The Bear

They were a family, a brother and two sisters, playing under the endless blue sky. On the prairie the sky was always a dome, because no matter how far you looked it arched over your head and made you feel very small.

The children had names, but these were not their real names. Those would be bestowed later. The boy would one day starve himself in a forest and force himself to stay awake through the night next to the fire. He would be alone and he would hear bears and cougars step on twigs beyond the pale of the firelight. Then he would be visited by the spirits of ancestors and beasts and birds. They would tell him his true name and reveal something about his destiny. Everyone would listen and since the words came from his heart no one would doubt them. Henceforth they would call him by the name that had existed at his conception, but had been only revealed just now in his vision.

The girls’ names would be like little prayers — hopes for the future, or some charming characteristic — a little narrative that summed them up: Weeps When Petals Fall, or Sings With Cicadas.

Like children at play everywhere, they were only faintly aware that the sun was already low in the sky and the air was just a little cooler. No one called them to the camp, so they played on, drifting ever closer to the forest.

The forest frightened them in a delicious way, its darkness at once dangerous and beckoning.

The boy thrilled his sisters when he yelled, ‘I am a hungry bear and I have come to eat you!’

The sisters screamed, running sometimes together, sometimes separately, but always just out of reach of their brother’s grasping hands. The girls were fast and full of tricks. They teased him by standing still, luring him to charge, only to spring aside like antelope at the last possible moment, laughing so hard they nearly lost their balance.

The sun was balanced on the horizon in a haze of red. In the east a few stars were just visible above the gloom of the forest. Yet no one called them home.

The girls had been close enough to their panting brother to feel his hot breath, but now his breath, though still hot, reeked of blood.

He still swatted at them, but now the girls yelped, for their buckskin clothes were slashed and blood welled in the furrows where sharp claws had grazed them.

Their brother’s face bristled with black fur and as he chased them his body swelled and became shaggy. He no longer ran like a human, but loped like a bear. His boy’s voice with its laughter and mock threats was now a snarl with occasional roars of frustration.

In terror the sisters disappeared into the forest. They could just make out the trees in the gathering dark. They stumbled over roots, fell in the dirt, helped each other up and fled deeper into the forest.

They stopped and hid behind a tree. They tried to quieten their wheezing breath. They listened in the dark. Somewhere not far away they heard a loud crashing about in the underbrush. It was something large, something that did not care about stealth, for it had no enemies. It was a predator, pausing now and again to sniff the air, to listen. It was driven by hunger. The hunger made it tremble, made its mouth drool. The hunger guided the huge body with smell and sound.

The girls froze like two does. Their breathing was shallow. They did not dare swallow. The crashing about was aimless, but terrible and near.

A voice whispered to them, so low they did not scream in fright. The voice came from the ground, from a tree stump, all that was left of a tree struck by lightning.

‘Step on me and I will save you from your brother.’ The bear had pricked up its ears at even this low voice and came crashing like a hailstorm in their direction, right for them.

The sisters held each other tight and the tree stump shot heavenward, till they were perched on their tiny island of safety above the tallest trees. The moon was just rising and it bathed the treetops in blue light as far as the horizon. In the west Venus was bright, low in the sky. Up here the wind was cold and moaned.

Their wooden pillar shook and the girls clung to the jagged stump. They wept and cried out, yet no voices of searchers answered them.

They swayed whenever the bear drove his bulk into the tree. But it held firm. They listened to the panting far below.

Then they heard loud scraping. The bear in its rage circled the tree and clawed the bark until the trunk was bare. The sisters held each other and waited. They listened. They heard quiet breathing in the blackness below. They remembered seeing men from the village chip away the bark with their hatchets in a ring around a tree, and as the moons came and went, the men watched it die, then toppled it.

© Robert L. Fisher, October 2003