by John Straley
I saw bear tracks in the mud, clear and finely etched. Claws perhaps four inches long coming from the toughened palm of the pad. They were headed in the direction I was going. I could see nothing ahead of me either on the bank or in the tall grass that ran down into the swampy flat of the river. I heard nothing. I cleared my throat and dug my hands deeper into my pockets and walked a little further upstream. I came to the narrowing point of the river where the freshwater stream fell through a short rocky falls into the tidal current. To my left was a dogleg cul-de-sac of grasslands and straight ahead was the steep slope of the mountain and heavy timber. I stopped, considering which way to go, when I heard a low grunt from a deep pair of lungs.
When I was young we lived in an old roadhouse in Juneau that had been a hunting lodge in territorial days. When my father came home from work it was almost of ceremonial significance. I would have the fire burning in the stone fireplace and my mother would have his drink ready. He sat in a leather chair and told us about his day, about the cases and the lives that had come before him. After about twenty minutes my mother would excuse herself and she would begin to set dinner on the table. Just after she excused herself, the Judge would turn to me and politely inquire about my day in school. I would give him some evasive and polite reply, and he would have a second drink. He understood I was evading him and he would move the subject to a hunting trip he planned to make, promising to take me on it. He talked about the duties of a man in the hunting camp and how a bear-hunting trip was no place for immaturity or silliness. When I was worthy I could go. He also talked about the bears on Admiralty Island and claimed they could touch the beams of our living room standing on their hind legs. I would look at him sitting in his leather chair, and above him the thick Douglas fir beams seemed unbelievably high. I thought the likelihood of my ever being old enough to go on such a hunting trip was slim. I watched him, tasted the smell of burning alder in the fireplace, heard the decorous clink of ice in his highball glass, and saw the bear standing behind him clawing the beams of our house. The presence of a bear that large was forever etched into my childhood imagination, and I had spent much of my adulthood trying to ignore it.
When the bear stood up in the tall grass beside the estuary in Prophet Cove, the dream world of my childhood house rose out of my body like cold sweat. The bear stood on her hind legs and I could see three-quarters of her torso. At first she did not move, and it was as if she were more a monument to a bear than an example of one. Then she swayed briefly like the top of a tree being felled. Her fur was matted down by the water she had been wallowing in and her coat was slick against her torso. She had the well-defined musculature of a middle-weight champion and the bulk of a Mercedes-Benz. As she stood there, water ran down her body and etched the pathways of the blood vessels and the knotted bundles of muscle, down the bulk of her shoulders and front legs, down her stomach past the visible row of teats that I could see just above the grass. She stood with apparent grace and power like Michelangelo’s David.
Her head swayed, her tiny black marble eyes searched for me. Her coffin-shaped snout twitched and scanned, twitched and scanned. Her ears were erect. I heard the heavy bellows of her breathing and I tasted the scent of rotted fish and blueberry shit. I imagined her great warm bowels and the row of blunt teeth that would grind my bones to slurry. It was like staring into the sun: I had to avert my eyes and look down at the mud. I did not run, I did not say anything. I listened and waited.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw a woman walking along the beach fringe, one hundred feet to the right and toward the shore. She jumped over the bear scat and was gone into the woods.
The bear was down and running. Toward me. The snuffling grunts of breath broke through her teeth. Toward me. Running hard and outstretched like a thoroughbred, warm breath, slaver, the stench of rotten meat and tideflat, small, impassive eyes and the black rubbery rind inside her lips. Her teeth. The bulk of her body coming over me like a breaking wave.
I fell backward and she ran over me and up into the dense cover of the alder trees and into the forest. I heard the small trees snapping as she clawed up the steep rock slope, not slowing down or stumbling once. The clattering of rocks and the grunting up the hillside became more and more faint. I felt the icy hot needles of fear stabbing up through my body and I lay still on the ground, shaking and muttering.
My pants were ripped and my thigh was bruised and cut slightly where she had pushed off from my weight. The hard corner of the tape recorder in my pocket had dug into my hip and it was sore. My clothes had the stink of rotten fat where I had touched her. My skin seemed hot but my body was freezing and I could not stop shaking. I sat up. I flexed my fingers and felt them move easily in their sockets. I put my hands over my eyes and ran them down my face and felt the soft elasticity of my lips. I ran my hands down my neck and my chest and felt my pulse beating up along the entire surface of my torso. My ears rang with blood pumping through the vessels, the air seemed sparkling and the rain glittered like dust. I heard voices and a woman crying out in the woods … and then a shot.
I supposed that the sow was some distance away by now. I tried to think if her teats showed she had young cubs with her but I could not make my mind focus. I kept seeing eyes, teeth and black gums. I reached for an imaginary gun. I tasted bile and my head ached. I heard another shot.
I moved down the estuary and into the woods toward the cabin. I walked quickly, but did not run. I felt like I could have sprinted up the mountain after her, my step was so light, but I forced myself to pause and tried to pull myself down out of the heightened reality created by fear—back into my usual dream state. I was pulling, pulling on my breath to slow down as I made it to the clearing where the cabin came into sight.
I heard voices, men’s and women’s, loud and argumentative. I did not hear words but tones, meter—contradiction and interruption. As I stopped and cocked my head, I realized the voices blended with the sound of the squall and the wind in the alders. I saw the Oso riding the weather at anchor and I saw a floatplane tied to a small buoy that was around the bight from our anchorage. Out of sight from our vantage point until now. It was the same floatplane that had been tied to Emma Victor’s dock. I stepped lightly on the moss, aware of every sound I might make now. I heard the noisy rustle of my rain pants scratching against my boots. Someone was arguing, maybe beseeching.
The cabin was only about twelve by sixteen, and it was made from brown plywood with an old metal roof. There was a lean-to on the mountain side made of visqueen rolled in a pole on the bottom. There was one window on the water side. The door appeared to be the heaviest part of the wall, and both panels were reinforced with heavy driftwood planks. It had a rusty brass knob.
Walt stood outside with his hands hanging down at his sides. He stood so still it seemed an effort.
Lance Victor was in back of him with an automatic pistol in his hand.
“Stop shooting that damn thing. Can’t you see he isn’t going to tell you anything?” Norma was at her brother’s elbow, shifting from foot to foot. “I think he’s alone. I ran out to the creek and I didn’t see anyone.”
I got down low and crawled the length of a fallen tree to get closer. I peered around the end of the splintered stump, my head next to the moss. More words emerged.
“You might as well kill me, boy.” Walt looked up at Lance almost with pity. “I’m not going to lift a finger to help you.”
Emma Victor stood in the doorway above Walt. She wore a red mackinaw. She had her arms folded and stared at the back of his head. Lance pointed the pistol at Walt, the six-inch barrel wavering slightly.
“Don’t tell him anything. We ask the questions,” Emma said.
“But what if he won’t talk, Mama?”
“Nobody cares anymore. Nobody except that foolish old woman, and I suppose that detective. Nobody cares about a killing when someone has already confessed.
“But what was he looking for here? Norma, do you know?”
&nbs
p; Norma stepped up into the cabin and spoke so softly to her mother I could not hear.
“Well, look some more then. He must be snooping around for something. What was he doing under the bed, for God’s sake?”
“Want to tell us now, Walt?” Lance waved the pistol under his nose like a piece of warm bread. “What were you looking for?”
“What are you going to do, boy? You going to push me into the bay? I might be harder to drown than De De.”
Lance swelled inside his body and his hand trembled as he held the barrel of the gun tight to Walt’s head. He began to speak in a shrill, pinched-off scream. “You’re the one that was drunk that night, old man. You’re the one that let her go up on deck. The weather was so bad. Why was she up on deck when we were moving the boat? What was she doing there? She saw too much. She saw too much because you were drunk. So I had to do what I did.”
Norma came out of the door and held out her hand toward Walt. She could have been crying. “Walt, she saw Papa and Hawkes fighting. But she also saw Lance and me moving the boat. I didn’t know what else she saw. I didn’t know. Lance didn’t know. When we heard that she was going to testify at the trial Lance went down to talk to her, to tell her to keep quiet if she knew anything more. I guess they got in a fight on the dock. She fell in by accident. It was an accident. Lance wouldn’t deliberately kill her. It was an accident.” Her voice trailed off.
Walt stared past Lance and his gun to Norma, standing on the steps. “You poor dumb kid. What makes a girl like you so simple and so mean?”
Norma shook her head and whispered “No” as she brushed the imaginary hair away from her forehead.
“It may have been an accident when she fell off the dock. But it sure as hell wasn’t an accident when he pushed her back in the water. When he kicked her face and forced her underwater. That was no accident. I knew she was pregnant, I knew about her boyfriend and how he didn’t want to be the father. I wanted to bring her home but I didn’t…. Because he executed her.”
Lance glanced at his sister and said in a soft voice, “Baby … I had to kill her. I had to. I told the police we slept all night. I couldn’t let them question her again.”
Then he jerked Walt’s head back. He looked for his mother but she had stepped back into the cabin.
His cheeks were round and his skin was blotchy red like a sullen child’s. He pulled back the hammer of the pistol and Norma buried her face in her hands.
I could hear Emma walking on the plywood floor inside the cabin.
“What were you searching for, Walt? What is there out here that could make any difference after all this time?” Lance asked once more.
“He was looking for this.”
Emma stood in the doorway. She was holding a rifle. A bolt-action 45–70. On the stock near the trigger guard I could see three raking scratches where a bear had clawed. She pulled back the bolt and pushed a cartridge into the chamber. The bolt was very rusty, but she worked it forward and locked it down with a soft, substantial click.
“It’s Louis’s rifle. It was hidden under the floorboards, in a box. He was looking for this.”
Lance sat down on a kindling splitting stump and rubbed the barrel of his pistol against his temple, muttering, “No, no, no.”
“Lance!” Emma snapped from the doorway. “Lance, look at me.” He swung his head around in her direction.
“Lance, why didn’t you do something about this?”
Lance looked down at the wood chips as he spoke. “I didn’t know where it was. I had to pump up the rubber boat we kept below before I could go ashore. The rifle was gone when I got to the beach. I checked all of the spots where I knew Dad hid things and it wasn’t there. I never… I never figured it was still in the cabin. I thought that crazy fucker really had thrown it in the water. But I didn’t know where. So I threw mine in the bay and told the cops where to find it.”
“Well, it was. Too many people can identify this as his gun.”
She looked at Walt as if from a distance. Then she stared down at the rifle and slowly nodded her head. She was weighing her choices, and I had a bad feeling about how things were tipping.
I stood up. I fumbled in my pocket. I cleared my throat but before I could give my assessment of the situation, Emma fired the rifle.
The bullet hit the bark of the spruce tree two feet from me. She was looking down the iron sights for a second shot. I raised my hands.
“Step down here, Mr. Younger.” She motioned with the front sight.
I walked to the cabin and stood by the wall, my arms in the air.
“We should work something out,” I whispered under my breath. I nodded at Lance.
Walt moved closer to me; we stood almost elbow to elbow. Lance could hold his gun on both of us now, so he was comfortable. Walt’s hands eased into the pockets of his wool jacket.
“Emma, why? Why any of it?” he asked, looking up at her.
She did not pause and she did not waver in her answer. “He humiliated me. He humiliated his children. Then he wanted a divorce. A divorce. What would that leave me with?”
“He was killed to preserve the family?” I know I shouldn’t have put it that way.
She almost smiled at me. She raised the rifle to her shoulder, but then lowered it and sat down on the steps.
“I’m a funny woman, Mr. Younger. I suppose after living with Louis for so many years I have a high tolerance for contradiction.” I saw her fingers tighten around the grips of the 45–70. “But you’re right. There was something more, even if it is hard for anyone else to understand.”
She looked up at me and she narrowed her eyes. “I loved him … completely. We were one body and one flesh.
“This was a new world for me and I gave myself to it. Louis, Alaska, this life … everything was different. I smelled things I never had before. I saw things I could not have even imagined. I gave myself to that new life and to these children. How could I allow that to be taken away from me?”
Lance was standing, shifting his weight from side to side, fiddling with the gun. Norma looked at the ground.
“When I discovered that he loved someone else … I realized that there was part of him, maybe most of him, that was a stranger to me. He was someone I loved, but didn’t know.”
She cradled his rifle on her lap. “These are my children. It’s true that they are half his. But I taught them to speak. I taught them to think and to love. They never really knew their father either. It was better to preserve at least some of his memory and his love than to let him desert them. Us.”
She raised the front sight of the rifle and made figures in the air. “And these children are a damn sight better off with me than in prison.”
Norma brushed her hand across her brow. Then she looked at me and squinted before she spoke.
“It wasn’t Mama, Mr. Younger. I know what you’re thinking. But you’re wrong.
“Why did I shoot him? I don’t think of it that way. I don’t remember the gun or the moment before or after. I just see him fall.
“I loved my papa but I see him fall and something lifts up inside of me, as if… as if I just thought of a word I couldn’t remember. I feel lighter as I see him fall.”
She turned and lifted the stick in front of her foot and tapped it lightly on the toe of her heavy leather boot. “When I was little, my papa took me berry picking. We would work down by the stream and he would tease me about stepping in bear shit. He would tease me and make grunting noises and he would scare me. I would cry and he would laugh. Laugh. He’d say that it was bad luck to step in bear shit. I told my friends in school it was bad luck for girls to step in bear shit, and they laughed, too.
“For a long time I thought they were laughing because it was funny. But then some of them started to call me names. They would laugh and pretend to be drunk and wave bottles at me and yell, ‘Heap bad luck. Heap bad luck.’ They’d act drunk and fall all over themselves laughing.”
She looked up at me and now her ey
es were watering as if the wind was blowing grit into them.
“By the time I was a teenager, I hated his being an Indian. I hated it in school. I hated it when boys would come over and their faces would change when they saw him in front of the TV and they realized where my dark hair came from. I hated it in airports when we traveled. He would walk into the clean, fancy terminals and if he stood in the wrong line people would talk to him too loud and slow. I hated the way he sounded, and I hated the way his hands felt when he had been drinking: soft and squishy, without a grip.
“I hated it… but… I loved picking berries with him. We would pick up Grandma and she would bring big pans that had come from the old cannery days. We carried them down by the river and she would hum slow tunes—bouncy tunes—chants, I guess, but I never knew the words. He would tear off branches and let me eat the ripe berries from them, as if they were lollipops. I liked that.
“When I was a freshman in high school I pretended that he wasn’t my papa at all. He was a guide I had hired. More than a guide, a paid companion. He was devoted to me and he would tell me secrets and bring me treats when I wanted them. He was to be my companion until my real father came to claim me and take me off to San Francisco. I imagined waving from the deck of a steamship to this big Indian man standing in his rubber boots and canvas jacket as my real father wrapped me in a Hudson Bay blanket and led me into our stateroom. But that never happened.
“I loved Papa. I never planned to shoot him.
“I saw them from the bow of the boat. I saw them fighting. First I thought of protecting my papa. I thought of shooting Hawkes, but when I raised Lance’s rifle and the sights lined up on Papa, something lifted up in me and—I pulled the trigger.
