by Sy Walker
“You are a mama bear,” he replied matter-of-factly. “But you will lose the excess weight once the baby is born. Which will be very soon. Do not fret about that.”
He chopped up a banana, an apple and an orange and put them into a blender along with some ice and a little bit of milk. She covered her ears while it worked to chop up the fruits even more and turn them into a smoothie.
After pouring half the blender’s contents into a glass, he passed it over to her. “Drink this. It will give you lots of vitamins and energy.”
Ursula drank it. It tasted delicious, but she shivered because it was cold and it wasn’t exactly warm inside their cabin. John noticed and went to the fireplace, quickly igniting the logs. He made a disapproving face and went into the bedroom, coming back out a few moments later in his dark jeans and a navy blue button up shirt that he neglected to button.
He went outside, to the side of the cabin where he’d left a pile of tree branches and stumps. She watched through the window while he chopped up some of the branches. His muscles rippled as he swung the axe. She admired his fluid movement and how easy he made the action appear, even though she knew that chopping wood was no simple task.
As soon as he was done, he carried in a pile of wood for the fire and set it on the hearth. “This is for the next round of fire,” he said, wiping the sweat from his brow with the back of his arm.
They cuddled up together on the couch, alternating between kissing and talking. Every time their baby moved inside of her, she brought his hand and held it where he could feel it. “Is it going to be like you?” she asked softly, in case the unborn child could hear them discussing its possible abnormalities and would take offense.
John nodded. “Yes. It’s genetic. And the ownership of the inn is also genetic. It will be passed on to him or her when I am gone.”
Ursula raised her eyebrows at him. She didn’t want to think about her big, strong John being gone! “But that won’t be for many, many years,” she said.
He chuckled a little, softly touching her cheek with his fingertips. “Let’s hope not. Hunting is no longer legal around here, ever since…”
“Ever since your father died?” she asked, slowly putting two and two together. “He was killed by a hunter, wasn’t he? Oh, John, I’m so sorry. That’s awful.”
John closed his eyes. She could tell that thinking about it brought him a lot of pain.
“But you don’t have to stay here, John. We could leave this place.”
“Where would we go?” he asked her, opening his eyes and looking deeply into her blue ones. “There is nowhere that is safe for me but here. Here, I have people who know about me. There are people here who do their best to keep me protected. Heaven knows why, but they do. They care about me. They cared about my father, too. I trust them.”
Ursula looked down. She wanted to help him, but she did not know how. He seemed to already have the help he needed, but she wasn’t convinced that he was happy. “You went to Silver Lake,” she said.
He played with her hair. “I went there to find you. No other reason. And now that I have you, I need not go anywhere else again. This is our home.”
The trouble was that she was starting to miss the spotlight and the Big Dipper club. As much as Ursula loved and cared about John, she was not convinced that this place could be her home.
When afternoon started to threaten the arrival of evening, John took his leave. He gave Ursula a kiss and promised that he would be back around eight. “Please wait for me,” he said. “And please stay indoors.”
“Yeah, yeah,” she said with a smirk. “I promise.” She took the key to the cabin out of her purse and put it in the breast pocket of his coat, giving his chest a gentle pat.
It was painful to watch him leave again, knowing what he was going to become and what might happen to him. Besides hunters, there were likely other bears out there along with wolves and whatever else inhabited the hills and mountains of the Sierra Nevada.
She stood watch by the large window that overlooked the lake. John had gone off in that direction and she wanted to keep an eye on him from her shelter, if she could. Baby Bear was restless inside her tummy, as if he or she knew that Papa Bear had gone away. She chuckled under her breath. “I can’t believe I’m thinking like this.”
Pulling out her cell phone, she called the Big Dipper club. She wanted to let them know that her vacation was going to be extended, but that she would be back. It would be crazy to stay out there in the woods for the rest of her life. She’d never been a social butterfly, but she was getting cabin fever already.
On the fifth ring, she was watching the black bear eat some berries several feet away from the window. He seemed to be hanging close to protect her, but maybe the bear was merely close because he smelled food.
On the seventh ring, she saw the flash of something in the bushes.
Ursula’s eyes widened. It was the barrel of a gun.
“Hello?” a voice said on the other end of the line. The phone was hanging by its cord where she had let it go.
She ran out of the house. “NO!” she shouted, waving her arms. “Don’t shoot him!!”
John the bear looked up at her and let out a growl. She was flailing around and the bear in him felt threatened, but the man in him felt concerned for her.
Suddenly, a shot rang out in the woods. Ursula screamed.
John fell down in a heap of black fur and berry bush branches.
Running, tears pouring down her cheeks, she ran to him, not caring that he was a bear. Not caring that she was breaking her promise. He was hurt and he needed her now.
“John?” she asked, taking his head and placing it on her lap, petting him. “John, can you hear me?” She felt around his fur for the wound. She found it on his shoulder. There was a lot of blood, but the bullet must have grazed him. It had to have grazed him.
He was dazed and in pain and the woman was holding him. He let out a loud howl of both pain and anger. He did his best to stand back up on his four legs, but then fell down again a few inches away from her. The woman didn’t care. She picked up his head again and looked into his eyes.
“Listen to me, John. It’s going to be okay.”
He snorted and groaned, complaining. His shoulder hurt. Couldn’t she understand? Someone had shot him and she was interfering. She shouldn’t be there!
Ursula brought her face close to his and softly rubbed the tip of her nose against his big, wet nose.
“You’re mean to me,” she quietly sang to him, a tear slowly falling down her cheek. “Why must you be mean to me? Gee, honey, it seems to me you love to see me cryin’…”
She looked into his soulful, chestnut eyes and she could see the recognition in them. He knew who she was now. She could see his humanity there.
As the sun slipped away and the moon began its act, John’s black fur shed from him and the bear became her man again.
“Ursula, it hurts,” he said, hissing from the pain.
“Shh,” she said. “You’re safe now.”
She did her best to help him to his feet, and dressed him back in his clothes before he caught his death from the cold. She kept his shirt unbuttoned, understanding now why he did that. If it wasn’t buttoned, he could fling it off when he started to change so it wouldn’t rip apart.
The two of them slowly limped and waddled their way back to their cabin, arms around each other’s shoulders.
Once inside, Ursula sat John on one of the kitchen chairs and surveyed the wound on his upper arm. It was bloody and awful, but it wasn’t as deep as she had feared. “The bullet passed you, but it wasn’t nice about it,” she said. She ran a wash cloth under some warm water. “This might sting a little.”
He let out a howl of pain not unlike his bear form.
“I told you not to come outside,” he said, huffing a little as she cleaned his wound.
“I had to,” she argued. “I wasn’t just going to stay inside and watch you…” She sniffled. “I cou
ldn’t let you die.”
John’s expression went from annoyance to appreciativeness. His eyes were sad now. So much like the bear’s eyes. “Thank you,” he said, clearly feeling guilty about how he’d spoken to her.
“Don’t move,” she instructed. She went into the bathroom and found a first aid kit under the sink. As gruff as he was, at least he took precautions and thought about things like first aid kits and logs for the fire. She suspected he had these things for her, not for him. Bringing out some gauze and Band-Aids, as well as the antiseptic, she stood admiring him for a moment.
John Asher the bear man was holding the wet rag to his shoulder and grimacing like a big baby. She smiled at him. He glanced at her, then turned to face her. “What? Why are you smiling?”
“Oh, nothing,” she said. “You’re just cuter than you realize. But this won’t be cute.” She put some antiseptic on his arm and watched as he threw his head back and yelled.
She wrapped the wound in the gauze and added some Band-Aids to the minor scratches he’d received from the berry bush.
John was gone again the following morning, as Ursula now expected. But thankfully, he was back in the afternoon when her water broke.
“Ahhh, John, help me!!” she greeted him when he came back into the cabin. Thankfully, he had the key with him now.
Quickly, he brought her down off the couch and onto the fuzzy rug by the fireplace. She had lit a fire. That was good thinking. He pulled off his coat and brought her legs up so they were bent, her feet flat on the rug.
He knelt between her legs. “This is going to be okay, darling,” he told her. “You are strong and confident…”
“I can do this,” she said, breathing slowly through her lips.
He coached her and she pushed. Then they rested. He mopped her brow with a wash cloth, smirking a little. “It’s my turn to take care of you,” he said.
She pushed some more, screaming and hollering bloody murder. Before long, there was a little baby in John’s arms and Ursula was crying tears of joy that she didn’t know she would feel about this. They had a baby. They’d created a life together, somehow. It was strange and it was certainly not one they’d be able to explain to many people, but it was their life.
“It’s a girl,” John said, crying a little himself as he held their new little person.
Ursula carefully took her into her arms. “Matilda,” she said. “Matilda Joan. Joan for her daddy, and Matilda just because it feels right.”
John smiled and kissed Ursula deeply. “I love you,” he said. Then he gingerly touched the small brown head of their daughter. “I love you.”
For several months, Ursula Blake sang songs in the cabin for a very limited audience of two. When Matilda was old enough to be able to laugh at her mom’s over-the-top performances, Ursula took her around town in a sling across her chest, sticking and stapling flyers to anything that could hold a flyer.
“Live at the Black Bear Inn: Ursula Blake-Asher! Jazz and Soul Songs to Cozy Up To!”
No matter what, even with his fairly rigid schedule, John never missed a performance. He sat in the front row with Matilda and the two of them would smile up at Ursula every night after dusk, when the black bear and his cub had shifted back into the man and his daughter.
THE END.
Chapter One
Alisa stared out over her family’s lands from the parapet of her father’s castle. Clan McGregor had some of the largest holdings in Scotland, and even in the midst of a bloody, devastating civil war, the true wealth of her kin was in rolling emerald hills and blue skies so sharp and clear even a dreary day could seem like a summer frolic. She thought to herself, I may never see this sight again, and though in that moment she felt like indulging in self-pity, she alone of all her sisters had the sense to recognize the futility of such thinking.
Lord Cheshire, the illustrious Earl of Shrewsbury, had chosen her above all other eligible highland lasses to be his wife. He had himself suggested a union with Alisa’s father, a merging of family lines intended to satisfy the feuding royalists and preempt any further bloodshed. War was the last thing anyone wanted. Lord Cheshire had first seen Alisa at a Christmas festival in Edinburgh when she was thirteen, and now five years later, he’d come to collect that which he’d so clearly coveted.
Alisa was the tallest of her sisters, with long blonde hair that broke the typical McGregor pattern of dark features. As she’d grown into a woman, she’d cut a figure which always seemed to attract attention, though Lord in Heaven knew why that was. It wasn’t that she considered herself ugly, not really. It was just that she didn’t see herself as the typical female object of desire. In her mind, she was still the awkward girl who rebelled against stiff petticoats and ruffled collars, who loved spending days down by the bog, catching toads and laughing till her father’s men came to collect her for supper. And the thought that her clan had decided so quickly to give her away, to simply offer her up as one would offer mutton … She knew it was the way of things, the way their world had always been. But just once, at one point in the long, storied history of men and women—she wished a single lass had deigned to stand up and shout to all the men of the world, Ye can’t have me! I am my own woman!
But such thoughts were silly and empty and she knew it. Fixing her eyes on a wealth of windswept fields of thistle, she heaved an exhausted sigh and trudged back inside through the heavy birch door. Closing it behind her with a loud thud, she slipped out of her cape, slung it over an arm, and made her way back to her waiting room, where she was expected by a chamber maid and a very impatient Lady McGregor.
Alisa entered with an unexpected heaviness in her heart. When her mother saw her, she threw up her hands in exasperation. “There ye are! What would I have done if ye’d managed to escape?”
Alisa scowled at her. “I would’ne have tried to escape, mother. Nor have I ever done so. Just because I talk about—”
“Talk, talk, talk! No more talk, deary, now’s the time to be on with it. Come over here. Ye’ve made a mess of Margarete’s dressing.”
Alisa did as she was told and allowed her mother to lace her bodice tighter and straighten her dark green dress. She felt like she couldn’t breathe. Clan society considered it unbecoming of a lady to look in any way unprepossessing when presenting herself to her betrothed for the first time. The Earl had insisted on ushering her to England himself before any wedding could take place. Alisa’s mother wouldn’t be there when she took her vows, and neither would her father or sisters. Lady McGregor had clearly found the decision difficult to bear, but she’d done her duty and had kept her misgivings to herself.
Eyeing her in the mirror as she brushed out her daughter’s long blonde hair, Alisa tried to count all the new wrinkles that’d expressed herself at the corners of her eyes and lips, wondering not for the first time what a lifetime of matriarchal obligations would look like on her own face.
“Mother, can I ask ye something?” Alisa said.
“Of course, deary.”
“Were you in love with father when he came to collect you from grandda’s?”
Her mother paused, the bristles of Alisa’s brush catching in her hair. “I hardly knew your father, Alisa. We’d only spoken once.”
“And ye were happy with grandda’s choice? You found father charming and handsome and—”
“What has charming and handsome got to do with anything?” her mother said. “We do what me must in life, daughter. Youth perhaps convinces us the world is wide open and welcoming to all our desires and whims. The truth of it is life demands much in the way of self-sacrifice and the dimming of all our girlhood dreams. To be the wife of a high lord is a calling to service much greater than most will ever know. As the bride of the Earl, Alisa, ye will not just be responsible for your man and his children. It will be your role to stand as the very bedrock upon which his destiny is built. If ye want to see the ultimate success of a man, deary, then look ne farther than his wife.”
Alisa considered
this, and the tiny lump of dread that’d been forming in her stomach for the past week seemed to grow the size of a standing stone. Service? Self-sacrifice? Surely that wasn’t the end all, be all of a woman’s life. Yet if Alisa were to take stock of all the women she’d known, she surmised she might find well-worn riverbeds of common matriarchal experience.
Was there truly nothing greater to look forward to? Was she destined to an existence meant for someone else rather than herself?
“Mother, is the Earl a good man? Is he…?”
“Is he what, deary?” her mother asked.
“Compassionate. Caring. Loath to cause me harm?’
Despite whatever she may have wanted to do, Alisa’s mother frowned deeply and sadly.
“Compassion has nothing to do with it, Alisa,” she said. “The man is yours now and you are his. That’s all there is to say on the matter.”
* * * * *
Alisa stood with her father as he presented her to the Earl of Shrewsbury, a tall and callow-faced older man who had the look of a shrewd and powerful warlord. Of course, rather than a soldier’s existence or the duty of a keeper of the peace, the life of an English lord was one of endless political rambling and trying to pretend all the extravagant wealth and influence was deserved. That’s what Alisa’s father always said, anyway. In private, he despised the English. To her, the Earl seemed the least vivacious man she’d ever met, with cold, cynical eyes that seemed to find no amusement in anything.
A meal had been prepared, but Chesire had said he didn’t want it. He hadn’t even made it past the drafty, echoing entrance to the reception wing. The intent, Alisa knew, was to leave for England immediately, which meant she was only moments away from bidding her entire family goodbye.
“Lord Fredrick Cheshire,” her father said, “allow me to introduce my eldest daughter, Alisa McGregor. Go on, lamb, say hello to the man.”
