*
On the way home their father told them that the old man’s name was Monsieur Roberge. He’d been a friend of their grandfather and had become his own friend when he’d hired him to help build his house. Monsieur Roberge had been an avid hunter all his life and deep down he still was even though he hadn’t hunted for years. You call an avid hunter like Monsieur Roberge a Nemrod, which was the name of a great hunter in the Bible. It was hard to understand for little girls like them, but people who kill animals often love animals dearly, and it’s hard to grasp but a Nemrod like Monsieur Roberge had to his credit only a limited number of kills. Never mind his skill in tracking and flushing out and trapping game, one day a Nemrod could no longer muster the strength to kill it.
Monsieur Roberge was at just that point when he’d met Billy. He’d not killed for years and went to his camp just to fish and prepare the hunting grounds for his sons. He set up salt licks and dug mud holes and scattered apples and at day’s end called deer and moose. He took animal photos. He never told anyone, but he sometimes got close enough to the moose to touch them.
One night their garbage can, which they kept outside with a heavy stone on the lid, was overturned and the plastic bag inside was torn open and the contents were scattered all about. To reassure Madame Roberge, Monsieur Roberge blamed it on racoons and their legendary cleverness but he began to check the surroundings looking for clues. The ground was dry and there were no tracks and by the time he saw them the shed had been smashed into and the refrigerator door torn off and what remained of the provisions and plastic wrappings and chicken bones and shattered Mason jars was spread everywhere around the house and you couldn’t hold racoons responsible for that. On his satellite phone he called a game warden he knew and asked his advice. The warden said:
“If there’s a bear that’s fallen in love with your garbage you’d best kill it. He’ll never get tired of visiting you and one fine day he’ll come when your wife is all alone picking mushrooms or your grandchildren are there for the weekend and you know as well as I do how something like that can end up.”
Monsieur Roberge had heard about relocating bears. The agents captured a bear in a trap and went to free it at the ends of the earth.
“But you’re already at the ends of the earth. Where will we put it, your bear? You do that for bears that get near urban spaces or rural communities. We could try it with your bear but that would just pass the problem on to another hunter.”
Monsieur Roberge said he understood and he hung up.
The next day he hung from the branches of trees, in every direction, rags impregnated with vanilla extract, and he laid out bait by distributing pails of stale doughnuts and rotten fruit and bacon grease here and there on the property. Then he sat in an old bus seat on his steps and cleaned and loaded his rifle and waited, calm and motionless. An hour passed and then two and then three and in the middle of the fourth hour, at dusk, the bear came out of the woods about thirty metres from the house. It had smelled him but it had also smelled the pail of bait sitting in front of it and it hesitated. The bear looked both ways in the clearing like a child crossing the street. When it turned its head the other way Monsieur Roberge, who had killed nothing and taken aim at nothing for years, shouldered the gun and buried a hundred-and-eighty-grain bullet in its vital parts, tearing in two the bear’s big heart. The bear took ten steps. For the first five it seemed normal and just frightened by the explosion. At the sixth it seemed to be running on ice. At the tenth its legs gave way beneath it as if its four kneecaps had dislocated at the same time. It had come near enough to the house for Monsieur Roberge to see a laborious breath swell its flank. He reloaded and heard the ejected cartridge bounce off the wooden porch. Madame Roberge, who didn’t like to see animals killed, had stayed inside the house. From behind the screen she asked:
“Is it over?”
“Yes. Please bring me my knives.”
He went down the steps with his rifle in his hands. The bear was no longer breathing. He circled the body and thrust the gun’s barrel into the bear’s glassy eye. It was then that he heard the little growls and saw the small animal come out of the woods at the exact spot from which its mother had emerged. Instinctively Monsieur Roberge took off the rifle’s safety catch even though he already knew that he’d never have the heart to kill it.
His wife arrived a few minutes later with the knives. She approached cautiously and asked her husband, whose back was turned:
“Is he dead?”
“She’s dead,” he said, turning around with the animal in his arms.
The cub whimpered and nibbled and sucked the ends of his fingers as if they were nipples. It didn’t really hurt.
“What’s that?”
“That is my bear.”
The girls asked dozens of questions when they got home.
“How did they feed it?
“The Roberges had an old golden retriever, Jackie. She nursed and weaned Billy like a pup.”
“Really?”
“I swear.”
“Is he tame?”
“About as tame as a bear can be.”
“Are we going to go back to see him?”
“Yes my babies, but you mustn’t mention it to anyone. Monsieur Roberge doesn’t have the right to keep a bear.”
But of course word spread after a few years and Billy had reached an age where nothing, not his cage nor his chain, could hold him, and the warden put Monsieur Roberge’s back up against the wall, offering to relocate the bear. Twice they’d tried and twice the bear had found his way back. The first time he’d ransacked the Gauthiers’ garbage and the second time he’d killed and eaten the Langlois’ dog. Ten days earlier they’d tried a third time and had transported it a great distance and that’s why their father had insisted on driving them. He sensed that it would be back soon.
That morning they kept on asking questions as if this conversation was an extension of the other and as if not two seconds had passed in the two years that separated them from the first day they’d met Billy.
“What did they do with him?”
“They led him far into the forest, so far that he’ll never find his way back, and he’ll stay there.”
“Do you think it will work?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“It’s hard to explain.”
“What will they do if he comes back?”