by Will Hobbs
But no one was in the backcountry, no one at all. No one marked his slow and painful progress, in a week’s time, over the Divide and down the valley of the Pine.
No one saw him until he walked through the door of the Cowboy Bar, four miles beyond the Pine River trailhead, at the end of the plowed road around the northern tip of Vallecito Reservoir. The men and the women there didn’t see the bearskin when he came to the door; it was rolled up in his pack with the blankets. They saw a dark-skinned Ute boy with long, shaggy black hair under a strange peaked cap of white fur that was streaked with blood. His lips were blackened, cracked, and bleeding. He was wearing a red mountaineering shell, top and trousers, smeared with dried blood. They could see that he was unused to speaking. They could see that he’d suffered much. None of the men and women there was saying a word; they only stared. He said, “Would somebody drive me to Walter Landis’s place on the Piedra River?”
* * *
He asked the man to drop him at the highway. He didn’t want to drive in. He’d come all this way, he could walk a mile more.
It was just turning dark when he reached the orchard and caught sight of the old farmhouse in the spruce trees. There was no smoke coming out of the chimney, and he was filled with dread. Walter Landis was dead, his heart was telling him. Walter is dead, I’ve come too late.
He went into the mudroom without knocking, and he didn’t take off any of his clothes or his boots. He opened the next door and stood between the kitchen and the parlor. The house was cold. No lights were on.
He switched on the parlor light, and a figure stirred there in the far corner, in the easy chair. The old man was blinking to try to adjust to the light, and he was trying to understand who it was he was seeing there at the entrance of the parlor.
“It’s me,” Cloyd said. “It’s me.”
The old man looked, and looked again, and wiped his hands over his eyes, and stared.
“It’s really me,” Cloyd said, and then he walked over to the old man and put a hand on his shoulder.
“Lord, lord,” the old man said, still uncertain. “Rusty said you were dead.”
“It’s cold in here,” Cloyd said disapprovingly. “You forgot to make a fire.”
Ashen-faced, Walter was struggling to his feet. “You’re alive,” he said. “You’re not dead.” The old man reached with both hands and placed them on Cloyd’s shoulders. He was looking Cloyd up and down in wonder. “I’ll bet you’ve got a story to tell…. You look like something the cat spit out.”
Cloyd took his medicine bundle from around his neck and brought out the coin for Walter. It was hard to work the fingers on his right hand. The index finger was numb and useless from frostbite. But he brought out the coin for Walter between his thumb and his middle finger.
The old man reached for his reading glasses on the end table and put them on. “Spanish gold piece,” he marveled. “Where’d you find it?”
“In the mountains,” Cloyd said with a grin. It was as specific as he was ever going to get.
The old man was coming to life now. He grinned back. His skin was glowing red instead of pale white. “We’ve got to get a fire started … I nodded off … I was going to when I woke up. Say, have I got something for you….” The old man disappeared into his room, then quickly returned with a huge smile on his face and a small turquoise carving of a bear held out on his palm. “Guess what Rusty found smack in a fresh bear scat back in the mountains.”
Cloyd took it between his thumb and middle finger. Yes, it really was the bearstone.
“They can’t take those cubs out of the mountains now,” Cloyd said.
“No, they won’t, and Rusty’ll be awful happy to hear they’re alive. It was you he was after rather than those bears…. I sent him, Cloyd. I knew if anyone could find you, he could. Rusty was going to help bring you out and let you know they decided to leave those bears alone.”
“Good,” Cloyd said. He was so weary. “That’s good,” he said.
“Let me tell you a secret that will never go beyond the three of us. You know how Rusty’s always been one to take the law into his own hands…. You’ll never guess what he brought back from Alaska and let go in the Weminuche Wilderness in September: a yearling grizzly! Caught it in a culvert trap and drove it back to Colorado. He said it had to be a male, to make up for the one he killed. He was hoping at least one of yours turned out to be a female.”
Cloyd closed his fingers on the bearstone. “They both are.”
The sun was climbing higher in the sky, and each day it cleared the Divide for a few more minutes. Each day the sun shone a few minutes longer on the steep slope below the Window and above East Ute Creek. All winter long, this slope had lain in the shadows in the grip of extreme cold. But the sun had arrived, and winter was giving way to spring even at 11,600 feet on the shady side of the Divide.
At 7,000 feet, on a farm at the edge of the wilderness, a Ute boy was doing the bear dance, even though it was early March and the Bear Dance wouldn’t be held until nearly the end of May. It was a tradition he had learned, that the people helped the bears to awaken after their long sleep.
He had selected a special place to perform his bear dance. He’d climbed high above the farm to the place where he had found the ancient blue stone carved in the image of a grizzly. He’d walked the ledge and now stood on the chalky floor of the cave high above the farm.
He hoped to dance until he could see things that otherwise would be invisible. For a gift, he knew he should give something in return. He’d shinnied behind the slab that had fallen from the roof of the cave, and he had replaced the bearstone in the pottery jar where he had found it. To the remains of the infant buried there, wrapped in a robe of rabbit fur and turkey feathers, he’d whispered “Thank you.” He didn’t need to carry the bearstone any longer. The strength of the bear was inside him.
As he faced the snow-clad tips of the mountains showing above the canyon of the Piedra, his dancing deepened, until it carried him above the forests and even above the Divide. He could see all over. On the slopes facing the sun, the first flowers were blooming and the first patches of grass greening. Water was trickling at the edges of the snowbanks, rivulets were rushing from underneath them, and marmots were whistling from the rockslides.
He saw the place he was looking for, a small hole in the snow beneath an immense spruce tree, on a slope he well remembered. There was a bit of water dripping from an icicle suspended above the hole.
A sharp nose was poking its way out, and now a broad face, bright and curious, was looking out on the world all shining and new. A second face appeared, and two bears, one brown and one the shade of cocoa, pushed through the snow and sat in front of their den, sniffing the spring wind and the scent of growing things newly come to life.
He had found his dream.
He saw them tumble and slide down the slope with their old playfulness, and he saw them lope across the crusted white meadow in that shuffling gait of the grizzly, with their heads carried close to the ground.
They were going to grow wild and large and powerful, and go about their ancient ways. If he ever came across them again, they might stand and pause and wonder. But then they would turn and go. They had known him in a bear’s dream, and he had known them in his.
Author’s Note
Although Beardance is fiction, all of the places in the story are real places I know from more than thirty backpacking trips. Lake Mary Alice, for example, is one of my favorite destinations. The first time I visited Mary Alice, at the foot of Mount Oso, I witnessed the colossal water, ice, and rockfall described in Beardance.
I believe there’s a part of the human heart that longs for wild places. That part of my heart is filled with the forests, alpine tundra, and snow-clad peaks of the Weminuche Wilderness in the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado.
Years before I ever thought of writing Beardance, I was gathering the knowledge and experiences that would lead me to this story. In 1973, soon a
fter my wife and I came to live in southwestern Colorado, we found teaching jobs in the little town of Pagosa Springs. I was lucky enough to be able to start a class called Living in the Southwest. Along with my students I was interviewing local old-timers, exploring in the library, and learning about the human history and natural history of the San Juans. We learned about the legend of the Lost Mine of the Window and the ways of the old sheepherders, and we learned about our neighbors the Utes who still dance the Bear Dance every spring to help bring the bears out of hibernation.
We learned that grizzlies had been plentiful here during the ten thousand or more years that people lived in the San Juans before the miners and settlers came flooding in during the 187Os. And we learned that now there were no more grizzly bears left in Colorado. The last one had been trapped and killed by a government trapper near the Rio Grande Pyramid in 1952.
What got me started writing Bearstone, which came before Beardance, was the surprising news in 1979 that a grizzly had been killed in the San Juan Mountains, not far from where we were living. The bear was killed by an outfitter who said he didn’t realize it was a grizzly. I began to imagine a story about a Ute boy meeting the last grizzly in Colorado. This being fiction, I got to make up how it would all happen. The boy became Cloyd, with Walter and Rusty soon joining the story.
After that 1979 incident, the experts once again agreed that the grizzlies were all gone. They were extinct in Colorado. I would never have had the heart to invent the idea for Beardance if there hadn’t been reason to hope that there might still be some left after all. It was a 1990 sighting of a mother grizzly and three cubs by a rancher on horseback that gave me that hope. In the summers following the sighting, bear biologists tested hair samples and other evidence found in the area, and announced that these remote mountains of southwestern Colorado may indeed be home to a few surviving grizzlies.
Now I could begin to imagine Cloyd returning to the mountains and meeting the mate and the cubs of the bear that had been killed in Bearstone. After reading for months, learning all I could about grizzlies and the traditions of native people all across the continent regarding bears, I began work on the novel. I found myself struggling with my early chapters, trying to get the story to come to life, so I decided to take a break from my desk and hike back up to the Window, that spectacular notch in the continental divide that I pictured as the geographic focus of the story.
Standing in the Window, I could imagine I saw Cloyd and Walter camping down on East Ute Creek far below. I could almost see the entrance to the lost gold mine on the ridge above the creek. And I could imagine Cloyd with the two grizzly cubs, Brownie and Cocoa, as the snow was beginning to fay. I practically ran home, my head bursting with ideas. I poured all of my love of the mountains and of bears into the writing, as well as my deep respect for native traditions.
I found my fingers flying all day and into the night. In writing, as in reading, you’re imagining what it’s like to be someone else, and I was fully imagining being Cloyd Atcitty, at 11,800 feet with winter coming on, risking his life for those grizzly cubs. I completed the novel in a sort of trance, much like his, in a little less than a month. It was a wonderful experience, and I don’t know if one like it will ever come again.
Will Hobbs
WILL HOBBS is the award-winning author of many popular adventure stories for young readers, including Bearstone and Beardance. His picture book, Beardream, illustrated by Jill Kastner, is a comoanion to these novels. Seven of his novels have been chosen by the American Library Association as Best Books for Young Adults. A graduate of Stanford University and former language arts teacher, he lives in Durango, Colorado, with his wife, Jean. Longtime backpapers and river runners, they have spent many years exploring the mountain and canyon settings of Will’s stories.
To learn more about the author ang his books, visit Will’s Web site at www.WillHobbsAuthor.com.
BEARDANCE
Books by WILL HOBBS
Changes in Latitudes
Bearstone
Downriver
The Big Wander
Beardance
Beardream
Kokopelli’s Flute
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
First Aladdin Paperbacks edition September 2004
Copyright © 1993 by Will Hobbs
ALADDIN PAPERBACKS
An imprint of Simon & Schuster
Children’s Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Also available in an Atheneum Books for Young Readers hardcover edition.
Manufactured in the United States of America
4 6 8 10 9 7 5
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Hobbs, Will.
Beardance / Will Hobbs.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: While accompanying an elderly rancher on a trip into the San Juan Mountains, Cloyd, a Ute Indian boy, tries to help two orphaned grizzly cubs survive the winter and, at the same time, completes his spirit mission. Sequel to “Bearstone.”
ISBN-13: 978-0-689-31867-2 (hc.)
ISBN-10: 0-689-31867-7 (hc.)
1. Ute Indians—Juvenile Fiction. [1. Ute Indians—Fiction. 2. Indians of North America—Colorado—Fiction. 3. Grizzly bear—Fiction. 4. Bears—Fiction.] I. Title. II. Title: Beardance.
PZ7.H6524Bd 1993
[Fic]—dc20 92-44874
ISBN-13: 978-0-689-87072-9 (Aladdin pbk.)
eISBN-13: 978-1-4391-3673-7
ISBN-10: 0-689-87072-8 (Aladdin pbk.)
