Bearskin

by James A. McLaughlin

  His dream was a nondream—he simply was aware of what happened around him as he slept: he knew the slow, inexorable movement of the sun, the wind’s gentle swish in the grass, the musty metal smell of warm soil. He watched three deer approach, stamping their front hooves and snorting at the strange sleeping human until their nerve broke and they bounded away, stark white flags floating and twitching over their backs. A silent raven circled him once and flew on over the forest. Ants crawled on his legs, a mosquito bit his arm.

  Violent shivering woke him and he sat up, chilled but calm. The cut on his head had seeped blood to dry in the hair over his temple while he slept. He stank of old sweat. Even so, those deer had come close. They’d known what he was and they’d come so close he probably could have killed one if he’d wanted. He thought about that, what it might mean.

  The sun was well past its zenith now, and he stared at it for a while, trying to see it move as he had in his dream and temporarily blinding himself. He walked back to the locust grove for his mug and bones. He tried to fit the cow pelvis over his head to wear it like a ceremonial Pleistocene headdress, but several fused vertebrae at the sacrum got in the way. He laid it on the ground and broke off part of the sacrum with a rock, and this time it fit, resting on his crown, and he could see through the holes.

  Halfway through the meadow, he stopped to rest. The view was better from up here, and he rotated slowly, panning like a camera, the world reduced to two oval windows. Turk Mountain leaning over the lodge like an old threat, the valley bright in the sun, the Blue Ridge edging the eastern horizon. All this light. Equinox. From now on, the nights would be longer than the days.

  He turned his back to the sun and saw in the grass his own grotesque shadow, the shadow of a man wearing a bone helmet. A massive-headed monster with short, thick horns. A minotaur. Fear this, he thought. His heart moved in his chest, the usual rhythm. Fear me. A roar in the trees on the mountain: the wind reaching the meadow in a moment, harder and colder than before, ending the afternoon. He waited, and felt the sun’s light slowly enter his body. He had nothing but these old bones; he was made of light and air, water and earth. He shivered again, shivered over his whole body like a bear.

  Twenty-Six

  CERESO Nogales, Sonora. She’d visited less than a week ago. She’d been more preoccupied than usual, and if he hadn’t known her to be fearless he would have thought she was afraid of something. But what could be worse than what she’d already lived with for the past eight months? When he’d pressed her, she’d paused, measuring what she could tell him, which wasn’t much. “I’m going to be okay,” she said, speaking slowly, as if trying to invest her words with more meaning than they could carry. “No matter what you hear. I’m okay.”

  Somehow Fernandez got the news before anyone else and he took it upon himself to tell Rice. The official line was random drug violence; she’d been doing a rare plants survey for the Coronado National Forest near Lochiel. Border Patrol had found her body hastily buried in Antonio Canyon, like something a mountain lion would do, a lion meaning to come back later and finish. But it wasn’t a mountain lion, and it wasn’t random. And she wasn’t okay.

  Rice felt something slip inside, like stepping on black ice. Nausea swept up from his balls to his throat, one wave, then another. His skin tingled and chilled. Translucent indigo lobes appeared in his peripheral vision and threatened to flood the bright Sonora morning.

  She pulled onto a jeep road north of Sells and drove up into some godforsaken mountains in the reservation, explaining in a disconcertingly offhand manner that there was a remote crag she’d wanted to climb, and that she wanted him to spend the night with her up there. On the mountain they cooked enchiladas with prosciutto on his little camp stove, drank a bottle of cheap cabernet, partook of one line of cocaine each. Just one—she’d told him early on that she wouldn’t work with a fucking addict. Later, in the moonlight, they screwed on a foam backpacking mattress until the coke wore off.

  So that was how it started: the one chaste white line of coke and the waning gibbous moon coming up late, bare feet and warm sandstone, coyotes going off nearby, a low moaning wind out over the desert. Trying to sing and laughing because they didn’t know any of the same songs, her careless laugh he heard for the first time, a girlishness he’d never seen in her. He figured out much later what it all meant, how much it meant, her trusting him like that. She was not a demonstrative person, and for Apryl that night was a consummation, a seal on some private commitment. Nothing else was required. She’d made up her mind.

  By the end, Apryl had taught him that love was the same thing as courage. He didn’t understand until he’d been locked up in CERESO for a while. He wished he’d figured it out sooner.

  Rice shook off the fugue and found himself in the prison’s courtyard, still seated on a concrete bench beside Raoul Fernandez. He stood and stepped away, as if the man were throwing off radiation.

  Fernandez called him Rice-Moore, with the emphasis on his first name, like “Rushmore.”

  “You are sicario, Rice-Moore.”

  He said this gently, smiling, as if the preposterousness of bestowing the title on someone like Rice was apparent, the pronouncement clearly an act of extreme generosity. Rice knew what Raoul was implying, and the apparently genuine show of compassion from this sociopath who tortured and killed people like Apryl for a living was so perverse and complicated and surreal that it pushed Rice over an edge he’d been skirting for months.

  The next morning he began to train in earnest.

  Twenty-Seven

  Rice spent his nights on the mountain, waiting in the dark for the Stiller brothers to show up, headlamps flashing: a procession of grim-faced men laden with bags of cast-off baked goods and baskets of bruised apples, road-killed deer carcasses slung over their shoulders, long-barreled revolvers in their belts, men who will not welcome interference from the likes of Rick Morton.

  He waited, but they didn’t come.

  He watched the bait station, climbing the tree the poachers had used, skulking there against the trunk as the light failed and the bait station transformed into something more sinister, remnants of a savage ritual gone haywire: tattered bear carcasses, a log cage haphazardly built for some unspeakable purpose, the ghastly cow’s head witched into the air, keeping its vigil.

  Other nights he stalked along the ridges, listening for voices, engines, footfalls, but hearing only the insects’ waning symphony, three species of owl, hoarse barking of foxes, a pack of big eastern coyotes that howled like wolves, and once, a bobcat scream so desperate and feral it made his eyes water.

  The crescent moon thickened to a bright oblong eye that fell behind Serrett Mountain a few minutes later each evening. Rice found he could make his way around the preserve even in scant starlight, and he always knew where he was, placed precisely on a three-dimensional map in his head. He wondered about this. The months he’d spent typing a century of logbook data into Sara’s spreadsheets, obsessively locating every observation on the maps, must have built a kind of synthetic memory in his subconscious, a bone-deep knowledge of the preserve, as if he’d lived there for generations.

  During the days, he worked on the cabin, but he was sleep-deprived, anxious, and distracted, worried he was missing the poachers returning unexpectedly by daylight. He considered calling Sara, telling her about his encounter with the bear hunters. She would probably be disappointed that he’d only punched one of them. He knew he should call STP too, report the trespass, the cut padlock. But he could never quite bring himself to plug in the phone.

  Soon he began neglecting the cabin, preferring tasks that required him to be on the mountain. He repaired the fence the Stillers had destroyed at the Forest Service boundary, and he hiked the survey transect through the top of the gorge, switched out the data cards and batteries on the five trail cameras. The cameras used infrared light to take pictures in complete darkness, and the first ten images he uploaded to the laptop showed a young bear the size
of a big Labrador drinking at the high-elevation spring at night, its humped body jet black against the gray leaf litter, the bright white foliage. He’d programmed the cameras to take a burst of five images of whatever tripped the motion detector, then wait three minutes before resetting. The delay ensured the memory card didn’t fill up with hundreds of similar images of the same animal. The next five images were in the daytime, ten hours later, a handful of whitetail does sniffing around the spring. Then two more bears the next night, both much larger than the first one. A raccoon, opossums, a fox. Another bear, a huge male, moving fast through the frame. It disappeared after the third image.

  He loaded his pack with metal Posted signs and fencing materials and walked the preserve’s seventeen-mile back boundary, replacing faded and lost signs and repairing fence as he went. He explored the adjacent national forest, walking the logging roads, the ridges and spurs on Serrett Mountain. But he found no trace of bear poachers or anyone else.

  By the end of the first week, he returned to the lodge less frequently, and he didn’t stay long. On the mountain he drank from creeks and springs seeping out of limestone cliffs, and he ate overripe pawpaws and handfuls of tiny wild grapes. He shat in catholes, cleaned himself with leaves, swam in the river at midday. He was always hungry. The nights were chill and damp and he no longer noticed his own constant shivering.

  The animals, though, were still aware of him as an interloper; he still vibrated at a disturbing frequency. Deer fled; ravens watched him with silent disapproval; jays and squirrels scolded him. Just after dawn on a particularly foggy morning, a yearling female bear came to sniff around the empty bait station and quickly detected Rice perched in the poacher’s tree. She shied away, trotted off a dozen paces, then sat on her haunches and, with idle, almost dismissive curiosity, watched this strange arboreal ape trying to hide in a tree. Rice felt ridiculous. When he climbed down and hiked to the edge of the inner gorge, the bear followed him for a while before losing interest and wandering off.

  The fog burned off and the morning turned breezy and sunny. He rested on the cliff where he and Sara had eaten peanut butter and honey sandwiches in the rain. He dangled his feet over the edge. He remembered the grouse he’d flushed gliding out over the forest. Sara had been right, he needed a ghillie suit.

  Twenty-Eight

  At the lodge, a couple hours’ rifling dusty storage rooms and closets gave him the basic materials. A pulpy decoction of black walnut hulls, yarrow, milkweed, nettle, sumac, blue food coloring, and a few shriveled blackberries in boiling salt water made a thick green dye. Empty burlap sweet feed bags and loops of sisal baling twine he sank with rocks in the biggest pots he could find. He set the pots to simmer on the stove.

  He cut pieces from an old disused badminton net and glued them to a leaky green rain poncho with dollops of epoxy, laid the poncho in the grass so the glue could dry in the morning sun. The dyed burlap and sisal emerged from the pots in variegated shades of green, darkening in places to greenblack. He set the material out to dry beside the poncho while he tried to catch up on his work in the cabin through the afternoon.

  Later, he started the coffee machine and went looking for the last few items he needed: several undyed burlap bags, scissors, and a big sewing needle and the spool of monofilament fishing line he’d used to hang the pig galls in the shed. The corks he’d saved from the wine Sara had brought. A pair of brown gardening gloves, threadbare brown dishtowels, and a tan cotton T-shirt that had always been a little small. He put these things in his backpack.

  On the mountain, he headed for a big boulder where he could keep an eye on the slope above the bait station while he engaged in the tedious and time-consuming work of cutting the burlap into strips, tying them onto the netting, and shredding the ends. He cut up the towels and T-shirt and sewed the lighter cotton fabric in among the dyed and undyed burlap and twine. When the gorge darkened around seven thirty, he spread his tarp behind the boulder and worked in the light of his headlamp, listening to the forest. Dew fell through the night, wet as a light rainfall.

  When he’d attached all the fabric he’d brought—he could add more burlap later—he cut clumps of grass and leafy branches and tied them in among the burlap and cotton on the shoulders and hood. This part of the process he would have to repeat every day, discarding the old stuff and weaving in new foliage to match his surroundings at the time. Finally, he thumbed his butane lighter to flame one end of a wine cork. The cork caught fire and he held it upright to burn for a few seconds before blowing it out. After it cooled, he rubbed the burned end over his nose, cheekbones, chin, brow, blackening all of the bright protruding surfaces.

  The poncho settled over him, draped like an animal skin, the bunched fabric thickest on his back, shoulders, and hood to erase the head-on-shoulders human profile. He found he could walk without making much noise if he moved carefully, slowly, and when he knelt or sat, he knew he would disappear, his outline hidden by the dark, soft-edged mounds of disorganized fabric. He’d read that if you were caught out in the open in a ghillie suit, with no cover to blend into, you could just crouch down and hold still, and a deer or an antelope or even a person could look right at you, maybe give you a curious double take, but never recognize you as something dangerous.

  By the time he’d walked down to the bait station, wearing the poncho and carrying his pack in his hand, it was nearly first light and his shirt was soaked with sweat. He’d known this would be a problem. The poncho was waterproof and he was going to get sweaty if he walked around in it. He sat in the leaves with his back against a tree trunk and waited. The canopy opened to starlight in the west, a gap where a giant tulip tree had fallen years ago. He’d noticed it before but now he wondered if that’s why the poachers had picked this spot, whether they wanted the light for their night-vision gear. He sat there in his ghillie poncho and concentrated on being invisible.

  Two barred owls moved through the forest, calling to each other in otherworldly voices. A large bear ignored the old bait and snuffled at what was left of the two bear carcasses for so long, Rice decided it was either mourning or feeding on the carrion. Later, two does passed by, and a raccoon climbed around on the bait structure at dawn. The sky in the opening overhead turned to hot gold. He shaded his eyes and could make out a pair of ravens circling hundreds of feet up, quorking to each other, glinting like chips of obsidian in the sunlight.

  As he waited, time ebbed and flowed—a black spider wasp took several minutes to fly past his face, but the sun cleared the spine of the mountain in seconds. By now he was used to this kind of distortion—if that’s what it was—and he didn’t fight it. The scientist in him resisted the notion, but he knew he was being drawn closer to some new understanding. The sun rose higher and morning light filtered through the foliage. The cow’s head hung motionless, not enjoying the daylight—it had grown ragged and hollow-cheeked, suffering from the depredations of crows and maggots, six inches of rebar protruding from each eye socket caked with chalky bird droppings. He’d watched crows perched on the rebar, one on each side, reaching around to dig with their bills in the cow’s open mouth.

  A guild of small woodland birds appeared in the understory: noisy chickadees, titmice, juncos, downy woodpeckers, red-breasted and white-breasted nuthatches with their tiny nasal bugles. A brown creeper scurried up and down tree trunks like a feathered mouse, quiet except for an occasional high-pitched peep, trying to hush the more boisterous species. The birds were hungry and feeding, but they didn’t seem desperate—instead they projected a relaxed workaday industriousness.

  A pair of chickadees landed on Rice’s chest and began pulling out threads of burlap. His stifled laugh rustled the fabric, perplexing them, but they didn’t leave. One seemed to realize Rice was a sentient creature and hopped up on the hood to peer into his eye. Sara had pointed out that chickadees possess certain cuteness factors that tend to make humans adore and anthropomorphize them—the protuberant rounded forehead, the short bill, their tiny feathere
d bodies, the big eyes. Rice looked into this bird’s face just inches away. One shining black eye regarding him. Not so cute up close, he thought. It looked wild, other, merciless. He felt a thrill of recognition.

  He blinked and the chickadee flew away. Soon the little flock had disappeared downslope, headed into the inner gorge, carrying their birdy perspectives with them. A connection of some kind remained, and without moving, without meaning to, Rice followed. He found himself acknowledging at a cellular level, as if for the first time, that these creatures would not vanish into nonexistence as soon as they lacked a human audience.

  The birds were in the cliffs now, feeding desultorily as they hopped and fluttered through the laurel rooted among the rocks. They were clear in his mind as he moved among them. Was he imagining this? Maybe it had to do with the ghillie, the perfect camouflage, or too many sleepless nights watching in the forest. Or maybe it was something else entirely.

  He reached out to the birds, moving closer in his imagination. It felt like he was asking permission to join them. The chickadee was sharp-eyed, quick, a pounce and a small black beetle was in its beak, legs flailing, the exoskeleton crunching, an oily taste. A sip of dew from a drop suspended under a blade of grass. When the birds flew from the cliff, Rice flew with them, swimming impossibly through the vast invisible air, a moment of vertigo as the creek flashed by far below, the treetops, clouds in the endless sky, then a gathering pause—a syncopation, a skipped heartbeat, an intake of breath—and some great cosmic valve opened, a vision of the gorge exploding in his mind, all of it at once, in every color, infrared through ultraviolet, everything was alive, speaking in a billion voices, a phantasmagoria of undreamed presences, the planet’s magnetic field itself vivid and pulsing around him.