Scratch

by Steve Himmer

  And Gil is knocked to the ground when I leap to his back from above, toppling him under my weight. The rifle spins out of his hands and clatters against the face of the cliff. The bear seizes his chance, rushes in snarling and spitting with blood on his snout from cleaning the wound in his leg.

  Why did I get involved? Why did I pounce? I didn’t like where the story was going. I didn’t want the bear to be shot—he’s been through so much to get into the woods, to become the bear that he is. This story doesn’t depend upon the bear’s own survival—there is one more transformation to come, though I don’t really need him for that—but for the hunter to kill him so soon, with so little effort . . .

  It may be unfair for me to intervene as I have, but this isn’t the story of Gil or his gun. Could we be satisfied with such a fate for the bear? We already lost one bear when the story gave us no choice. Are we so willing to give up another?

  And perhaps I saw a chance to take care of the hunter once and for all. To speak back to one of your kind who takes us seriously enough to shoot when he has the chance. Pragmatic vengeance against Gil and his hunting weren’t my main reason for leaping in, but I can’t be expected to pass up the chance when it comes.

  Besides, I haven’t killed him. I’ve only knocked the gun from his hands, and leveled the field on which this confrontation will play itself out.

  Gil stretches one arm out as far as he can, fingers straining to locate the rifle, but it isn’t there no matter how much he wants it to be. The bear stands above him, a broad paw on either side of his head, snarling snout pressed so close to his face that hot, blackberry breath shakes the hunter’s bushy white brows.

  Gil doesn’t make a sound, or turn away from the bear for a second. He stares into the animal’s face with granite eyes and waits to be killed. He almost looks relaxed as he reaches up toward the bear’s face. He looks like he’s going to touch it. The bear growls, and a heavy paw swats Gil’s arm away with a crunch.

  The bear’s lips peel back from purple-tinged teeth, and saliva collects in the bowl of his tongue before spilling over and onto Gil’s face. Then he lays a paw on the man’s forehead, and his claws comb through thin white hair and down over the brow, trailing thin red lines behind them. The claws reach the man’s chin and the bear snorts, then backs away from the body.

  Gil lies on the ground, bleeding from cuts the length of his face, his eyes still fixed on the bear even as they glaze over crimson. His hand searches frantically for the gun, but it still lies out of his reach. His other arm hangs limp at his side, bent at an unnatural angle.

  And the bear is off down the trail, leaving the hunter behind. The bear hurries, he runs, and vanishes into the forest while Gil waits to be sure he is gone. The bear will cross streams, climb up and down slopes, and in time he will go so far into the forest he passes beyond any domain the hunter might claim as his own.

  In time he’ll go far enough to become just one more part of the woods, another story that is taken for granted and told again and again until it takes on a life of its own: the bear who hunted the hunter, the bear who marked a man’s face.

  The bear who wasn’t always a bear.

  25

  THE BEAR MOVES JUST LIKE A BEAR.

  That may not seem worth saying, but to a bear who wasn’t always a bear and now rolls in the grass here before us, scratching behind a round ear with his claws, what could be more important?

  He was a man of empty spaces as Martin Blaskett but now he has all he wanted, everything he ever asked for, and so what if it didn’t come quite the way he expected it to? The bear doesn’t mind, so neither should we.

  I can’t help but repeat that word “bear,” because no other word says what it does. I could describe him to you—slightly over six feet in length and thick in the middle, teeth tinged with the dark juice of berries and scraps of half-rotten meat caught where they don’t get brushed anymore. I could say he’s a black bear, the most common type in this forest, instead of the towering grizzlies or polar bears that first come to mind when you think of a bear . . . I could tell you, but you’ll see him only as you want him to be, so it makes little difference what species he actually is: this bear will turn into the monster that scares you the most, even if he doesn’t quite fit the bill.

  I could offer the finest details of science or legend, but you might still only know him as “bear.” And that would be fine, because sometimes a name is worth more than anything else, a name with the full weight of fear and awe layered upon it by generations both past and yet to come. Your kind haven’t grown any larger over the years, at least not so much that it matters, but the bear always gets bigger; the bear always comes to mean more every time you cross his path in the woods.

  It doesn’t much matter if he’s any one kind of bear or another, he isn’t the name hammered into his body with the sharp spikes of Latin and science and lies. He’s this particular bear and he’s all bears at once, as every bear is. The ur-bear. He’s dangerous because stories have made him that way. You call on him to fill the bear-shaped space in the back of your mind, to provide a ready answer to so many questions: all the reason you need for bigger boxes and higher walls, faster cars and louder alarms to remind you what you’re afraid of and what goes on beyond the bright reach of the spotlight above your back door.

  He’s the story parents won’t tell their children and that children tell each other instead. The bear is the reason for all you’ve accomplished, the source of your stories and the old mysteries you cling to for fear of becoming bored with the world. So he will always be here, in these woods, perhaps even after the forest is gone as I’m sure it one day will be. I know your kind well enough to believe the bear will always remain as the shadowy shape your eyes can’t make sense of as it rumbles along in the dark.

  Do you feel the air turning? The crisp tang of fall closing in? There’s enough time for this bear to fatten himself before cold weather comes and brings with it his hibernation. So let’s leave himself to himself, to the juicy berries and succulent grubs that will carry him over to spring, and to an afternoon nap in a particular clearing where an old rotten log surrounded by growth is the right shape and size for his body, and catches sun in just the right way. Its thick mattress of moss takes the bear’s weight the way nothing else could.

  I’m going to shed my shape, too. There’s a particular hole in the world I’m interested in, about the size of a man, one I’ve been meaning to fill. I’m going to leave these woods for a while and get away from this part of the world—Martin may not have murdered the boy, but he isn’t as welcome in town as he once was, and how would I explain to people who think they recognize him that Martin isn’t Martin at all? How much more welcoming would they be of me, the monster who has been at the backs of their minds for so long? Would they want me in town any more than they’d want the real Martin, even if they could tell us apart? Or if they knew I was gone, had left them alone, would their way of life fall into ruin?

  I wouldn’t have gone to all this effort just to stay here. What do I care about building houses? Why would I want to knock down more trees? There are other things I can do with his body, things he never did with it himself. I don’t care what it was to be Martin. I want to know what it could be, if Martin wasn’t so much like himself and if he was more like the bear.

  I expect you’ll find your way out of that body in time, and back into your own. Then you’ll find your way out of this forest. And if you don’t, no harm done. These woods could use another coyote, the same as there’s always room for another nurse log and the new stories that grow where it falls. I’m sure there’s another voice eager to speak in the silence you’d leave behind.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  With gratitude to Michelle Bailat-Jones, Laura McCune-Poplin, Mary Kate Hampton, Jessica Treadway, Lise Haines, Rick Reiken, and everyone who read the earliest version of this book at Emerson, and to the Writers’ Room of Boston and Robie and Julia Harrington who provided a space to work on it; to M
ichael Kindness, Ann Kingman, Kevin Fanning, Rob and Karissa Kloss, Amber Sparks and Chris Backley, Kate Racculia, Roy Kesey, and Lori Hettler, who walked these woods along the way, and to anyone I’ve inadvertently left off this list and now owe a beer; to Richard Thomas, Alban Fischer, and all at Dark House/Curbside Splendor who gave it a home; to my parents, and to Tim and Pete and Theresa, and to Sage and Gretchen, of course; and to the bears and to everything wild in the woods.

  STEVE HIMMER

  Is the author of the novels The Bee-Loud Glade and Fram. His short stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in The Millions, Ploughshares online, Post Road, Los Angeles Review, Hobart, and other anthologies and journals. He edits the webjournal Necessary Fiction and teaches at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts.