The Bear
From high forest meadows, down from his highland home, came the bear to the great highways where the cars roam. He came from the clear light of the bright mountains to the gasoline haze of the long road; from the green scent of Dines to the dark stench of searing tar. There, in the parched valley land, walked the bear - loose in his black pelt, small-eyed, his heart filled with the thoughts of bears.
He was wary in the beginning. He kept hidden in the day. Away from the road, in long grass or fields of corn, he lay lifting his snout to the strange smells of the road, its metalled skin dry and hot like fire, its oil slicks like the sweet resinous wounds of summer firs. In the night he would rise and scavenge along the borders of this new desert land; along the lay-byes, the garage forecourts and the yards of diners, sniffing in the bins and trash cans, smelling the sweet ketchup on the waxed paper wrappings of old dogs, dark and sweet like blood. With the dawn he would take cover once more as the cars roared by leaving only the incense of their blue exhausts and another smell, sweet but sick like carrion.
As the days passed, he learnt much about the road and the ways of men. He learnt to keep away from their shacks and huts by day, for then there were many of them and he risked the hurt of a thrown rock or a wielded club. He remembered, too, the day when he’d caught a pellet from a gun and had spent the waning of the moon under cover of an old wreck, roaring at the dull pain that froze his flank.
He watched the highway; the cars and cycles, the trucks and tankers, the caravans and motorhomes. He knew that they stopped sometimes, and then people might get out to walk a few paces, or urinate or eat. He learnt that if he approached them, as long as there were not too many, they would usually flee, driving away, leaving their food instead of fighting for it as bears will, leaving it behind as if it were some offering to appease him, and in this way he learnt that men were fearful. Two things made them especially so: one was night, the other was to be without the company of their fellows. Alone at night, that was the best time to approach them - then they smelled of fear, then their hearts were quiet and their blood still, then they were weakest, then he was strongest, for bears bide well loneliness while men do not.
As time went on the bear grew bolder. One day he came upon a trailer. It stood by a high part of the road near a campsite and a stand of tall trees. It smelled of man and something richer and saltier. Provoked, he shambled slowly around the closed hut, held suspended in his orbit between wariness and hunger. It was only as he was about to move away that he leaned gently against the door, flattening it, and entered for the first time the world of men. Blowing, he lifted himself into the empty room. Greedily he pulled doors from cupboards, ate packet soups, sucked jars of peanut butter and mayonnaise and licked the spilt salt from the white plastic shelves like rime from the bones of a hunted deer.
Later he wandered back down the highway again, back to the shores of the long, grey river, drifting down the littered margins of the endless road.
Now this land did not seem to the bear to be part of the world of men. It did not seem theirs. It was more like his distant highland home.- just a hard, lonely country that had always been, that was never anyone’s, that owed no-one a full belly or a long life. Once he’d come upon a trucker in a lay-by, and their eyes had met but he’d seen only the faint red traces of blood in the whites of the old man’s eyes. Once he’d loped away from a crowd of children partying in on a bus, but he’d only heard the sounds of the long wind blowing through the spaces of the tarmac river. And then, on a day like any other, snuffling warm milk from its squat carton, nosing spicey smears of dry mustard from a styrofoam tray, the bear heard the sound of a truck approaching as if for the first time in the silence of the road, and now he heard them each and every one, cars and trucks, cars and trucks - as they came there was an exhalation and a rush, and then they were gone, beyond his grey horizon. The people were always journeying, always moving from somewhere the bear did not know to somewhere he did not know, and it was as if he, in his great, strong loneliness, were somehow never taken into account. He listened to the road. He listened to the vehicles come and go. Every short roar, every brief throb, every pulse of rushing wind measured out the heartbeats of his loneliness. Slowly a rage grew, that he never knew and only latterly felt when it had grown very cold, very strong, very, terribly strong.
Another day. The sun is hot and bright. Lifting his broad head, his small eyes seem to flinch from it. The bear blinks and blows and hunkers down on his haunches, but no sooner has he done so than he is on his hind legs again, standing tall. He does not fear the sun any more; he has entered the world of men, has tasted their food, has looked into their eyes, has listened to their hearts, has smelled their bitter carrion smell. He has a rage and only the smallest fear.
Night time. Frank finishes his beer and pushes away a plate of skins. Heavily he eases himself from his stool, takes change and crumpled bills from the bar and thrusts them in his back pocket. He calls out to the bartender and walks out, through the parking lot, to his truck. He puts one foot on the plate but never swings the other on to his rig because there is a figure there, looming in the dark: the bear, all vast and terrible desire; he crushes the man’s head with a cuff, and before the dead man’s weight can pull him to the ground, he rips again with his other claw across the torso in one terrible double flexion of his great, slack shoulder.
Night time. Johnny and Margie are camping, away from it all, bosses far away, the children at grandmother’s. They bathed and walked and ate by the fire. Their names are in all the papers now.
Night time. The bear lies still in a ditch left by men who were laying pipes. It’s the very middle of the night. He hears a car and smells its acrid steel and plastic and his small eyes see it coast into the lay-by. There is no moon, only the sickly faint yellow glow of the moon behind storm clouds. There is no sound except a cricket and the small cooling, creaking noises of the car at rest. The bear is cautious. There are two in the car: a small boy and a woman. There is much baggage crammed on to the back seat. The woman gets out and walks around the front of the car to the other door and opens it; and now, in the glow worm light of the lamp on the sill of the door, the bear can see the boy. She bends down to him in the front seat. He is very young. She undoes his seat belt and gently turns him so that his feet hang through the open arch of the door. She leans across him to the back seat and fetches him a cookie, kisses him briefly and turns to the back of the lay-by to the ditch, not forty yards from the bear, who smells the hot scent of her urine. He eases out over the lip of the ditch.. The little boy doesn’t see him. He inches closer over the gravel. The mother is returning now, picking her way in the dark over broken concrete. The bear comes closer, but for no reason, for instinctual reason, she turns towards him and sees, not him, but perhaps just the tiniest glint of light in his cold eye, and quickly, with swift movements, she has swung the boy’s legs back into the car, spun herself around the bonnet, is in the car and driving without a word said, with her child scarcely waking, with the bear standing still and frozen in the empty spaces of the road.
Fewer people stop on the road now - and soon none will stop at all, but the bear has gone down the highway, joining the endless tide. He is grown thinner and more upright. He has no fur now, only a little dark hair on the back of each hand and on his shoulder blades. Sometimes he will take work for a while, in a gas station or a car wash. Sometimes he hitches rides or just wanders the sides of roads, sniffing in the bins and lay-bys, smelling the sweet ketchup on the waxed paper wrappings of old dogs, dark and red like blood.
Page(s) 6-8
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