Bear first appeared in Willows Wept Review (Spring 2012)
Day Twenty-one
Bear likes the way I let ladybugs walk on my fingertips.
There are hundreds of them in the cave we’ve decided to stay in for a while.
Most are dead or dying. Bear loves them. He eats as many as he can. I am using
them to teach Bear to count.
We found this place when we wandered up a steep pathway
lined with pines. If there weren’t trees to prevent my falling, I would never
have gone that way. Bear says it never occurred to him to think of falling, and
he doesn’t think he’s ever seen a bear fall unless on purpose.
The path leads beyond the pines and along the face of the
mountain. I wanted to turn back, but Bear discovered the cave. From late morning
until late afternoon, we are in direct sunlight. It is warm, and I’m sure this is
why ladybugs live here.
Day Twenty-one
I’ve set up housekeeping, and Bear loves to watch. I made a
pine broom. I sweep the hard dirt floor. There are bones from the bodies of
small animals that came here to be eaten. Bear is happy about this. He tells me
this by carving an X on one of the tiny skulls. He says that a mountain cat
must have lived here and that her maternal power and the power of her eating
small animals fill the place. All of this is still in the cave, and don’t I feel
it?
“No,” I say.
Bear will not let me take the bones out of the cave. Instead, he allows me to arrange them in a pattern around the cave’s perimeter. He says he never
thought of that and that I am a clever witch.
Today he showed me how to find winterberries in
the snow bank. He also showed me how to mark the cave, so others know it is
ours. I can tell he is preparing me. He wants to sleep.
Day Twenty-six
Bear fights his instinct to hibernate and eats everything in
sight. I sometimes wonder if he’ll eat me. He says we are from the same clan.
We both have changing eyes and brown hair.
"And sharp teeth and wit," I say. He
does not laugh at my joke.
He is like an overtired child kept from his nap. He won’t
talk with the birds or watch the moon. All-day he wants me to tell him what I
see. So I write this poem for him,
Today is beautiful, gold-eyed Bear.
Today can be dreamt of if one sleeps.
Today wakes on the shores of tonight.
Today is the day gold-eyed Bear.
Tells me his name.
It is Bear. It is Tree. It is Heavy-footed Hungry Beast.
Bear says it is so. And with an ivory claw, he carves a circle in the breast of a
pine tree. That circle is how I know what he says, what he means, and his name.
Day Thirty-one
Bear tells me about tree ghosts. Not trees haunted by
people, he says, sniffing. What a nose, I think.
Tree ghosts stand in the place where their tree once stood,
sometimes forever. Apparently, tree-ghosts are part of why branches
grow as they do and why certain animals move around in the forest in specific
ways. There is something to see everywhere you think there is not.
“What can’t you see today?” Bear asks.
“The end,” I say.
“It’s been here forever,” says Bear.
“The beginning.”
“It follows the end. It’s where you are from.”
“The spring,” I say.
“You can’t see that because you are standing on it.”
“I can’t see what is behind me,” I say.
“Turn around.”
“Or what is before me,” I say.
“You are always arriving there.”
Bear stops. He presses his muzzle to the back of his paw and
bites his wrist. Damn fleas.
He asks me, “What do you see today?”
“The snow prepares to melt.”
“You don’t believe it will,” says Bear.
“I see that you love me.”
“But worry that we will part.”
I change the subject. “I see mountains on our path.”
“You dread the climb,” he answers.
“I see what you give to me in what you take from me.”
Bear is pleased! He strokes my face forgetting his ivory
claws. I will always wear the scar of my thoughtfulness. I am alive at that
moment again, Bear’s apologies, his great coarse tongue on my face, the heavy
stink of his saliva. He does not allow me to wash my face.
Day Thirty-three
I realize the journey is about things not immediately seen
along the path. Bear lets me build a fire. He trusts me more than he fears
flames. He is drunk on fermented apples and full from eating things he sniffed
on our path: a cocoon, a spider, pineberry. His fur is golden. In the firelight, it looks like an aura.
In his drunkenness, he shows me his swagger. He stands on his hind legs and
extends his claws. He bares his horrible teeth with a rumbling slobbery growl.
Day Thirty-seven
We walk the path beyond the cave and over a narrow
passageway.
“What are you so nervous about? You are making snowmelt.
It is too soon,” Bear snarls.
“Will you just forget to be afraid of heights?”
He says this by nudging me up the pathway. There is a sheer drop for a time but
soon the way retreats into the woods.
I am not nervous. I am not.
Some pine forests are dark and damp, with exotic mushrooms, mosses, and swallows flying. This wood holds the afternoon sunlight and
breeze magically. Whole families of cardinals and many types of woodpeckers
live here. Both are fun birds according to Bear.
Bear says that the pines here are majestic and tall because
they feel great about growing in a sunny spot. They are always trying to reach
the sun. He points out different shapes in the pine and shows me how to hide
should an enemy approach. I stand perfectly still. He is right; a wintering
cardinal comes to sit on a branch just above my right shoulder. Bear says the
cardinal and the pine both love the sun. How else would you get that particular
red and that particular green? Back in the cave, Bear asks me to tell the story
of the cardinal as I know it. I recite a poem.
Harrumph! Bear is snoring! Later, he tells me that this is
the best compliment a Bear can pay a poem to fall asleep upon hearing it. This
is so true, Bear says, that poem and lullaby mean the same thing to bears. He
tells me this by running his claw down the side of a tree to make a long
squiggly mark.
Bear says the world is perfect the way it is.
