My hand quaked as I held the gun out before me. It was quiet, the only sound a distant hum of insects and the chock-chock-chock of some hidden bird. Aside from a scattering of leaves, there was no trace of the plantlings we’d put in the ground here — every last one had been uprooted. I looked closer and recognized the now familiar paddlelike tracks in the dirt. And then, with a start, I realized that I was not alone in the clearing beneath the trees.
For some seconds I’d been filtering out a steady and distinctive background noise — a low wheezing ripple and snort of air, an asthmatic sound, like the hiss of a vacuum cleaner with the slightest obstruction in the wand. Now the sound began to register, and I traced it to a tangle of branch and weed at the far perimeter of the growing area, no more than thirty feet away. In that moment I experienced a revelation that slammed at my knees and swabbed my throat dry: the bear was in that tangle. Not only was he in there, but he was asleep, and what I’d been hearing was the steady sibilant rise and fall of his snores. But why, I asked myself, would this canny night-raider leave himself wide open to the hurts of the world, laid out like a wino at the very scene of the crime — and in broad daylight?
The answer came like a fanfare: he was stoned, that’s why. Obliterated, wasted, kayoed, down for the count, his great bruin’s belly swollen with the remains of forty pot plants. I listened to his breathing, deep and restful, insuck and outflap: yes, the bear was in there all right, sleeping off a monumental high, snoring as contentedly as if he’d just toddled off to his den for a long winter’s nap.
This was it, I thought, this was my chance. I could empty the magazine and fling myself into the highest branches of the tree before he knew what hit him. I scrutinized the welter of leaves with the intensity of a hit man, probing for a target. There, that was the cracked black sole of his foot, wasn’t it? Yes! And there, buried in the vegetation, the immense mottled hulk of him, like a heap of moldy carpet someone had scraped from the floor of a flooded basement. I steadied the pistol with my left hand, as Vogelsang had demonstrated, and took aim.
A big bloated second ticked by, the bear snoring, my finger clutching the trigger as if it were my pass to the realms of glory. I remembered the scoutmaster, the bull’s-eye target perforated with.22 holes, Vogelsang and the shotgun. But this was not the shotgun, this was the pistol, and its use required skill and concentration. What if I missed? Or merely wounded him? And if I killed him, then what? Would I bury him? Skin him and eat him? Leave him for the maggots? I lowered the gun. You’d have to be heartless, a degenerate blood-crazed butcher, to shoot a sleeping bear. There he lay in all his splendor, denizen of slope and glade, hibernator, bee-keeper, omnivore, symbol of the wild and born free: who was I to take his life? Perhaps I could simply fire in the air and scare him off. But that left open the possibility that instead I’d scare him into springing up and removing my face. I thought of slinking away, going for Gesh and Phil and the shotgun, sharing the danger and the terrible responsibility both. But no. There was no time for that. The bear was raiding our crops, destroying everything we’d worked and planned for, threatening the very success of the project itself. I raised the gun. Kill! a voice shrieked in my ear. Kill!
At that moment, my options were suddenly reduced to zero. For the bear, perhaps sensing on some deep instinctual level that he was half a step from eternity, awoke, and poked his huge grizzled snout from the bushes. He was lying on his side, raising his head wearily, like a commuter roused by the first buzz of the alarm clock. For an instant we regarded each other in bewilderment. His great chocolate eyes were striated with red veins, marijuana leaves hung from his drooping jaw, and his odor — the feculent, rancid, working stench of him — enveloped me. I was stunned. Terrified. Entranced.
The bear broke the spell. He rolled to his feet like an old sow shaking up from the dust, a sapling snapped under the weight of him and I fired. BOOM! The report of the gun was loud as a howitzer blast. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! I fired again and again, backing away simultaneously, all my circuits open wide.
I missed.
When the smoke cleared, the bear was standing there precisely as he had been an instant earlier, but now his eyes were seized with intimations of mortality. He gave me one quick dumbfounded look, as if to say “You’re really serious about all this, aren’t you?” and then he was gone.
He took the back fence with him, and cleared a path through the scrub that would have accommodated Clyde Beatty’s elephants. For a long while I could hear him crashing through the brush, and I listened till the sound was absorbed in the hum of the insects and the bored, quotidian chock-chock-chock of the hidden bird.
Chapter 2
Even before I could think to set down the sack of German beer, cold cuts and cannolis tucked under my arm, I’d hit every light-switch in the place, flicked on the air conditioner, tuned the TV to some cretinous game show and dropped the stylus on Carmina Burana at killing volume. This was living. I felt like Stanley emerged from the jungle, Zeus hurling thunderbolts; I felt liberated, triumphant, omnipotent. Machines hummed and clicked at my command, breezes blew and trumpets rang out. I was home.
Gesh followed me up the stairs like a page, his arms laden with wine, kaiser rolls, grapes, olives, anchovies, taco chips, Dijon mustard and artichoke hearts. It was two p.m., Friday, the start of the Fourth of July weekend, and we were a hundred and fifty miles from the heat, dust and disrepair of the summer camp. I was overjoyed. Save for a trip to Friedman Brothers’ Farm Supply in Santa Rosa, this was the first time I’d left Willits in four months. Four months: I could hardly believe it. The world had gone on, governments rising and falling, economic indicators in a tailspin, people scheming, dying, erecting shopping centers and committing acts of heroism and depravity, and all the while I’d been sitting on my ass in the hinterlands, contracting poison oak and facing down rednecks and bears. But now, now at long last, sacrifice would have its reward: Gesh and I were on a three-day furlough, horny and wild and crotchsore as drovers descending on Abilene.
Phil, who had experienced some measure of relief in Tahoe the previous weekend, had reluctantly agreed to stay behind and tend the plants. “I can handle it,” he said, and then, playing on our fears, “so long as Sapers stays where he belongs and the bear doesn’t come poking around again.” We scarcely heard him. After sixteen weeks of abstinence — sixteen weeks during which we leered at sheep, slavered over farm girls in the two-hundred-pound class and built elaborate fantasies around the whores of Rio — we were strung just as tightly as the horniest zit-faced adolescent. Bears, cops, commandos, insolvency, failure, ignominy and incarceration: none of it mattered. Our eyes were glazed with romance, we were already lifting cocktails in lush gleaming bars full of secretaries, cosmeticians, poetesses and lutanists, the field of our perception narrowed to a single sharp focus. For the present, we had one concern and one concern only: women.
Gesh made the sandwiches while I showered and shaved. Then, while he was anointing himself, I made a few phone calls, hoping to connect with one of the girls I’d dated sporadically over the past year or so. I was disappointed. Amy and Marcia, I learned, had married, and I offered them my feeble congratulations. Giselle was in France, Corinne had joined the army, and Annie was dead. When Annie’s phone didn’t answer, I called her sister, who erupted in sobs at the mention of her name. It was a shock. Annie, declaimer of poetry, danseuse, cat-lover, Annie of the quick smile and athletic legs, had been laid low, cut down by a Coup de Ville as she crossed Market Street on her Moped. All I’d wanted was the fleeting comfort of pressing my flesh to hers — all I’d wanted was love — and instead I’d been given a whiff of the grave. O Sorrow, cruel fellowship,/O Priestess in the vaults of Death …