“Foggy morning early, I was sitting on my stump. My hunting buddy had gone on into the swamp to a stand of his own. Just a pinch of sun came through, and I sat still, with my gun cradled across my knees. I’d seen bear sign all along that run—pretty open ground for a hundred yards each way. You know, hunting’s like prayer when you live it right. You get to expect something so strong, it comes to you. And I just expected that bear out through a young stand of hemlock. He came ambling down the trail to me, dew on his ears, salal on his mind. He’d have been humming if he was a man.
“Up on my stump, I was a good fifteen foot off the ground, and that baffled my scent. When the bear came close he found something in the wind and stood up. First he turned slow to look back down the trail. Then he swiveled around, his eyes squinted shut to give his nose more play, kissing the wind and blowing steam. I hadn’t moved, but he found me, sitting high as a damn totem pole. He opened his eyes and we looked at each other. The sun burned through, and his face fur glistened. I knew I ought to raise my gun and shoot him. He knew he ought to drop and run. But we held. We held there. I was looking into something. I was looking into the face of a man. Maybe he saw bear in me, bear with a little stink of gunmetal. He finally eased down and went on. Fog closed in behind him. When I heard a shot from way off in the swamp, I felt a chill to my back as if that bullet grazed me.
“I been hunting a lot of years. I still trap some. But my days hunting bear, they’re done.”
When the Indians were mostly gone from the Siuslaw, bear became the truest local citizen. When bear dwindled, pioneers come too late had to invent Sasquatch to act that necessary part of the wild one. Charlie, Dan, Martin had no need for Sasquatch. Bear was the mask of their own souls got loose in the woods. The lore of Sasquatch is thin gruel to the hot old food of bear stories. One night someone brought a Sasquatch movie to the Siuslaw. We crowded the school gym, hoping to be terrified, but the film made us laugh. It was all a dark blur of underexposed night shots—faces glittering with sweat by the flicker-light of campfires as something screamed from the forest and actors tried to act afraid.
True bear stories are otherwise. A true story rises irrepressible from the place itself. I learned this from a book and from a mouth. I can’t remember the face around the mouth, or the name of the teller. Only the story the book brought back to mind. First, the book, a linguist’s text: Siuslawan, the fortieth volume in the Handbook of American Indian Languages.
In March of 1911, Leo Frachtenberg, a student of Franz Boas, came to the Oregon coast to study the language of the Siuslaw Indians. He didn’t go to the Siuslaw Valley itself, where Charlie and Dan and Martin lived then young, because most of the original tribe had been moved north to the Siletz Reservation. As Frachtenberg reports, “besides the four individuals who served as my informants [at Siletz], and the two or three Siuslaw Indians said to be living near Florence, Lane County, there are no other members living; and since these people no longer converse in their native tongue, the Siuslaw family may be looked upon as an extinct linguistic stock.” At Siletz, Frachtenberg laboriously wrote out two original texts from the speaking of Louisa Smith, an old woman nearly deaf. One is an invocation for rain. The other is the story of the dancing bear of the Siuslaw.
It begins, in Frachtenberg’s literal translation, “Long ago. Very bad long ago world. Everywhere thus it started long ago. A bad person was devouring them. Grizzly Bear was devouring them long ago. When a man went out hunting, he would kill and devour him. People came together and desired to fix his disposition, to kill him always.”
Since this bear could not be killed with arrows, the people decided to invite him to dance. While he danced, they might kill him. If he would dance until fatigue felled him, he might be killed. They sent a messenger to invite him, but he would not come without a gift. A gift is a promise. They promised a knife. The shrewd messenger said to him, “You are my relative. Why don’t you want to go?”
“I am wise, that’s why I don’t want to go. It seems to me I am simply wanted there to be killed. That’s why I am wise.” But at last Bear said, “All right, I will go. I don’t care, even if I die.”
At the dancing, he was still suspicious. The people crowded around him with promises: “Friend, don’t sleep. We will play. Don’t sleep, O friend! Not for that purpose we asked you to come.” But Bear grew sleepy, sitting by the great fire to watch the dancing.
“Don’t sleep. Look on! For that purpose we invited you. We have abandoned all our hatred.” They said, “Move away from the fire, you may get burned!”
But Grizzly Bear said, “Leave me alone. I intend to sleep a while.”
Then a man stood over Grizzly Bear and took hold of the burning pitch. Bear lay sleeping.
“Better pour it into his mouth!” And as Grizzly Bear burned, the people danced. As he died, smoke rose.
“Here the story ends,” said Louisa Smith. “If Grizzly Bear had not been killed, this would have been a very bad place. Thus that man was killed. Such was the custom of people living long ago. Here at last it ends.”
In the city library, I was a hundred miles and seventy years from Siletz. But under the hum of fluorescent light, tasting the words of Louisa in my mouth—sqak wàn smîtu, “here it ends”—I danced with the people and died with Bear. The smoke of that death bit thick. I reached out for those few Siuslaw people Frachtenberg never met, the remnants of that tribe the old settlers of Florence had told me about.
A white woman nearly slain with senility had said to me, “Oh, Indians, yes. I remember old Indian Dan, Indian Jeff. We named our dogs Dan and Jeff. They were wonderful dogs.” The casual wander of the feeble mind had this terror to it: their story is done, as mine is nearly done.
But then in the library, I had to wonder if it really ends. Sqak wàn smîtu? Like Martin Christensen, I waited on a stump to know. Like the bear, I looked toward light with dim eyes. I remembered another story from the mouth whose name I could not remember. It was a story told about the people who drove Louisa Smith and her tribe from home ground. It was a story rising irrepressible from that ground. It went like this:
“Lots of homesteaders came who never stayed. Rain gets to you, mold in your socks. Fog so thick, babies cut their teeth on it. And one man, after years of trying to prove up his claim by Lily Lake, left the country without telling a soul. When the neighbors came by in the morning, his cabin was empty and that was all.
“Folks called his place the Red Bungalow—one big red-walled room, with a little sleeping room off the back. Right away it was the community’s gathering place. That’s where people came for parties. We could set up table and share a meal, then push everything out of the way and dance. Someone always had a fiddle: fire up the chimney, forget your troubles, and dance. Pretty soon, kids would be asleep in the back room, and then you may as well dance till dawn. No reason to risk your neck on the mud road by dark.
“One night when I was a kid, I woke up when something stopped the music. I came out into the big room rubbing my eyes. All the big folks stood there listening, looking at the ceiling or the fire, and some had moved to the open door or out onto the porch. I got out there too, before my mother could see me, and standing by the rail I could hear some pain squall way out across the water. There wasn’t any storm, but it was blowing like it usually does, and a little rain, so you couldn’t hear real clear, but something was pretty sorry out in the dark. First you’d hear wind buffet the roof, and then little waves slap the lake edge, and then that sound.
“I heard a man say it must be bear in a trap—that’s about the direction where the Mercer boys ran their line. It must have been around midnight, and too dark to go chasing bear. ‘Best let her be till light,’ the man said. And pretty soon, the fiddle killed that sound, and everyone went in to dance some more.
“I got my blanket out on the porch and sat there listening. I’d doze a while, and then the wind or the fiddle would die away enough to wake me with that sound. It had some anger in it, but m
ostly plain sorry. In my head half asleep I could see the bear stop to listen to our fiddle, and stand up like we did to hear him cry. I saw him prance around, but I was sleeping. Once I heard people calling my name, but when my mother found where I was, she just bent down over me, left a taste in the air between whiskey and a rose, and went back to the dance. Long night then. The fiddler got drunk and the music changed. A man on an errand fell shouting in the lake, and seemed like some folks wore different clothes than they started with. The dancing faltered. It was still plenty dark, but everyone started packing to go home and milk the cows.
“Once the dancing really stopped, we heard the bear calling all the time, and it seemed to get on people’s nerves. When one of the Mercer boys showed up with a gun, the other kids woke up. The Mercer boy’s eyes were wild and happy, and the kids were all crazy to go with him. Someone picked up a fatwood torch. We started off slow, stumbling in the dark, then getting so close to the kid with the torch we nearly got singed. We went half around the lake, and came on the bear thrashing in a big dished hole he’d dug. We were pretty close and we could taste the bear smell that spooks horses. Then his eyes glittered. The trap chain hung shiny where he’d gnawed it, and the tree was stripped white. His right front paw was limp inside the jaws. Then he stood up.
“I had seen my father stand like that—when a stump would not come free from earth, or when a calf died for all the help he gave it. There was something in the bear’s shoulders, though, besides fatigue. Something I wanted. Maybe every kid there felt the same, but I saw the bear looking at me alone.
“The bear turned to the one with the gun, and the Mercer boy put a bullet through its face. The bear dropped like a sack and lay still. For some reason, I was holding a stick, and the boy told me to go see if the bear was dead. I took the torch in my left hand, the stick in my right, and eased up toward the bear’s wallow from the side. It was flattened in the shadow there. As I came up, it lay sprawled on its back like a furry open hand. I could see the wet glitter of one eye, one eye on me. Then it clouded, a sheen went out of it. I sat down on the edge of its grave. That’s all.”
Years after I heard that story, my sister camped by Lily Lake. She didn’t know about Grizzly Bear, or the Red Bungalow, then long sunk to earth. She had heard other stories. She had heard that a lonely woman guarded the place, and blew out the tires of trespassers with telepathy. She had heard only travelers with respect might stay past dark. My sister had heard enough to brighten her mind through a long night. Maybe this helped her hear the stamping, the chain of the dancer. It wasn’t surf pounding to the west, she told me. Not her heart that woke her first. She looked into the moonlit face of her companion. Both knew it. Something irrepressible was trying to be remembered.
East, up Separation Creek in the Three Sisters Wilderness, my wife and I met a thin summer bear the second day of our honeymoon. We were in the sweet daze of that event, sidling along with packs too heavy and heads too light. How many bottles of wine does it take, how few words? We grazed on huckleberries as we went. And here came a bear doing the same. We passed each other on that fragrant trail in sun. We held a trust, a kinship in that month. Berries and honey, woman and bear—the world fit.
I think now of that mythic room in the voice of Louisa Smith, and the fog-walled room at Lily Lake. By such stories, we keep listening to the world itself. Next time we invite the bear to dance, neither partner needs to die.
My brother taught me the last story. Hiking the Three Sisters Wilderness alone, he saw the amorous bears rolling about in that meadow up by Lauder Mountain—the lupine crushed, Indian paintbrush flattened in their loving swathe, how he nibbled her ear and she smacked him with her paw, there in the fall of fat September. My brother crept away on hands and knees into the hemlock thicket, left them be. Sunlight struck the dancing bears, apart from our human way: this wearing of shoes, and words, and nations.
THE BARN AND THE BEES
My parents and I were driving along Boone’s Ferry Road early one Sunday morning with a ripe load of horse manure in the back of the family station wagon when we saw a hand-lettered sign nailed to a telephone pole: “2 × 4 is 25 cents, 2 × 6 is 50 cents.” There was so much fog on the glass we had to open the side window to see an arrow in red crayon pointing up a road to the west. Even the steam from the hot stuff behind us couldn’t blunt the chill that went through me. Up that road was a barn I had admired since I was a child, and I knew it had fallen. In the same moment I felt the thrill of honest greed.
Twenty minutes later I stood alone in the fumbled ruin of red boards, straw, and the sweet stink of old dairy. No one was around, except the swallows careening overhead where the eaves had been and their nests hung once. Like me, they clung to the vacancy of the familiar. Blackberry vines had held the barn upright for years, and now that it was down the vines trailed over the tangle, dangling in a veil from the south and east walls that still stood crooked somehow. I scrambled up a slanted timber wedged into the pile to survey the place. The deep litter I stood on had a fragile architecture to it, not quite fallen clear down in a crisscross balance of long sagging rafters propped in chaos, with bent tin roofing over half-collapsed rooms where the side bays had been, the rusted stanchions wrenched into twisted contraptions, and everywhere tangles of baling wire and splintered fir siding. The heap made a ticking sound as it settled in the heat. There seemed to be too much light on it all, the fragrant old mystery bleached away and done. Then I heard a low hum from the dark southeast corner.
Lifting a jagged sheet of tin aside, I clambered into the long tunnel of slanted posts and rafters down the nave, stepping from one nail-studded board to the next, putting my body through a snake’s contortions without a snake’s grace, every pop and squeak of wood on wood a warning, every ping of corrugated tin in the deadfall. I passed a boat filled with hay, its bow beached on a bale that sprouted green, its keel turned to earth. I passed a wagon with no wheels, split in half where a beam had dropped through its bed to the floor. Mice scattered before me, and a bumblebee struggled out from a ball of wool, its nest that had fallen gently to a new niche in the rusted skull-hollow of a drinking pan. I had to inhabit what was left of this palace before it came all the way down, and the bees were beckoning me from their half-shattered hive now thirty feet ahead.
Others were in church. I was in a trance. In the honey-sweet gloom of the back corner I stepped up onto a patch of floor. This dusty vestibule had the privacy of prayer, the solitude of visible history. The combs hung down from a four-by-four rough-cut brace on the wall, and the bees massed quietly there, working. The small back door opened onto acres of blackberry, and a thorned vine held it ajar with a double turn around the knob. Inside, a scatter of oats glittered on the threshold. A wheelbarrow stood mounded with jars. A currycomb worn down to nothing hung from a nail on the wall where each knot-hole was mended with the rusted lid from a tin can. If I stirred, my boot would crush broken glass, so I held still and watched the bees climb each others’ backs to toil, to turn over pollen and flower-sap in their mouths in a flurry of wings and touch. The blunt, heavier shapes of a few drones waited among them to be fed—so inept they could not lick their own food from underfoot. The queen must have been on the inner combs, laying like mad at this season for the main summer honeyflow. From one mating flight, one meeting with a drone, she bore children all her life. If I stood in the dark, they would not bother me. It was light and work each gave her custom to, spinning out through the open door on the quickly tightening spiral of her errand.
I crawled out and away, the fragrance of the hive, the quiet of that dark corner filling me. Across a field, in what must originally have been the farmhouse, a neighbor of the barn in a heap gave me its owner’s phone number, along with a sad look. “They finally got it,” she said through the screen door, as she brushed a wisp of hair aside. “I was hoping they’d forget to.” She was going to say more, but a child shouted and she closed the door instead. Back home, I called and asked for Peter. I kn
ew it was best not to talk about money at first.
“Howdy,” I said. “I was wondering about your plans for the scrap from that barn off Boone’s Ferry Road.”
“Yeah?” he said. “Well I don’t want anyone in there, the shape it’s in. On account of my liability.”
“I can understand that,” I said, “but I noticed some boards piled out in front, and there was a sign about it.”
“Sign? I didn’t put up any sign. Must have been the guy I hired to tear it down. We’re stalled on account of some bees in there.”
“I can take care of those bees for you.”
“Listen, you take care of those bees, and you can take anything you like. I’ve got to get everything out of there. Some guy complained to the County about it being a fire hazard, and they gave me a week. But do you really think there’s anything worth saving? What do you want it for?”
“I want to build a barn.”
In the short light at five a.m. I was there in my bee-gloves and veil, mechanic’s coveralls and tall rubber boots, threading my way down the tunnel of boards and tin by memory and luck. I carried a hive-box and a spray bottle of water and a soft brush. Bees never sleep, but they generally don’t fly when they’re chilled before dawn. I found them as they would be at that hour, packed together on the combs with a low, sociable hum. Once the sun hit that wall behind them, they would fly to work.
I stepped on the wrong board, the architectural balance above me groaned and shifted, a dozen bees lifted off with an altered pitch to their buzz, and the whole hive quickened. In their sudden, ordered turmoil, I was seeing a mood-change inside a friend’s brain, something naked and fair. I waited without a word. Bits of straw flickered away as the guard-bees settled back onto the wall and climbed into the mass that quieted with their return. The warm scent of wax and honey came my way. Through the doorway, mist settled over the gray sweep of the blackberry meadow. It was in full blossom, and the bees must have been working it hard. I could see the white wax over capped honey cells whenever the mass of bees parted like a retreating wave from the comb’s upper rim. There would be sweet enough to keep them alive once I dampened their wings, carved away the comb entire, and swept the chilled bees into the hive-box I carried. Through my veil I saw them in the cleft they had chosen, their little city compact with purpose in a neglected place.
Having Everything Right Page 14
