pack in ahead of him.

  His scrabbling feet felt dangerously exposed as he crawled inside, hearing the bear’s trundling, thumping gait pounding down the slope. His heart jumped into his throat, choking off his breath. He could almost feel the heat of its breath on his calves and ankles as he thrust himself into the space, surprisingly cramped now that it was full of them and all their gear.

  Even as he spun to look back, a huge shadow fell upon the opening, and a whuff of hot breath blew a puff of dirt and leaves into the space after him.

  Chapter Nineteen

  A snout as thick as Stewart’s leg poked into the opening, a sensitive black nose twitching, snuffling. The nose was easily the size of a dinner plate.

  Cassie started to cry. Liz clamped a hand over the girl’s mouth. Hunter had his hunting knife in hand. Stewart was lying on a packet of luncheon meat. A package of bread lay pancaked under him.

  The bear poked its nose far enough into the opening that it could lay one eye on them. The glimpse of enormous teeth between the dark lips drove Stewart back against the rear boundary of the space. There was something about the fur on its nose that seemed off, but Stewart was too frantic to grasp it. The big brown eye blinked, regarded them.

  “I don’t think our group is going to scare that thing, Dad,” Hunter whispered, eyes
like golf balls.

  Then as if ascertaining something only the bear understood, the huge snout withdrew and began to snuffle around the area outside the opening.

  Stewart’s galloping heart began to slow. Cassie’s crying quieted to a whimper. Liz clutched her and stroked her hair.

  Liz whispered, “What’s it doing?”

  Hunter moved toward one of the gaps between the boulders, just wide enough to peer between.

  “Hunter!” Liz whispered. “Get away from there!”

  The boy peeked outside, then gasped at what he saw. “Dad! Look!” he whispered.

  Stewart crawled up behind him—the ceiling was too low to stand—and peered out.

  The first thing he saw made no sense to him, so he blinked and rubbed his eyes.

  He looked again.

  It certainly looked like a bear in form, but it was huge, bigger than the biggest Kodiak grizzly ever recorded, the size of a minivan. Grizzly bears did not roam this far south. But it sounded like a bear. Even the smell of it, earthy, musky, resembled a bear.

  But bear fur did not change color, did not coruscate with patterns and movement like a cuttlefish or an octopus. The beast’s coat was a constantly shifting mosaic of brilliant hues, shifting through palettes of earth-tone browns and greens and then bursting with Day-Glo splashes as it sniffed around the cooler.

  The cooler thumped and clattered as the bear opened it and stuck its nose inside. Plastic crunched and shattered. It made a disappointed grunt, and the colors shifted back to a rippling forest camouflage.

  “Liz!” Stewart whispered, “You gotta see this!”

  “I wanna see!” Cassie gulped, wiping her cheeks with her palms.

  The two of them scooted forward to find an aperture. At the sight of the bear, they fell silent and gaping.

  “Do you think it’s friends with the dino-moose?” Cassie asked.

  Stewart couldn’t answer, because all logic and reason had fled over the nearest mountain.

  With a quick wrench of its claws, the bear turned the cooler into wreckage, and then sniffed through the pieces.