Bearwalker

by Joseph Bruchac

  Then the sarcastic voices of Asa and Ernie and Harle jolt me back into the present.

  “Man, if I only had a gun.”

  “How about an RPG?”

  “Yeah, that’d do it. Ka-boom! Course all you’d have left would be the head.”

  They’re laughing like hyenas now. They’ve reduced this moment of awe to an adolescent fantasy of animal slaughter. I hunch into myself. I know that the Turtle is my dad’s clan and not my own, but at moments like this I find myself wishing I had a shell. I could just pull my head in and pretend the rest of the world—which can be so mean—doesn’t exist.

  I’m alone in the seat. Mr. Wilbur stood up and moved back along the aisle when the three moose first came into sight. He’s telling the kids what he knows about moose, how they’ve come back into the state after being absent for so many years. It wasn’t just that they’d all been killed by hunters. The disappearance of the northern forests eliminated their habitat. But now the woods have been growing back for more than a century. With forests to return to, moose have been slowly spreading west from Maine into New Hampshire, Vermont, and now the Adirondacks.

  How does he do it? He’s actually managed to quiet Asa and his clique with his soft-spoken lecture. He’s up to the challenge of handling thirty-four eighth graders on a bus where he and the driver are the only grown-ups. The other adults coming to Camp Chuckamuck with us are in the smaller van with all the camping gear. Three parents and Mrs. Smiler, the girls’ PE teacher. They fell behind when they had to stop for gas.

  Mr. Wilbur drops back into his half of the seat again.

  “Don’t,” he says. Then he waits.

  “Don’t what?” I finally reply.

  “Take a guess.”

  “Don’t let those guys get to me when they are being jerks?”

  “Bingo.”

  “That’s easy for you to say. You’re a six-foot-tall adult teacher.”

  There’s a longer silence this time. I’m looking out the window, but except for an occasional chipmunk or red squirrel taking its life into its paws to scurry across the road in front of the bus, there’s no sign of any other animals.

  “I suppose I could tell you,” Mr. Wilbur says, his voice slow and careful, “that kids who are bullies and loudmouths are that way because they don’t feel good about themselves. You know, a person is not born a bully.”

  “So it’s not like my situation, eh?” I answer. I always have an answer when I’m in this kind of mood. “Not like being born the runt of the litter.”

  “Baron,” Mr. Wilbur says, directing my gaze out the window, “look up.”

  I do as he says. We’ve entered another cleared area, an old decking ground for logging where the trees were cut back and a hillside is exposed. You can see the sky over that hill and there, even though it is early afternoon, is the full moon. It is just hanging there, luminescent in the west, almost as visible as it would be at night. Full moons in the autumn can be like that. Even though the sun is lower in the southern sky, the moon is still high, reflecting the sun, giving a second chance at the light. Mohawks call the moon Grandmother. We say that she watches over us when she is big and full that way.

  “You don’t have to be tall to see the moon,” Mr. Wilbur says.

  I don’t argue with that.

  We go around one curve, dive down into a valley, and climb a steep grade. There’s a small building, more of a shack than anything else, by the side of the road where some machinery is parked. Small as that building is, it has a huge padlock on its solid door. keep out and stay away are painted in large red letters on the three sides of the shack visible as we bump past. What’s being kept in there?

  Just past that mysterious shack the road abruptly narrows. It’s just wide enough for our bus as it passes between two steep rocky hills. Another mile or so and we come out of the gap. Now I can see the blue of water glinting ahead of us. We turn again and then we’re there.

  When you come to a new place, pay attention. That’s one of the things my dad and mom have often told me. Part of it is from their military training and part of it is just the old Mohawk way. So I look around slowly, taking it all in. First there’s the pond. It’s nothing like the pond where we saw the moose. This one is bigger, clearly man-made, with a concrete dam wedged like an open palm between two small hills to hold back the water of the two streams that flow down the mountain into it. It’s as neat as a picture postcard. It’s been edged with white sand. There’s a swimming float in the middle and a dock with a dozen boats tied to it.

  Then there are the buildings. The first one we pass, which is at the start of a trail that rises quickly up the mountain to our left, is a small frame building with a porch. It looks lived in and the clothesline out back is a sure sign of that. A couple of small red-and-black patterned shirts and several pairs of wool socks are hanging from the line. As we continue to follow the road around the pond I count the rest of the buildings. There are six and they’re all log cabins, like out of a travel brochure or a corny old movie.

  Several people are ranged around the biggest one, a square-built florid-faced blond man. He has one of those “I’m in charge” smiles on his face. Ten to one, he’s the camp director. He and the two others with him wear khaki uniforms with little triangle-shaped designs stenciled on the left pockets, yellow ball caps with that same triangle, and identical blue-and-white sneakers. Their welcoming grins look as manufactured as their clothing. Clones.

  I amend my first impression when I notice the older-looking couple standing a little off to the side. They look like real human beings. They both have deeply tanned faces. The woman wears a floral pattern dress like those Grama Kateri favors. The man holds a pipe in one hand and a splitting ax in the other. His clothes look like larger versions of the ones I saw hanging on that line. The square-built blond man notices them just then. He turns and waves a hand at them in a dismissive gesture and they disappear back around the building.

  Two medium-sized single-story cabins lie to each side of that main building, rustic signs on their log walls. CHICKADEE JUNCTION, GIRLS’ BUNKHOUSE. Cornier than Iowa. But the boys’ bunkhouse is worse. HAWK HAVEN, it reads. Hawk Haven? No haven for me if all the boys will be staying together there. I have no doubt that Asa and his crew of apprentice sadists will be tormenting me with unfunny practical jokes. Rather than a place of refuge, that boys’ bunkhouse is where I fully expect that my life will be made into a living…

  “Baron?”

  I wake up from my vision of inevitable torture. Everyone else has gotten off the bus. I’m the last one left sitting inside. Surprisingly, the person who has just stepped back in and spoken my name to return me to the real but no less bitter world is not Mr. Wilbur but Tara Moody. She touches my arm lightly and smiles.

  “Come on, dreamer,” she says, looking down at me with a little smile. “You’re in my flight.”

  Flights. It’s been explained that we’ll be broken up into groups called flights. Why? Because Camp Chuckamuck “gives wings to the spirits of every child.” To which I want to reply, “Give me a break instead.” Or maybe just remind them that I’m a bear, not a bat or a bobolink.

  However, I am so surprised by Tara’s unexpected friendliness that my protective armor of sarcasm falls away. I get up out of my seat, smile up at her (she is a good foot taller than me), and follow her off the bus.

  But as soon as I set foot on the ground and see the huge man who seems to have appeared out of nowhere, I freeze in my tracks. He’s leaning back against the main camp building, the sign EAGLE’S NEST half obscured by his broad shoulders. A chill runs down my back.

  4

  Terrible Creatures

  I’ve always had this ambiguous feeling about scary stories, whether they’re modern ones like that overblown tale of Jason Jones that Willy was spinning or ancient stories from the time of my ancestors. Whenever my mom or dad would ask me if I’d like to hear a story, part of me would be eagerly saying yes while another part of me was
just as vehemently saying no. I knew that the nighttime tale they’d tell might have a monster in it.

  Mohawk stories have the world’s scariest monsters. Long ago, the forests were full of bloodthirsty things stalking the night. Hungry giants with skins made of stone, huge panthers with eyes of fire, whirlwind creatures screaming through the air, ogres that were once just greedy humans—until they ate their own flesh and then became cannibals with an insatiable lust for human prey.

  There were so many terrible creatures in the old days, it’s a wonder that any of my ancestors escaped to pass the stories on down. I asked my parents that very question.

  “How did any of our old people survive?”

  Mom nodded in appreciation of the wisdom of my question. I was only eight years old then.

  “Hmm,” she said. “I can think of two reasons. One is that our old Mohawk people were tough.”

  Dad chuckled at that remark. “Especially the women,” he said. That earned him a punch in the arm from my mother.

  “See what I mean, my son,” Dad said, cradling his arm as if it was broken. “Our women are daaaan-gerous.”

  Mom shook her head, but she couldn’t keep from laughing. It always made me feel safe and secure when they teased each other like that. I miss that feeling—and both of them—so much.

  “What’s the second reason, Mom?” I asked.

  I had to do that. It looked as if they were about to get into one of their full-scale wrestling matches. They just did it for fun, but when both your parents are soldiers with black belts in karate, a kid learns when he needs to keep a discussion focused.

  My mom raised one eyebrow at my dad. “Later,” she said, cartoon menace in her voice.

  “I can’t wait,” Dad replied. “Bring it on.”

  “Bad parents! Behave!” I said. They both laughed at that, but it worked.

  Mom settled back down with her arm around me. “The second reason,” she said, “why our old people survived, even surrounded by all those terrible, hungry creatures, is that we’ve always been smarter.”

  If you were smart enough, if you just used common sense and the lessons taught you by your elders, you might be able to defeat a monster. Even if you were a little kid. I liked that. That’s why I kept listening to the stories they told and asking them for more. Those scary stories made me feel safe. Safe because my big strong parents were there with me. Safe because every story they told always came to an end. Safe because the hero or heroine of the story usually found a way to defeat whatever threatened the people.

  Usually. But not always. If you were stupid or selfish, if you didn’t show proper respect to the natural world, the monster might just win. That was always there in every story. There might still be a happy ending, but not for the foolish human in that tale.

  Why did my parents tell me those stories? I ask myself that question a lot these days now that they’re no longer with me. I’m as alone as one of those long-ago orphan boys who had no one to care for him but his old, weak grandmother. (Although no one better call Grama Kateri weak if they want to remain unbruised!) I suppose my dad answered that question that day when I was eight.

  “It still must have been scary back when there were monsters,” I said.

  My dad leaned over and put both his hands on my shoulders. “Son,” he said, “it’s still scary now.”

  Standing here at the foot of the bus steps, trying not to stare at the tall figure who hasn’t seemed to notice me yet, I’m hearing my dad’s voice say those words.

  There’s no logical explanation for the way I’m feeling. But I sense something very wrong about the one I’m looking at from the corner of my eye. You don’t make eye contact with a predator unless you’re prepared to attract its attention.

  Activity is swirling around me. The man in charge of the camp, the square-built blond guy with the sunny smile so broad it must make his face hurt, is talking with Mr. Wilbur and the other adults whose van pulled in while I was sitting in the bus. Things are being unloaded, people are talking, there’s an occasional shriek from one of the girls—usually Heidi. Every now and then someone jostles by me. Everyone is doing something. Everyone except me and…him.

  He’s wearing the same khaki shirt as the others, with that triangle camp logo on the shirt pocket, but that is where all resemblance to the other staff ends. You might say that he looks like an Indian. He has long black hair down to his shoulders and his complexion is almost as dark as mine. Porcupine quill earrings dangle from his earlobes and he wears a leather band around his forehead. There are Indian bracelets on both his wrists, turquoise rings on his thick fingers. Instead of sneakers he wears moccasins on his feet. A big silver Navajo belt buckle is at his waist. His necklace is made of huge bear claws.

  That necklace sends a shiver down my back. I know how much some folks, some Indians included, like to wear jewelry decorated with animal claws. There was a time when I thought about wearing a bear claw necklace, it being my clan animal. But after what Grama Kateri told me a few years ago, I decided that I would never make or put on a bear claw necklace of any kind.

  “Some people,” she said in a sad voice, “hunt bears just to chop off their paws and pull their teeth for making necklaces and cut out their gallbladders to make a kind of medicine. They just leave the rest of the bear to rot in the woods.”

  Even if I were a person who made necklaces out of grizzly bear claws—and there are some of our people who do that with prayer and care and respect—I know I wouldn’t make one like the one he is wearing. His necklace is more than just the claws, which haven’t been cleaned but have pale dried flesh there and look like they were roughly torn from the bear’s paws with pliers. The bones that the claws were attached to are also on that necklace. It makes me think of one of our tales in which the monster wears a necklace of shrunken human skulls. Or the more modern story I heard on TV about soldiers overseas who cut the fingers off the enemies they killed and strung them together to wear around their necks.

  The one wearing that grisly necklace might look Indian to some, but I don’t think he is. You can’t always tell if someone is Indian by the color of their hair or how they dress. Over the years our people adopted in plenty of folks from other tribes: Abenakis, Mohegans, Irish, English. I once saw a painting in the cultural center up at Akwesasne that was done by a Tuscarora artist, Rick Hill. It made me smile and then nod my head in recognition. It showed an old-time Mohawk man with a roach-style haircut, his face all painted, his clothes those worn three hundred years ago. But his hair was blond, his facial coloring fair. The picture was titled The First Blue-Eyed Mohawk.

  It’s not just hair and skin and clothing. There’s a way people hold themselves and talk and behave that makes it clear who they really are, what nation they hold in their hearts. There’s something about that one there that freaks me out. His hair, the way he’s dressed, everything about him seems unreal. Like it’s all a disguise. He’s pretending to be something that he is not. Not just pretending to be Indian. Pretending…to be human.

  He’s studying the crowd of us. Watching us the way a mountain lion might eye a herd of deer from a place of concealment. I’m so short that I don’t think he can see me. Then he suddenly turns his head. His eyes catch mine; I can’t look away. A little smile curls his lips.

  “I am doomed!” someone behind me declares. “My life is over!”

  I quickly turn my head away to look behind me.

  It’s Willy Donner. He’s holding his cell phone and frantically tapping away at its keys. He holds it up again. “Look,” he says, his voice as tragic as that of a shipwrecked sailor. “No signal!”

  “Cell phones do not work here,” a know-it-all voice intones. “No towers in these mountains.” It’s the square-built man in the khaki uniform. He’s close enough now for me to make out the name tag on his chest.

  MR. MACK, CAMP DIRECTOR, it reads.

  “So you won’t mind handing them over,” Mr. Wilbur adds. He has a box full of manila envelo
pes in his hand. “Write your name on the envelope, put the cell phone into it, seal the envelope, and hand it back.” He pauses and holds up his finger. “Also any other electronic devices. IPods, Game Boys, whatever. You are all officially now unplugged.”

  Mr. Mack and his assistant counselors go around collecting the electronic devices. There’s a lot of them. Enough bulging envelopes to fill a big cardboard letter file box. There’s some grumbling, of course, but everyone gives up their gadgets except for me. I just don’t own any of that stuff, especially not a cell phone. Grama Kateri firmly believes they cause brain cancer. Mom agrees with her. So there’s no one I’d be calling on one.

  While the electronic toys are being collected, I sneak a wary glance back toward the EAGLE’S NEST sign. There’s no longer anyone leaning against the wall. How could someone vanish that fast? Was he just a figment of my overactive imagination? But even if he wasn’t real, in the conventional sense of things, I am certain that I had a vision of something threatening.

  5

  Journal Time

  I’m sitting in my bunk now. We have an hour for journal time. Find a quiet place. Write down your impressions of your camping experience thus far. The boys’ cabin is about as quiet as it can get because no one else is in here. That is muy cool by me.

  You might think I’d be out exploring the woods, looking for signs of animals, communing with nature. After all, I’m an Indian. Isn’t that what we are supposed to do? Not. I try to avoid those stereotypes about Native Americans that the other kids and even some of my teachers seem to have. I never wear any Indian jewelry or moccasins. (You can bet I have never mentioned the regalia stored at Grama Kateri’s that I used to wear when Mom took me to dance at powwows.) I keep my hair short—a Marine-style haircut. I can’t do anything about my skin color or my features, but most non-Indians don’t see you as a real Indian unless you’re dressed for the part. Sneak under the radar. Fade into the background as much as possible.