Once again he can feel that deep shifting color inside him, the jagged scent that the stranger brought up from the bottom of the mountain, and with it comes the feeling, the desire, above all, that the man he knows will somehow sense his need, his encroaching panic, and will rise through the trees to talk him back from the darkness. But the bear cannot even feel the man now, cannot sense him at all except in his memory and in that spectral dark shape on the floor of the black desert below.
He can hear the wolf panting somewhere and all he can think is that something is wrong, and then thinking again that if he can somehow will the man to his side, can summon him back from wherever he has gone, that it will be all right somehow, that the man will fix everything. But he cannot even feel the man now, cannot smell him anywhere on the freezing wind, which continues to rise from below, passing beyond mountain lion and badger and turkey vulture and eagle and porcupine and through the wire boundaries of his own enclosure, and then on past the wolf and into the forest that breaks into peeling birch and rises yet to spin around the empty trailer where the man dens and up to the top of the ridge and into the high thin dark impossible desert air, its passage curling everywhere in endless spirals like fern frost spreading upon an endless sheet of clear dark glass.
The jagged black scent of the stranger is headed away now, into the blizzarding wind so that the bear can feel him, smell him, can sense him all the way back down the road through the stands of cedar and black spruce and through the shaggy hemlock trailing, down at the river, long pale swaths of old-man’s beard that now hang heavy with ice. Through all of it moves that jagged scent, diminished now that the stranger has dropped the raw meat into the enclosures, has tossed it up and over the fences, has managed, even for those fenced in roof and all, to squeeze it through the gaps in the wire, so that every one of them has had the taste of it. He could sense that something was not right even then, could smell it through and under and above the blood, and he might have called out to them, to all the animals in all their enclosures, but he could no more do so than he could resist the raw flesh that had flopped onto the frozen and crystalline snow at his feet, and before he could even think about what it was, about the scent he had followed up from below, he had swallowed it down. They all had, and he knew it. Wolf and raccoon and porcupine and badger and eagle and turkey vulture. The jagged scent in every one of them, pulsing slowly, from one to another, into their blood.
He had known it was not right. No strangers came at night. And no strangers came when the snow fell. Only the man he knew, the man who was his friend and who sat with him day after day on the stump beyond the fence. Only he would come at night or in the storm, descending through birches the bear had never actually seen and yet could witness in his body when the wind came crosswise through their slim peeling trunks, could pick out their scent as it curved down through the others: the heart-leaved sticky twayblades sprung up through dark fragrant earth, fringed grass of Parnassus with its curled leaves and white lobed flowers, and the pale bouncing crowns of cow parsnip, those tiny blossoms held aloft on thick stalks filled with milky sap. He could sense all of it out there, even though most of what he sensed, smelled, felt, he had never seen. And yet it was there and he knew it was there and it came to live in his body, as palpable, when the wind was right, as if he walked down that path every day with the man. And in many ways, this was exactly what he had done.
But the man he knew was not coming and the wind would not blow his scent to the bear. Instead, what he could smell came to him from the base of the mountain, the thick white stream of it rising from the river where sometimes he could feel moose and deer and elk moving along the banks and the slick and diaphanous flashes of silver fish streaking the current. There had been times when he had longed for them, when he had lain in his den with his nose crushed under his paws, trying only to will their scent away, but the silver moved in his mind evermore and would not be stilled, and he could see, feel, smell, the slick lightning of them coming up the rapids, and in his heart he grasped for them, his claws flashing in the foaming wake of the current, his breath coming in gasps.
But all that is already past now, the stranger long departed and the bear alone by the frozen pond with the snow coming down all around him and the smell of the desert deep in his body. The wolf quiet. The bear thinks he hears a distressed squawking from the raptors but the wind seems to blow in all directions at once and he can form no image of them at all. He wonders if the wolf has gone to his warm place at the far side of his enclosure, a place the bear can sometimes sense with such detail that he can nearly lie down in it himself in his mind. That enclosure was his own for so long he ceased to understand that there could be anywhere else for him to place his scent, but it had become a vast and confusing geography to him as he grew old and weakened and then lost his sight. He might have continued to live there but the man had moved him to this smaller place and there was the pond and the man had come often with his marshmallows and such things were good enough. He knows the wolf does not like the old place, perhaps because it continues to smell of bear or perhaps because the wolf still remembers running through the big trees. The bear can feel that memory all around the wolf, coming up through its blood like sharp young jack pines bursting free of black earth. In his heart are snow-covered mountains and a pack that flows down from the high places like a river.
As for his own: he still held, as a vague scent somewhere deep inside his mind, that gray winter when he and his mother came up out of the den and wandered down through the forest. Even now, in his dreams, he sometimes feels her warmth against his face. He might once have remembered her eyes, the sound of her voice, but if so these have long since disappeared from memory. What he has been left with is that moment of being totally alone, when all the trees in the forest turned black and the big bears rumbled and roared from every mountain and ridge while he trembled: a tiny furred thing mewling in the shadows of the giant trees.
The men who found him tied a rope around his neck and pulled him into a cage that smelled so strongly of dogs that the little bear screamed and fought, so sure he was that if he entered that space he would be immediately torn apart. But there was no such attack. He remained in that cage until he could hardly smell its previous occupant, peering out at a rotating group of men and women who came to stare at him as if he were some kind of exotic creature. And perhaps, to them, he was. Their smells confused him, some so strong that he could not help but press his face to the cage wire and moan.
Then he was taken to the place where he would live all the rest of his days and he was fed berries and carrots and lettuce heads and sometimes elk or moose or beef and there were others too: raccoons and a coyote and an opossum but never, ever, another bear.
He had felt alone until the summer the boy first arrived. Even now he can remember his scent, not so different than it would be tonight were the wind to blow it to him through the trees. Were the bear not blind, he might have formed the image of the man’s face as a boy, a cub, staring back at him through the wire that first time, but in the blurred and milky darkness there is only the face of the man as he is now and when he sees that face in his mind he does not see a man at all but rather a bear.
There comes a time when there is no cloud-choked sky above him; there is only desert and the flat sagebrush plain. There runs the long straight line of the highway. And there lies the town. For a long time, there is only the anonymity of quiet movement: paint-stripped cars adrift on dusty streets, a few sweating figures on the sidewalks in front of the casinos. And then he can see the boy, a thin hot shape come racing through the afternoon light, his path an undulating swoop between lines of boxlike homes, the fences of which guard patches of yellow grass. He sits on the handlebars of a bicycle piloted by someone the bear does not recognize but he recognizes the smile on the boy’s face as the boy’s life, the life of the man he knows, runs out before him like the oxbow curves of some thin cold river, the whole of it running backward and forward at once, the sky shivering with snow, the sky the floor of the desert, the road between the places: a boy riding on his brother’s handlebars through a desert town, and everything to come after, the whole of it spread out across the sky, the bear staring up into the great depths of that dead ocean, no longer aware if his eyes are open or closed but knowing now that everything he has seen and will see has led to this moment and that no matter what happens next he cannot help the man, the thought of which brings a long warm bloom of raw desire shaking through him. Again he tries to call out to the man he knows but there is nothing but his breath and then there is not even that anymore. He can smell the snowed ridges pouring away from him in all directions. He can smell the slick silver shapes of fish pressing out across the sage, over mountains, across towns. He smells a city made of light and his friend moving through it and he smells the stranger too, the one who had brought that black jagged scent up the mountain, smells him laughing and talking and smoking cigarettes on the street, smells him screaming in pain and anger and frustration and then smells him as he is locked away. Then there is the long stretch of the desert back to Battle Mountain again, his eyes blurring with tears, and the hands that hold the wheel he knows are his own for he has become a man as surely as his friend has become a bear.