Scratch

by Steve Himmer

  His paws are still in front of his face and they break his fall on the dirt. But his body crashes against the folding metal stairs with a crunch and a clang and they bend beneath the side of the trailer. The bear pulls his hind legs to the ground, takes a few steps, and then rolls onto his haunches to flutter a paw at the back of one ear.

  Beige smears of mud cake his fur, and he lets out a moan, closes his eyes, and gives himself over to the pleasure of scratching. He rubs the claws of one paw across the back of his head, and his top lip curls back to show gleaming teeth. One eyelid slides open the tiniest bit and a rolled-back white shines through the space. The bear looks content to sit in the mud and scratch himself here forever; oblivious, unconcerned about what might be coming while he is swept up in his bodily rapture. He moans, low and long, like settled old floors in a house. His body is piled on itself in a heap; a shaggy black coat draped over . . . something. How can I describe the shape of a bear without calling it, simply, a bear?

  At last the bear finishes scratching and gets to his feet, all four of them. His tongue uncoils to lick first his black bottom lip, then his top one. He lopes away from the trailer and toward the road, rolling forward as one shoulder at a time rises under his fur then flattens as the other wells up. The bear walks past the dormant bulldozer where a black starling perches, preening its feathers with darts of a beak. The bird doesn’t even look up from its grooming as the bear passes with heavy footfalls.

  This morning is only half-formed, and mist hovers over the ground. The bear walks through it primeval, a monster coming out of the fog, but he doesn’t look so much a monster as he swings his head side to side in what almost seems like a rhythm; it’s as if the bear is dancing in a private bear way, to a song that plays in his memory only.

  Turning away from the road, the bear raises his snout to the air and takes a loud sniff. His nostrils flare, his lips curl, then he swings his body in a new direction. He crosses the mud toward the first leveled clearing, where the broad rectangle of a foundation gapes in the ground. The bear approaches the hole, leaning forward over the lip as his forepaws cling to it, and hangs as far into the ground as his body allows him. He snorts, and then sniffs again as he slides his head back and forth above the moist earth. He leans closer, but loose soil flakes away in his claws, and his weight begins pulling him over the edge. He grunts, and flexes his legs to push himself back onto solid ground. He sits for a moment over the hole, smoothing the matted fur between the claws of his front feet with a pink tongue.

  He stands, and circles the foundation in a slow walk. He goes around twice, snorts, and then moves toward the road. From the gravel shoulder, he looks toward the house on the other side of the pavement, his head tilted to one side as he does, then crosses and climbs the first two steps to the porch. There’s a white stoneware bowl at the top of the stairs with a spoon standing in it, and the bear stretches his body to reach it, his hind legs staying down low. He licks at the vessel, and his tongue knocks the spoon onto the boards of the porch with a clatter. The bowl spins and bounces with his hungry effort, hopping closer and closer to the edge of the porch before it finally slips off. The bear is left with his tongue hanging out as the bowl lands bottom-up on the grass by the stairs.

  He grunts, then retracts his body from the rise of the steps and walks out of the yard toward the sun, stopping to sniff at a cluster of white-petaled, yellow-rimmed flowers blooming in the overgrown grass of the shoulder.

  Not especially menacing, this bear, is he? Clumsy and lumbering, licking bowls of old milk . . . he’s more of a clown than a monster. But don’t get the wrong idea about him. He’s clumsy because he can afford it; he can get away with being a clown. Who’s going to stand up to a bear?

  Not me. Not you, at least not in the shape you are now. And certainly not empty-handed. Bears have no need to worry about smaller bodies, only the tools those bodies might carry—it’s the gun that does all the damage, not the fragile hand holding it.

  So he’s taking a sunrise walk into town, meandering on the side of the road to dig ants from their hills and chew blackberries out of the brambles that grow wild on the verge. His teeth and tongue are stained purple, and he sits to clean the juice from his paws before walking on toward the center of town.

  23

  THE TOWN IS QUIET THIS MORNING, AS IF EVERYONE HAS overslept, as if they’re all at home dreaming of bears, denned in their blankets and sheets. Or else gathering on the outskirts of town to reenter the woods in search of a boy who is lost.

  The grass is still thick with dew and as he weaves across it the fur of his belly droops and drags in wet clumps. Near the bandstand and black iron cannons, he stops, and tips onto his side to roll in the grass. Flat on his back he swings his whole body. Head and tail move independently of one another, each thrashing through dew on its own. The bear moans and his long tongue unrolls from his mouth, to hang against the side of his head and drag through the wet grass for itself.

  Then he stops rolling and stretches all four legs straight up into the air, kicking as if he’s keeping a ball aloft, as if the faint, round moon still white overhead is his plaything. At last he flops over, and climbs to his feet with a yawn. He pants, his ribs heaving, one round black ear turned inside out from his rolling so the pink, veiny membrane is exposed. His body drips and glistens with dew, as a shivering shake starts in his nose and rolls the length of his body, flinging water into the air.

  The bear continues toward the café and shambles into the alley that runs along the wall of the building. Behind the restaurant, in front of a screen door in a white wooden frame, the bear stops and raises his snout, sniffing with loud, wet snorts. His nose slides through the air toward the door, an antenna seeking a signal. He pushes the screen with a wide paw and it bulges but doesn’t break. When he curls his paw into a fist the claws catch the aluminum mesh so a slight pull swings the door open. He pushes his snout, then his head, and then his whole upper body through the opening between door and frame, slipping from the alleyway into the restaurant’s kitchen.

  Inside, everything clatters—the hotel pan of bacon he chews his way through, and the rack of steaming, clean silverware he knocks from the dishwashing sink. The bear hardly starts at these sounds, rapt in myriad smells and sensations—the bacon, the sausage, the frying of eggs, and the rich, greasy air of the kitchen. He drinks from a dish of warm, melted butter with tongue-slapping slurps, and shovels pancakes and scrambled eggs and fried potatoes from one plastic tub after another.

  He doesn’t notice the round, balding cook in his dirty white apron, aghast on the other side of the serving window, dialing a phone, or the waitress who hurries out the front door, holding her glasses to her face as she runs for help. He is only aware of the buckets and baskets of breakfast foods, being packed for delivery to those who now wander the woods. The bear hasn’t been a bear very long; he’s still too hung up on the feeling of being himself to worry what those others are doing. Their presence doesn’t mean much to him, and he doesn’t yet know what it means for him to be seen, for a bear to get caught in a space where he doesn’t belong.

  But they’re aware of what it means for him to be there, these humans, and within seconds the wail of a siren rises above the town square, waking the few remaining sleepers as it approaches, growing louder and louder here in this kitchen. Loud enough to make even those out in the woods around town stop and look up in hope the boy has been found. The bear looks up, too, from a white tub of home fries, in time to see the sheriff and his deputy come through the front door with their guns drawn.

  How would a bear, a new bear, know their intentions? How could he understand the importance of the pistols drawn in their hands and the shotgun a third man holds across his badged chest when he arrives a few seconds later?

  They fan across the café with their weapons, flanking the bear, and creep toward the kitchen. The bear drops the bucket, spilling greasy potatoes all over, and the empty container bounces away on the floor. He sits on his
haunches and watches the men coming closer, guns shaking in their hands—not the sheriff’s, his hands are steady, but the other two men seem nervous.

  The bear rises onto his hind feet, rises to his full height, and the men take a clumsy step back as if they’ve been hit by a wave. Something is burning under the broiler, and dark smoke rolls out with a sharp, charcoal smell. The bear surveys the ruin he’s made of the kitchen, the potatoes and eggs and sausages scattered all over the floor, the silverware and chafing dishes upturned over spilled food. Then he turns away from the men and their guns, toward the screen door, lowers himself to four legs and walks out. His wet fur leaves a glazed streak across the black rubber floor mat as he passes over.

  As the bear vanishes through the back door, the police officers charge through the kitchen, slipping in spilled butter and tripping on dropped forks and spoons. It would be funny if their faces weren’t so deadly serious. The sheriff barks clipped commands into a radio as his men burst out the door in pursuit of the bear.

  And the bear’s round, lumbering rump moves out of sight at the end of the alley, the end away from the square, where a few houses cluster and the forest begins. He rambles oblivious, showing no interest in the men on his tail, his appetite sated after his impromptu breakfast, and now he’s after a warm, quiet place to curl up for a nap. He feels the way all bodies feel after a big morning meal.

  He rolls through a backyard without a fence where two small faces watch from a window, eyes wide and jaws dropped. A mother moves into the frame, gasps, and pulls the curtains in front of her children so they can’t see the bear. Later she’ll laugh at her instinctive reach for the curtains, as if the sheer fabric could deter something so large, and will wish they had watched—her children may not see a bear up so close ever again—but for now she’s dialing her phone.

  Other faces watch from other windows as the bear moves through their yards, and more phones dial the same number the first woman has. The bear pauses to spray a bush with his scent, and spatters the wall of a house as he does. Inside, a dog jumps up and down barking, buoyed by the barrier between himself and the bear who has invaded his turf, but the intruder doesn’t even look up.

  When he reaches the curtain of trees that separates the town from the forest, he plunges into the brush without a glance back. If he had looked behind him, he would have seen the sheriff and his men standing in the last yard he crossed, wrinkling their noses at his acrid scent, still holding their guns and watching the dark shape of his body fade into the forest.

  They have no idea the bear was, a short time ago, Martin Blaskett. No idea Martin dreamed of being a bear while he was locked in their cell, and that he has now become one. He’s an ordinary creature, as far as they know, and they hunt him as they would any other.

  And he is any other, now, really—Martin is not inside the bear, waiting to reemerge. He isn’t aware of this change, because nothing of Martin remains to be aware, except as a faint, fuzzy memory in the bear’s mind, the residue of a dream he had once while hibernating. And even that much will be gone soon.

  Martin hasn’t returned to some primal state he’d abandoned for his modern life. He gave way to the bear because that’s what he wanted to do—he wanted to belong to this place, to these woods. He wanted his occupation of space to make sense in a way it never did while he was a man, and in a way it never could. Not as long as Martin was Martin. He struggled to build himself a home, to raise walls that could demarcate a particular space as his own as much as they would contain him. He tried so hard for so long to claim some part of the world as his own, but in the end he was unable. At least, he was unable in the shape he wore for all that time.

  Don’t feel sorry for Martin and what you may think he has lost, because in one single step, in the movement of the bear’s foot from the yard to the forest, all that he’s never had became his. Trees instead of the walls he’s been building, and this forest instead of a family, but what matters most is that Martin . . . is that the bear is contented. That he isn’t aware of anything missing, no more than the bear is aware Martin ever existed, or Martin is aware he no longer does.

  His impotent, aimless desires and daydreams have given way to ursine instincts and satisfaction. Try to imagine the Martin we’ve known with his face in a pan full of bacon, or rolling in the wet grass. Try to imagine our Martin giving his body free rein, and allowing his deepest desires to sing. Yet the bear does those things without thinking—he doesn’t worry about whether he’s happy in some vague, human way; the bear is the bear is the bear.

  And he has found his way into the forest.

  24

  THE BEAR PLOWS THROUGH A MAZE OF BRAMBLES, PLUCKING the occasional berry and swatting black flies when they land too close to his nose. He finds a slim stream where it murmurs along beside an overgrown trail, and he leans down from his shoulders to drink with a satisfied smacking of lips. Then he crosses the stream, away from the recognizable path, and ambles into the trees.

  He walks with a musical lope, and makes frequent stops for sniffing this leaf and scratching that log, to rub this tree with his scent. The bear walks until he comes to the face of a cliff, a high, gray bluff bright with early sun. In the warm shelter of the rock face he curls up, eyes squeezed shut and head resting on his own back as his body curls around itself. And with rattling, rumbling snores and spasmodic twitches and jerks in his legs, the bear takes his mid-morning nap.

  When the bear dreams, he dreams of being a bear. Of being himself, and of what he will do when he wakes, the fish he will paw from the water and the plants he will find in his path. The place where he will take his next nap. The bear dreams of his life more or less as it is; the honey may be a bit sweeter and the grubs a drop juicier, but no differences greater than that.

  There’s a sound in the trees near the bluff, a footstep and the brushing of fabric on branches. The bear snaps awake and onto his feet, a motion quicker than his slow, heavy body looks capable of. He looks into the trees, snout in the air and sniffing loudly. The wind in the leaves could be a hunter’s canvas passing by brambles; acorns rattling their way down through branches are the footsteps and snapping twigs of something’s approach. The bear sniffs the air then paces the rim of the clearing before yawning and moving back toward his bed.

  A loud crack shakes the birds from the trees in fluttering clouds, and the echo rolls through the woods. The bear’s body jerks to one side; his left hind leg folds beneath him and his body crumples onto the ground. He moans and roars in one sound, a gurgling note full of pain. The leg that buckled bleeds crimson streams through his fur, quickly crusted with dirt. The bear twists his back so his tongue can reach the wound. He pushes himself to his feet and lumbers into the trees, dragging the injured leg.

  The gunman, the hunter, bursts into the clearing with his rifle leading the way. His grease-smeared orange hat is low on his head, shielding his eyes from the sun. His red, wrinkled face glistens with sweat and he’s rasping and gasping for breath despite—or maybe because of—his many years in these woods, tracking one animal or another, eliminating some threat to the town.

  Gil has been sent to take care of the bear, called by the sheriff and sent into the woods. He misses his quarry’s departure from the clearing but the trail is easy to see—the dragging leg flattens grass and brush wherever it goes, and trails blood, and the bear is still new to all this. He isn’t as skilled as he could be at covering his tracks. He isn’t as invisible as he might become.

  With the long, black rifle held out before him, Gil follows into the trees, moving slowly and swinging his eyes back and forth across the blood-speckled trail.

  Disturbed from his nap by a shot in the leg, then chased through the woods by one of the animals that fed him before—the bear is learning fast. He’s making sense of his world and learning what he needs to fear, though perhaps—like the cat that was Elmer—he is learning these things all too late.

  He can’t move as quickly as he could a few moments ago. His wounded
leg takes tentative steps. The bullet struck his left thigh, but barely—it punctured the top layers of fat and fur but passed through without becoming embedded; the injury’s painful and bloody but not serious. The bear won’t be in any real danger from this particular wound, so long as he survives long enough for it to heal. So long as he gets away from the hunter.

  Hurry. Keep up. Join me here on this high rock where we’ll have a good view of the clash between hunter and hunted, the clash with which every story worth telling has ended since stories began. A confrontation one body or the other must win.

  And here comes the bear, plowing the brush with his injured leg already taking back some of his weight. There’s no trail for him to follow as he rushes along a line parallel to the bluff, deeper into the woods. The hunter keeps his distance. He’s waiting for the bear to grow tired, to concede and collapse. He doesn’t know how superficial the wound is—the amount of blood on the bear’s trail is misleading—and he waits for his prey to give up.

  But the bear runs out of trail before he runs out of blood. He doesn’t know these woods yet and he’s pinned himself into a corner where the cliff face ends at the top of a steep, muddy hill. The bear stands at the top of the slope, testing his footing with a hesitant paw, a motion so delicate it seems out of sync with his bulky shape. But even that light footstep is enough to crumble the soil at the top of the hill, to set a tiny avalanche into motion, and he recoils, backing his body against the rocks, squeezing into the corner as tightly as he can while still facing the trail.

  The hunter steps forward, rifle raised and one eye squeezed shut as the other lines the bear up in the sights. The bear roars but stays where he is, concerned by the hot smell of the gun. A steady, calloused finger wraps around the trigger. The bear’s weight begins to shift forward as if he’s contemplating a charge, and the hunter steps back, but the gun remains steady as stone in his hands.