Black Heart, Ivory Bones

Bear It Away MICHAEL CADNUM

Miсhael Cadnum lives in northern California and is a poet and novelist. He is the author of St. Peter’s Wolf, Ghostwright, Calling Home, Skyscape, The Judas Glass, Zero at the Bone, Edge, The Lost and Found House, and other novels. He has also published an illustrated book based on Cinderella called Ella and the Canary Prince, and a novel about Robin Hood and the Sheriff of Nottingham. His most recent collection of poetry is The Cities We Will Never See.

I never liked the woodland, even in my youth, but the forest here has never been one of your lowly hoar-wilds, all crag and moss. It was really very pleasant, a happy mix of pinecones and little red ants, dock and nettles. You wouldn’t want to muss your skirt, going on a picnic in the cockleburs. But it was nice wood, little yellow flowers when the snow melted, and mushrooms shaped like willies. Some of our more prominent watercolorists traveled here to set up their easels, and botanists collected herbs along the streams.

A maiden could go berry picking with the silversmith’s son, or slip off to meet the young professor from down-valley, and if she ran across a bear, it would be one of the old traditional bears, little eyes, big rumps, snuffling the air, trying to see if you were trouble or something to eat. If a bear said anything at all it was in antique bear-tongue, not much to it, really, just good-bye or go away, all a bear needed to know.

From time to time a typical bear fracas broke out. A sow bear killed a miller down by the well, for example, when he stepped on a cub, it being night and the miller having lost his spectacles in the inn. The she-bear threw him over her shoulder and left him by the quarrymen’s privy quite a boneless puddle. But what did we expect? It was reassuring, in a way, having bears to worry about. Kids afraid of the dark were easier to quiet down. A sudden gust or a scuttling acorn on the roof and Mom and Dad would roll their eyes and whisper, “A bear looking for children who won’t eat their cabbage!”

Gentlemen of rude humor would disguise a burp by muttering, “Must’ve been a bear, growling in the glade,” and if things got boring on a long summer’s day, the villagers would unpen the hounds, run down a granddad bruin, and pen the bear in a sand pit. It was sport, all fair-play, joy under a summer’s eve. Bets would flow hand to hand on the question which would expire first, bear or dog. Life was simple. Mosquitoes and holidays, ale and bear skins.

But it changed.

Some people say it was better nutrition, trout multiplying as the rivers ran clear. The weather changed, the magnetic poles shifted — we all had our theories. I don’t know how, but it happened. One day we had dumb bears rolling logs to gobble worms, and the next we had bears in the vicarage library. They were wood-bears, still, and kept off to themselves, when they weren’t stocking up on rhyming dictionaries. But a revolution was underway.

It could be overlooked for a while. Bears still slept half the year and they still had trouble seeing. But when a boar-bear lumbered into the fletcher’s wife one afternoon and offered effusive apologies for treading on her toe, we all knew something profound had happened to bear nature. The bears rushed her to the surgeon, stood around waiting for news of her recovery. Mrs. Fletcher regained her health and sanity, until she stepped out a week later to take some medicinal-sun. A bear made way from the midden, dainty-like, a she-bear, and said, “I hope I see you well.”

Which killed the fletcher’s dame. She died of the shock. Many of us understood exactly. I didn’t mind a bit of sass from a bluejay or the tinsmith’s mutt, but I did think that this was more than mortal humans need endure, a curtsy from a bear wearing a bonnet.

Myself, I was blond, and if the glazier liked the look of me as well as the joiner, why, let them all have an eyeful, was how I always felt. I was charitable with my smiles, but when a bear asked how I was on this finest of mornings, and held the post office door open for me, I hurried right past and never said a word.

A long era of tranquillity was underway: bears writing essays, offering opinions on the likelihood of rain, bears making excellent neighbors. And most humans liked this, an age of peace. But I never got used to bears reading haiku, bears laughing at our human jokes. Months went by, entire seasons, and a bear never ate a single human. Not one. There was bear laughter and bear song, noon and night.

I had a plan.

I wanted a hunter, one of those always just in time to drill a musket shot through a wolf’s lights. And if he was fine of leg and loin, I wouldn’t mind parting the bracken a bit with such a man, not being quite so young as I had been, and looking for the right sort to share my winter nights. Although this was not the point-entire. I wanted to teach the bears why they shouldn’t weave rugs and write plays, and give them a lesson they’d never forget.

I wanted to teach them to keep their bear-talk to themselves. And if the cottage-dwelling men were too weak-kneed to educate the bears, I’d find myself a red-jacketed crack shot and make him mine.

And so I did. He was a square-jawed elk-hunter from the vale to the east. His red jacket was sappy-brown along the sleeves, and he smelled of brandy, but he showed me how he double-powdered both barrels and blew twin holes in my mum’s quilt hanging out to dry — and he paid gold florins for a new one.

He was perfect.

I recall that early morning well, how I tickled him awake. I tugged him from the bed, red-cheeked, unshaven. I remember the dawn as if it were a week ago, although these days I’m the only one alive who can sing the words to a single bear madrigal. I led my hunter to the woods, mist in the tulips, wood smoke in the thatch. I filled him with my scheme, and before I let him yea-or-nay, I kissed him wide-awake and said, “Follow me.”

Bears are fond of walking — or they were, our wise bears used to be. They walked, they slept. Peripatetic brethren, as the priest would say, they were always cooking their oats, howling when the porridge scalded, and using the excuse for another ramble, up one trail and down the next. My hunter and I spied a family, dad, mam, and wee one. They ambled off, blinking in the sunlight, happy as cows to be out in the grass, the little one hopping, rabbit-like. “Stay here,” I whispered to my gunner.

I hid behind a berry bush. I waited, and when the family vanished up the trail, I scurried into the cottage. I violated their breakfast bowls, hot and cold, and made sure they would see the mess when they returned to table. Spoon and finger, I tasted, scooped, and splattered. (It was delicious — just the right amount of honey.) I did what I could with the furniture, the chairs and settles too stout for the likes of me to break. All I could manage was a high chair in the corner, one the bear-lad must have just outgrown.

I broke that into kindling, and left it sowed around the nook. I took myself upstairs. I flung wide the shutters so Redcoat would hear me shriek when the time came, and I settled myself in the largest of the three beds. This mattress was packed with straw so coarse it was like sprawling in a thicket. So I tried the middle bed, just my size, but it was so cratered by the weight of Mistress Griz that I climbed up and down the bedding, clinging to the edges.

Finally I escaped the bed and found the laddie’s bunk, and slept. Why did you fall asleep, moon-calf? I would demand of myself in years to come. And I have no retort. No clever answer to myself. I lay, I slept. Not one to stoop to excuses, but mayhap the hunter’s nip, that brandy wine he said was courage, overdid my wakefulness. “Just a taste,” he had said, tasting some himself.

I never heard them on their way. When the three rambled back into the cottage, I had no inkling they were home, peering at their porridge, aghast at the broken high chair, nosing the air. Or perhaps I had a hint of what was happening, in one part of my mind.

Step by step, they ascended to the bedroom. The oak door creaked. Their heavy steps were slow, the floorboards groaning. Only then did I hear them, words as clear as any tinker’s. “What’s this — my pillow all mussed,” said the father.

“And here, my mattress half in, half out,” said mum-bear, nearsighted, nose to her bed. “And me, and me!” cried the pup-bruin. “My bed too!” he cried.

I am now the only one in the land who knows, how like to our own speech it was, this language, this Bear tongue. “Mine too,” he stammered, “and she is still — still here!”

I didn’t have to feign my horror, yelling from the window, tangled in a sheet, screaming, bellowing. I called out, “What are you waiting for?” But my huntsman was lying in plain sight, sound asleep, sunlight in the green grass gleaming off his gun.

“She’s here, she’s here!” cried the cub. Both parents trying to make me out, blinking in the bright morning light through the open window.

I ran home.

In my haste I soaked my skirts in the ford, dragged them in the thistles, muddied them and tore them, all the way to hearth and safety. I was scolded by my mum, and I sobbed into the shot-rent quilt, swearing virtue, good deeds, and chastity to God.

I kept my visit secret. And a perfect secret it was too.

Except that the silence fell.

No ursine gardeners peddled roots from door to door. No kindly bear held the pasture gate to let a goodwife pass. No bear song drifted from the meadow. Nine days later a pigeon-hunter accidentally uncovered the powder horn, one weather-glazed hunter’s boot, and one sap-stained quarter of a jacket.

“A mishap,” said the magistrate, eyeing the tooth marks in the shoulder of the scrap. “A lamentable misadventure,” he said with sadness. “A mystery.” Anyone could see the nature of the hunter’s sudden end, but the sheriff said it was beyond us all, what might have taken place. Because the bears were loved, and loved in return, in their bluff, like-human way.

But all the bears had vanished. Their cottages stood dark. No one knew what caused this blight, or where the speaking grizzlies repaired to, why they left our woods.

No one except myself.

The last time I saw a bear beside a creek, not a fortnight past, she stood on her two hind paws and listened while I bid her a good evening. “And good health to you,” I said. She turned away and left me alone, the stream beside me running like a song.

Only I know, and I keep it to myself. But I see too clearly what happened. I know exactly how the huntsman leaped to his feet, face red with sleep and drink. I see too well in the eye of my mind how the redcoat brandished his double-shotted gun.

I see him drawing aim upon the cub, and in my waking dream I see what a bear can eat for breakfast, when she has to on a sunny morn.

While not originally a part of the folk tale canon, “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” (an English story from the nineteenth century) has entered the oral tradition to become a treasured piece of our cultural lore. With its depiction of domestic bears, with favorite chairs and porridge for breakfast, and the daring and dangerously innocent Goldilocks, the story continues to intrigue generations of children and adults. Cadnum says that he loves to take a traditional story and turn it upside down, or inside out, to see the tale with new eyes.