MaddAddam

The Story of when Zeb was lost in the Mountains, and ate the Bear

And so Crake poured away the chaos, to make a safe place where you could live. And then …

We know the story of Crake. We know it many times. Now tell us the story of Zeb, Oh Toby.

The story of how Zeb ate a bear!

Yes! Ate a bear! A bear! What is a bear?

We want to hear the story of Zeb. And the bear. The bear he ate.

Crake wants us to hear it. If Snowman-the-Jimmy was awake, he would tell us that story.

Well then. Let me listen to the shiny thing of Snowman-the-Jimmy. Then I can hear the words.

I am listening very hard. It doesn’t help me to listen when you are singing.

So. This is the story of Zeb and the bear. Only Zeb is in the story at first. He is all alone. The bear comes later. Maybe tomorrow the bear will come. For bears to come, you must be patient.

Zeb was lost. He sat down under a tree. The tree was in a big open space, wide and flat, like the beach except there was no sand and no sea, only some chilly pools and a lot of moss. All around but quite far away, there were mountains.

How did he get there? He flew there, in a … never mind. That part is in a different story. No, he cannot fly like a bird. Not any more.

Mountains? Mountains are very large and high rocks. No, those are not mountains, those are buildings. Buildings fall down, and then they make a crash. Mountains fall down too, but they do it very slowly. No, the mountains did not fall down on Zeb.

So Zeb looked at the mountains that were all around him but quite far away, and he thought, How will I get through these mountains? They are so large and high.

He needed to get through the mountains because the people were on the other side. He wanted to be with the people. He didn’t want to be all alone. Nobody wants to be all alone, do they?

No, they were not people like you. They had clothes on. A lot of clothes, because it was cold there. Yes, it was in the time of the chaos, before Crake poured it all away.

So Zeb looked at the mountains and the pools and the moss, and he thought, What will I eat? And then he thought, Those mountains have a lot of bears living in them.

A bear is a very big, fur-covered animal with big claws and many sharp teeth. Bigger than a bobkitten. Bigger than a wolvog. Bigger than a pigoon. This big.

It speaks with a growl. It gets very hungry. It tears things apart.

Yes, bears are the Children of Oryx. I don’t know why she made them so big, with very sharp teeth.

Yes, we must be kind to them. The best way of being kind to bears is not to be very close to them.

I don’t think there are any bears very close to us right now.

And Zeb thought, Maybe a bear has smelled me, and maybe it is coming right now, because it is hungry, it is starving, and it wants to eat me. And I will have to fight the bear, and all I have is this quite small knife, and this stick that can make holes in things. And I will have to win the fight, and kill the bear, and then I will have to eat it.

The bear will come into the story quite soon.

Yes, Zeb will win the fight. Zeb always wins the fight. Because that’s what happens.

Yes, he knew Oryx would be sad. Zeb felt sorry for the bear. He didn’t want to hurt it. But he didn’t want to be eaten by it. You don’t want to be eaten by a bear, do you? Neither do I.

Because bears can’t eat only leaves. Because it would make them sick.

Anyway, if Zeb didn’t eat the bear he would have died, and then he wouldn’t be here with us right now. And that would be a sad thing too, wouldn’t it?

If you don’t stop crying I can’t go on with the story.

The Fur Trade

There’s the story, then there’s the real story, then there’s the story of how the story came to be told. Then there’s what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.

In the story of Zeb and the bear, Toby has left out the dead man, whose name was Chuck. He, too, was lost among the pools and moss and mountains and bears. He, too, did not know the way out. It’s unfair to deny him a mention, erase him from time, but putting him into the story would cause more knots and tangles than Toby is prepared to deal with. For instance, she doesn’t yet know how this dead man wormed his way into the story in the first place.

“Too bad the fucker died,” says Zeb. “I’d have twisted it out of him.”

“It?”

“Who hired him. What they wanted. Where he would have taken me.”

“Died is a euphemism, I take it. He didn’t have a heart attack,” says Toby.

“Don’t be harsh. You know what I mean.”

Zeb was lost. He sat down under a tree.

Or not lost completely. He did have a rough idea of where he was: he was somewhere on the Mackenzie Mountain Barrens, hundreds of miles from anywhere with fast food. And not under a tree, more like beside, and not a tree exactly, more like a shrub; though not bushy, more like spindly. A spindly kind of spruce. He noticed the details of the trunk, the small dead underbranches, the grey lichen on it, frilly and intricate and see-through, like whores’ underpants.

“What do you know about whore’s underpants?” says Toby.

“More than you want me to,” says Zeb. “So. When you focus on details like that — close up, really clear, totally useless — you know you’re in shock.”

The AOH ’thopter was still smouldering. Lucky he got clear before it burst, or before the blimp component did, and thank shit the digital release on the seatbelts had still been working: otherwise he’d have been dead.

Chuck was lying belly down on the tundra, his head at a sick angle, peering over his own shoulder one-eighty degrees, like an owl. Not looking at Zeb, though. Looking up at the sky. No angels there, or none had showed up yet.

Blood was coming from somewhere on the top of Zeb’s head, he could feel the warmth trickling down. Scalp wound. Not dangerous, but they bleed a lot. Your head’s the most shallow part of you, his sociopath of a father had been in the habit of saying. Except for your brain. And your soul, supposing you’ve been blessed with one, which I doubt. The Rev had been a big cheerleader for souls, in addition to which he thought he was the boss of them.

Now Zeb found himself wondering if Chuck had a soul, and if it was still hovering over his body like a feeble smell. “Chuck, you stupid fuck,” Zeb said out loud. If he’d been given a brief to kidnap himself on behalf of the brainscrapers, he’d have done a way better job of it than Chuck had, the fuckwit.

Too bad Chuck was dead, in a way — he must’ve had some good sides to him, maybe he liked puppies — but now there was one less asshole in the world, and wasn’t that a plus? A checkmark in the column of the forces of light. Or darkness, depending on who was doing the double-entry moral accounting.

Though Chuck hadn’t been an ordinary asshole; not grouchy, not aggressive, not like Zeb himself on his asshole setting. Too much the other way. Too friendly, too eager to be on message, man is obsolete, dooming ourselves to extinction, restore the balance of nature and babble babble, he overdid it so much that he sounded preposterous, and in an outfit like Bearlift, with its full quota of preposterous green-hued furfuckers, that took some effort.

They weren’t all furfuckers, however: some claimed to be along for the challenge. Adventurous, devil-may-care, no strings on me, tattoo-upholstered, with greasy ponytails like bikers in old movies — boundary-pushing muscle-flexers, boot soles a little too hot for ordinary strolling. That was how Zeb had positioned himself: bulked up on natural steroids, do what had to be done, could take the pace, wings on the ankles, needed the money, liked the shadowy rimlands where nobody official could stick their tentacles into your back pocket, within which the contents of other people’s hacked bank accounts might be bashfully lurking.

The card-carrying furfuckers looked down their narrow green true-believer noses at Zeb and his edgy like, but they didn’t push that my-shit-don’t-stink agenda too hard. They needed the manpower because not everyone on the planet thought it was a great idea to aero/orno/helithopter numerous dumpsterloads of rancid biotrash around the far north so a bunch of mangy Ursidae could gobble it free of charge.

“This was before the oil shortage really kicked in?” says Toby. “And the carbon garboil business took off. Otherwise, they’d never have let you waste such valuable primary material on bears.”

“It was before a lot of things,” says Zeb. “Though the oil prices were already getting pretty steep.”

Bearlift had four old-model ’thopters they’d bought on the grey market. The Flying Pufferfish was their nickname. ’thopters claimed to use biodesign: they had a helium/hydrogen gas-filled blimp with a skin that sucked in or exhaled molecules like a fish’s swim bladder that contracted and expanded and allowed them to lift heavy weights. Plus, they had stabilizing ventral fins, a couple of heli-blades for hovering, and four bird-like flapping wings for manoeuvrability at slow speeds. The upside being minimum fuel consumption, ultra-high freight weight, and the ability to fly low and slow; the downside being that a ’thopter flight took forever, the software on the things failed regularly, and few among them knew how to fix the brutes. Questionable digimechanics had to be called in, or rather smuggled in from Brazil, where the digital darkside flourished.

They’d hack you as soon as look at you down there. Roaring business in politicians’ medical records and sordid affairs, celebrities’ plastic surgeries — that was the small end. At the big end it was one Corp hacking another. Hacking a powerful Corp was the kind of thing that could get you into the real crapola, even if you were firewalled by being on the blackbox payroll of another powerful Corp.

“So I suppose you did it,” says Toby. “The kind of thing with the real crapola.”

“Yeah, I’d been down there, just making a living,” says Zeb. “That was one reason I was taking a breather at Bearlift: it was ultra far from Brazil.”

Bearlift was a scam, or partly a scam. It didn’t take anyone with half a brain too long to figure that one out. Unlike many scams it was well meaning, but it was a scam nonetheless. It lived off the good intentions of city types with disposable emotions who liked to think they were saving something — some rag from their primordial authentic ancestral past, a tiny shred of their collective soul dressed up in a cute bear suit. The concept was simple: the polar bears are starving because the ice is almost gone and they can’t catch seals any more, so let’s feed them our leftovers until they learn to adapt, “adapt being the buzzword of those days, if you’ll recall, though I doubt you’re old enough; you must still have been in playskirts. Learning to wiggle your little mantrap.”

“Stop flirting,” said Toby.

“Why? You like it.”

“I remember adapt,” says Toby. “It was another way of saying tough luck. To people you weren’t going to help out.”

“You got it,” said Zeb. “Anyway, feeding trash to the bears didn’t help them adapt, it just taught them that food falls out of the sky. They’d start slavering every time they heard the sound of a ’thopter, they had their very own cargo cult.

“But here’s the scammiest part. Yes, the ice had mostly melted; yes, some polar bears had starved, but the rest of them were drifting southwards, mating up with the grizzlies, from which they’d separated themselves a mere two hundred thousand years ago. So you’d get bears that were white with brown patches or bears that were brown with white patches, or all brown or all white, but whatever was on the outside was no predictor of temperament: the pizzlies would avoid you most of the time, like grizzlies; the grolars would attack you most of the time, like polar bears. You never knew which kind any given bear might be. What you did know was that you didn’t want your ’thopter to fall out of the air over bear country.”

As Zeb’s had just done.

“You stupid fuck,” he said again to Chuck. “And whoever hired you is a double stupid fuck,” he added, not that they were listening. Or — he had a sudden nasty thought — maybe they were.

Crash

Everything was going fine at Bearlift until Chuck turned up. Zeb was in some trouble at that time, true enough …

“Unlike at any other time,” says Toby.

“You laughing at me? Victim of a confused youth due to parental abuse? Plus, I grew too fast?”

“Would I laugh?”

“Matter of fact, you would,” says Zeb. “Heart like shale. What you need is a good fracking.”

Zeb was in some trouble at that time, true enough, but nobody at Bearlift Central seemed to know or care: half of them were in trouble themselves, so it was Don’t ask, Don’t tell.

The chores were straightforward: load up the edible refuse, in Whitehorse or Yellowknife, sometimes maybe Tuk, where the Beaufort Sea offshore oilrig tankers dumped their garbage when they weren’t tipping it illegally. The oilrigs still produced a lot of real-animal-protein leftovers in those days because nothing was too good for the tanker crews. Pork — they ate a lot of pork byproducts — and chicken, or something next door to it. When it was labmeat it was top grade, camouflaged in sausages or meatloaf so you really couldn’t tell.

You’d pack the postmeal slops into the ’thopter, then grab a beer, then fly the ’thopter to the Bearlift drop locations, hover while dumping off the loads, fly back. Nothing to it except mind-numbing boredom unless there was bad weather or mechanical failure. In that case you’d have to set the ’thopter down while trying to give the mountain-sides a miss, then wait out the weather or kick your heels until Repair showed up. Then repeat. Pretty routine. The worst of it was listening to the green-nosed furfucker sermonizing that went on in the Bearlift-town bars when you were trying to get spongefaced on the crapulous booze they hauled in there and dispensed by the vatful.

Apart from that, it was eat, sleep, and on a good day have a tussle with one or another of the girl staff, though Zeb had to be careful about that because some of them were snarly and others were taken, and he tried to stay out of brawls, never having seen any percentage in rolling around under bar stools with some enraged moron who considered he’d staked eternal twat rights because of his pre-eminent cock and his dimples, and who might have a knife. Unlikely a handgun any more because it was around that time that the CorpSeCorps was confiscating those, having raised the spurious banner of civic safety and thus effectively securing a monopoly for themselves on killing at a distance. Some guys hid their Glocks and other name brands, dug them in under stones in case of dire need, but for the same reason they were unlikely to be carrying. Though not every law and declaration was respected up there in the boonies. Things in the north were always a little fuzzy around the edges, law-wise. So you never knew.

Anyway, the girls. If there was a Back Off sign on a little or big or medium-sized set of cheeks, he always backed off. But if someone crept into his dorm room under cover of darkness, who was he to whimper? He’d been told since a child that he had the morals of a sowbug, and he hated to defeat expectations, in addition to which rejecting a girl’s overture would be hurtful to her self-esteem. Some of those wouldn’t have stood up too well under the light, but one of them had an amazing floppy ass, and another one had a set of boobs like two bowling balls in a string bag, and …

“Too much information,” says Toby.

“Don’t be jealous,” says Zeb. “They’re dead now. You can’t be jealous of a bunch of dead women.”

Toby says nothing. The lush corpse of Zeb’s one-time lover, Lucerne, floats in the air between them, unseen, unmentioned, and certainly unburied as far as Toby is concerned.

“Alive is better than dead,” says Zeb.

“No contest there,” says Toby. “But on second thought you never know till you’ve tried.”

Zeb laughs. “You have an amazing ass too,” he says. “Not floppy, though. Compact.”

“Tell about Chuck,” says Toby.

Chuck entered Bearlift Central as though tiptoeing into a forbidden room while pretending he had a right to be there. Furtive but assertive. To Zeb’s mind, his clothes were too new. They looked as if Chuck had just come from one of those crispy outfitter shops, zippers and Velcro and flaps all over, like some kind of kinky video puzzle game. Undo this man, find the leprechaun, win a prize. Never trust a man with new clothes.

“But clothes have to be new sometimes,” says Toby. “Or they did back then. They weren’t created old.”

“Real men know how to dirty up their clothes in about one second,” says Zeb. “They writhe around in mud. Apart from the clothes, his teeth were too big and white. When I see those kinds of teeth, I always want to give them a gentle tap with a bottle. See if they’re fake, watch them shatter. My dad, the Rev, had teeth like that. He used whitener on them. The teeth plus his tan made him look like some kind of light-up deep-sea devilfish or else a long-dead horse’s head in a desert. It was worse when he smiled than when he didn’t.”

“Back off on the childhood,” says Toby. “You’ll get woeful.”

“Woe, your foe? Say no to woe? Don’t preach at me, babe.”

“It works for me. Backing off woe.”

“You sure about that?”

“So, Chuck.”

“So. There was something about his eyes. Chuck’s eyes. Laminated eyes. Hard and shiny. They had a sort of transparent lid over them.”

The first time Chuck appeared at the canteen table with his tray and said, “Mind if I join you?” he scanned Zeb, an overall back-and-forth of those laminated eyes. Like scanning a barcode.

Zeb glanced up at him. He didn’t say yes, he didn’t say no. He gave an all-purpose grunt and continued work on his rubbery conundrum of a sausage. You’d have expected Chuck to start with personal questions — where you from, how’d you get here, and so forth — but he didn’t. His opening ploy was Bearlift. He said what a great org it was, but since that got no nodding and yupping from Zeb, he intimated that he was only there because he’d hit a bad patch in his life and was, you know, keeping quiet for a while, until things blew over.

“What’d you do, pick your nose?” said Zeb, and Chuck gave a dead-horse-teeth laugh. He said that he guessed Bearlift was for guys who, you know, sort of like the Foreign Legion, and Zeb said the foreign what, and that was the end of that one.

Not that he could shake the guy by being rude. Chuck backed off, but he still managed to be ever-present. Zeb would be at the bar labouring away at the next morning’s hangover and all of a sudden there would be Chuck, buddying up, offering to get the next round. Go to the can, take a leak, and there would be Chuck, materializing like ectoplasm, taking a leak two stalls down; or Zeb would be sliding round the corner in the seedier part of Whitehorse and, guess what, Chuck would be sliding round the next corner over. He most likely went through Zeb’s stuff in Zeb’s broom closet of a room when Zeb wasn’t in it.

“He was welcome to it,” says Zeb. “Nothing in my dirty laundry but dirty laundry because the real dirty laundry was in my head.”

But what was his game? Because it was obvious he had one. At first Zeb thought Chuck was gay and was about to start some trouser nuzzling, but it wasn’t that.

Over the next few weeks Chuck and Zeb had flown a couple of lifts together. There were always two in a Pufferfish; you’d take turns dozing. Zeb tried to avoid partnering with Chuck, who by this time was giving him the nape prickles, but on the first occasion the guy Zeb was supposed to have flown with was called away by an aunt’s funeral and Chuck had inserted himself into the slot, and the second time the other guy got food poisoning. Zeb wondered if Chuck had paid the two of them off to go missing. Or strangled the aunt, or put E. coli in the pizza, to make it convincing.

He waited for Chuck to pop the question while they were in midair. Maybe he knew about some of Zeb’s earlier capers and was hiring for a hitherto-unknown bunch of darksiders who wanted Zeb to tackle a bolus of seriously forbidden hackery; or maybe it was an extortion outfit after some plutocrat, or a hireling connected with IP thieves who needed a skein of professional trackwork to further their kidnapping of a Corp brainiac.

Or maybe it was a sting — Chuck would propose some flagrantly illegal jest, record Zeb agreeing to do it, and then the giant lobster claws of what passed for the justice system would descend and clench; or maybe there’d be some goofy blackmail demand, as if you could get shit from a stone.

But nothing abnormal happened on these two runs. They must’ve been soothers, to set Zeb at ease. Signal that Chuck was harmless. Was his dinkiness a deep cover?

It almost worked. Zeb started thinking he himself was paranoid. Twitching at shadows. Worrying about a slithery nobody like Chuck.

That morning — the morning of the crash — had started out as usual. Breakfast, some anonymous bunwich with mysterious ingredients, couple of mugs of caffeine substitute, slice of toasted sawdust. Bearlift got its supplies on the cheap: It considered its cause to be so noble and worthy you were supposed to be humble, eat food stand-ins, save the good stuff for the bears.

Then loading up the offal, biodegradable sacks of it forklifted into the belly of the Puffer. Zeb’s scheduled flying partner had been scratched off that day’s list — cut his foot dancing barefoot on broken glass to show how tough he was in one of the local knocking shops while higher than the ionosphere on some cretinous pharmaceutical, it was said — and Zeb was supposed to be doubling with an okay guy called Rodge. But when he went to get in, there was Chuck, all togged up with his crispy zippers and Velcro flaps, smiling with his enormous white horse teeth but not with his laminated eyes.

“Rodge get a phone call?” said Zeb. “Grandmother died?”

“Father, in fact,” said Chuck. “Nice day. Hey, I brought you a beer.” He had one for himself too, just to show he was a regular guy.

Zeb grunted, took the beer, twisted off the top. “Need to take a leak,” he said. In the can he poured the beer down the hole. Top seemed to be sealed on, but you could fake those things, you could fake just about anything. He didn’t want to swill or munch any item that had been in Chuck’s hands.

The Puffers were always complex while taking off: the helicopter blades and the helium/hydrogen blimp provided lift, but the trick was to get high enough before you started the wings flapping, and to cut the heli-blades at exactly the right time, or the whole thing could tip and spiral.

But there was no problem that day. The flight was standard, threading the valleys through and around the Pelly Mountains, pausing to bombard the landscape a few times with bear yummies; then over to the high-altitude Barrens with the Mackenzies all around, postcard snow on the tops, with a couple more drops; then crossing the remains of the Old Canol Trail, still marked by the occasional World War Two telephone pole.

The ’thopter responded well. It stopped flapping and started hovering right over the dump spots, the hatch opened as it was supposed to, and the biotrash tumbled out. At the last feeding station, two bears — one mostly white, one mostly brown — were already cantering towards their personal garbage dump as the ’thopter approached; Zeb could see their fur rippling like a shag rug being shaken. Being that close was always a bit of a thrill.

Zeb turned the ’thopter and headed southwest, back towards Whitehorse. Then he handed over to Chuck because the clock said it was Zeb’s turn to catch some zizz. He lay back and blew up the neck pillow and closed his eyes, but he didn’t allow himself to drift off because Chuck had been far too alert during the entire flight. You don’t get that geared up over a non-event.

They were about two-thirds of the way to the first narrow mountain valley when Chuck made his move. Through his almost-closed eyes, Zeb saw the one hand moving stealthily over towards his thigh, holding a thread of glitter. He sat up fast and whacked Chuck across the windpipe. Not hard enough, though, because although Chuck gasped — not a gasp, hard to describe it — although he made that sound and dropped whatever he’d been holding, he grabbed at Zeb’s neck with both hands and Zeb whacked him again, and of course nobody was flying the controls at that point, and in the thrashing around something must’ve been hit by a leg or a hand or an elbow, and that’s when the ’thopter folded two of its four wings and tipped sideways and went down.

And Zeb found himself sitting under a tree, staring at the tree trunk. Astonishing, how clear the frilly edges were, of the lichen; light grey with a tinge of green, and an edge that was darker, so intricate …

Stand up, he ordered himself. You need to get moving. But his body didn’t hear.

Supplies

A long time later — it seemed like a long time, he felt as if he was wading through transparent sludge — Zeb rolled to one side, put his hands on the ground, pushed himself to his feet beside the spindly kind of spruce. Then he threw up. He hadn’t noticed feeling sick right before: he just suddenly puked.

“A lot of animals will do that,” he says. “Under stress. Means you don’t have to put the energy into digesting. Lightens the load.”

“Were you cold?” says Toby.

Zeb’s teeth were chattering, he was shivering. He took Chuck’s down vest, added it to his own. It wasn’t ripped much. He checked the pockets, found Chuck’s cellphone, mashed it with a rock to destroy any GPS and eavesdropping functions. It started ringing just before he did the mashing; it took everything not to answer it and pretend he was Chuck. Maybe he should’ve answered, though, and said that Zeb was dead. He might’ve learned something. A couple of minutes later his own phone rang; he waited until it stopped, then mashed it as well.

Chuck had a few more toys, though nothing Zeb didn’t have himself. Pocketknife, bear spray, bug spray, folded-up tinfoil space-age survival blanket, those things. By great good luck the bear gun they always carried with them in case of groundings and attacks had been tossed out along with Chuck. Bear guns were the exception to the new no-guns rules because even the dickwad CorpSeCorps bureaucrats knew you needed a bear gun up there. The Corps didn’t like Bearlift, but they didn’t try to shut it down either, though they could have done that with one finger. It served a function for them, sounded a note of hope, distracted folks from the real action, which was bulldozing the planet flat and grabbing anything of value. They had no objection to the standard Bearlift ad, with a smiling green furfucker telling everyone what a sterling lot of good Bearlift was doing, and please send more cash or you’ll be guilty of bearicide. The Corps even put some of the cash in themselves. “That was back when they were still massaging their trust-me images,” says Zeb. “Once they got a hammerlock on power, they didn’t have to bother so much.”

Zeb almost stopped shivering when he saw the bear gun. He could’ve hugged it: at least now he might have half a chance. He didn’t find the needle, though, the one Chuck was going to stick into him; too bad about that, he would’ve liked to have known what was in it. Knockout potion, most likely. Freeze-frame his waking self, then fly him to some seedy rendezvous where the brainscrapers hired by who-knows-who would be waiting to strip-mine his neural data, suck out everything he’d ever hacked and everyone he’d ever hacked for, then leave him a pithed and shrivelled husk, staggering around with induced amnesia in a far-distant ravaged swamp until the local inhabitants stole his trousers and recycled his organs for the transplant biz.

But even if he’d managed to get hold of the needle, what then? Test it out on himself? Stick it in a lemming? “Still, I could have kept it in reserve, for emergencies,” says Zeb.

“Emergencies?” says Toby, smiling in the dark. “This wasn’t an emergency?”

“No, a real emergency,” says Zeb. “Like running into some other person out there. That would be an emergency. Stands to reason it would be a madman.”

“Was there any string?” says Toby. “In the pockets. You never know when string will come in handy. Or some rope.”

“String. Yeah, now that you mention it. And a roll of fishing line, we always carried that, with a few hooks. Fire-lighter. Mini-binocs. Compass. Bearlift gave us all that Boy Scout stuff, survival basics. I didn’t take Chuck’s compass though, I already had one. You don’t need two compasses.”

“Candy bar?” says Toby. “Energy rations?”

“Yeah, couple of shitty little Joltbars, faux nuts. Package of cough drops. I took those. Plus.” He pauses.

“Plus what?” says Toby. “Go on.”

“Okay, warning: this is gross. I took some of Chuck. Hacked it off with the pocketknife, kind of sawed it. Chuck had a fold-up waterproof jacket, so I wrapped it in that. Not much to eat up there in the Barrens, we all knew that, we’d had the Bearlift course. Rabbits, ground squirrels, mushrooms, but I wouldn’t have time to hunt for any of that. Anyway, you can die of eating nothing but rabbits. Rabbit starvation, they called it. No fat on those things. It’s like that whatchamacallit diet — the all-protein one. You start to dissolve your own muscles. Your heart gets very thin.”

“What part of Chuck did you take?” says Toby. She’s surprised she doesn’t feel squeamish; she might have, once, back when squeamish was an option.

“The fattest part,” says Zeb. “The boneless part. The part you’d have taken. Or any sane person.”

“Did you feel bad about it?” says Toby. “Stop patting my bum.”

“Why?” says Zeb. “Nah, I didn’t feel too bad. He’d have done the same. Maybe a stroking action, like this?”

“I’m too skinny,” says Toby.

“Yeah, you could use a little more padding. I’ll bring you a box of chocolates, if I can find any. Fatten you up.”

“Add some flowers,” says Toby. “Roll out the full courtship ritual. I bet you never did that in your life.”

“You’d be surprised,” says Zeb. “I’ve presented bouquets in my day. Of a kind.”

“Go on,” says Toby, who doesn’t want to think about Zeb’s bouquets or what kind they were, or who he may have given them to. “There you are. Mountains in the distance, part of Chuck lying on the ground and the rest in your pocket. What time was it?”

“Maybe three in the afternoon, maybe five, shit, maybe even eight, it would still have been light then,” says Zeb. “I’d lost track. It was mid-July, did I say that? Sun hardly sets at all then, up there. Just sort of dips below the horizon, makes a pretty red rim. Then in a few hours up it comes again. That place isn’t above the Arctic Circle, but it’s up so high it’s tundra: two-hundred-year-old willows like horizontal vines, and the wildflowers all bloom at once because the summer’s only a couple of weeks long. Not that I was noticing any wildflowers right then.”

He thought maybe he should get Chuck out of sight. He put Chuck’s pants back on and stuffed him under one of the ’thopter wings. Changed boots with him — Chuck’s were better anyway, and they more or less fit — and left a foot sticking out so anyone looking from a distance would think it was Zeb. He figured he might be safer dead, at least in the short-term.

When Bearlift Central saw they’d lost communication, they were bound to send somebody. Most likely it would be Repair. Once they discovered there was nothing left to repair and that nobody was sitting around setting off little flares and waving a white hanky, they’d go away. That was the ethos: don’t waste fuel on dead bodies. Let nature recycle them. The bears would take care of it, the wolves, the wolverines, the ravens, and so forth.

But the Bearlifters might not be the only ones who would come to have a look. For his brain-snatch caper, Chuck clearly wasn’t working with the Bearlifters: if he had been, he wouldn’t have hesitated to try something right at the base, and he would’ve had help. Zeb would already be a lobotomized shell parked in some zombie town, ex-mining, ex-oil, with a fake passport and no fingerprints. Not that they’d even bother going that far because who would ever miss him?

Chuck’s bosses had to be elsewhere, then: they were wherever it was they’d phoned from. But how close was that? Norman Wells, Whitehorse? Anywhere with an airstrip. Zeb needed to move away from the crash as fast as possible, find a place with cover. Which was not so easy on the next-to-bare-naked tundra.

Grolars and pizzlies could do it, though, and they were bigger. But also more experienced.

Bunkie

Zeb started hiking. The ’thopter had come down on a gentle hillside sloping to the west, and west was the direction he took. He had a rough map of the whole area in his head. Too bad he didn’t have the paper map, the one they always kept open on their knees when flying up there in case of digital failure.

The tundra was hard walking. Spongy, waterlogged, with hidden pools and slippery moss and treacherous mounds of tussock grass. There were parts of old airplanes sticking out of the peat — a strut here, a blade there, detritus from rash twentieth-century bush pilots caught by fog or sudden winds, long ago. He saw a mushroom, left it alone: he knew little about mushrooms, but some were hallucinogenic. That’s all he’d need, an encounter with the ’shroom god while green and purple teddybears skimmed towards him on tiny wings, grinning pinkly. The day had been surreal enough already.

The bear gun was loaded, and he kept the spray ready. If you surprised a bear it would charge. The spray was no good unless you could see the reds of its eyes, so you had a narrow time window — spray and then shoot. If it was a pizzly, that’s how things would go. But a grolar would stalk you, and come up from behind.

In a wet patch of sand he found a print, left front paw, and, farther on, some fresh scat. They were most likely watching him right now. They knew he had a packet of blood and muscle, no matter how tidily wrapped: they could smell it. They could smell his fear.

His feet were already drenched, despite Chuck’s superior boots. Those boots didn’t fit as well as he’d assumed they would. He pictured his feet turning to pallid, blistery dough inside his socks. To take his mind off them — and off the bears, and off dead Chuck, off everything — and to make some noise to warn the pizzlies so neither he nor they would be surprised, he sang a song. It was a habit left over from his so-called youth, when he’d whistle in the dark, whatever dark he’d been locked into. In the dark, in the darkness, in the darkness that was there even when it was light.

Dad’s a sadist, Mom’s a creep,

Close your eyes and go to sleep.

No, not sleep, even though he was so tired now. He needed to keep going. Forced march.

Idiotic, idiotic, idiotic, idiotic,

Maybe I’m a really bad, a really bad, a bad psychotic.

There was a line of thicker green downhill that signalled a creek. He headed towards it, over the hillocks and the moss and the bare gravelly spots where pebbles had boiled to the surface during the deep frost of the winters. It wasn’t particularly cold on that day, it was in fact hot in the sun, but he was still shivering in fits, like a wet dog shaking. He hugged Chuck’s vest around himself, on top of his own.

When he was almost to the creek — it was more of a river, it had a swift current — he thought, What if it’s bugged? The vest. What if there’s a tiny transmitter sewn into it somewhere? They’ll think Chuck is alive and moving, though mysteriously not answering his phone. They’ll send someone to pick him up.

He took the vest off, waded across the creek to where the flow was the strongest, held the vest underwater. It puffed with trapped air, it wasn’t going to sink. He could put stones in the pockets; but better, he let it float away, away from him. He watched it sail downstream like some odd bloated jellyfish, thinking, That was possibly not very fucking bright. I am not focusing.

He scooped cold water into his mouth — Don’t drink too much, you’ll waterlog — wondering if he’d just swallowed a pisspotful of beaver fever. But surely there were no beavers up here. What could you catch from wolves? Rabies but not from drinking. Dissolved moose poop — would that have tiny worms in it that would suck and tunnel? Some kind of liver fluke?

Why are you standing in the water talking out loud? he asked. In plain view. Go along the creek valley, he ordered. Keep to the shrubbery, out of sight. He was counting in his head: how long would it take from the moment Chuck hadn’t answered his phone? Maybe two hours, if you factored in the what-went-wrong panic, the meeting they’d call, by remote or otherwise, the messaging, the wheel-spinning and buck-passing and veiled recriminations. All that crap.

Shoulder-high willows here, sheltered from the wind; grasses, bushes. Flies, blackflies, mosquitoes. Drove the caribou mad sometimes, it was said. You’d see them floating across the muskeg on their wide snow-shoe feet, running to nowhere. He used some of the bug spray: not too much, he needed to ration it. Worked his way west, towards where he remembered — he thought he remembered — that he would hit the remnants of the Canol Road. Nothing much left of that road now, but as he recalled from his overhead flights, there were a few buildings along here. An old bunkie, a shed or two.

He aimed for a leaning telegraph pole, an archaic wooden one. There was a tangle of wire beside it, and a caribou skeleton, the antlers snarled; farther on, an oil drum, then two oil drums, then a red truck, in almost pristine condition but no tires. Local hunters most likely took them, carted them away on their four-by-fours, back when they could afford the fuel to come in this far for game. They’d have had some use for tires like those. The truck was that rounded silhouette, streamlined, from the 1940s, which was when the road was built. Some bureauscheme to transport oil inland through a pipeline during World War Two, to keep it from being blown up by coastal submarines. They’d brought a whole bunch of soldiers up from the South to build the system, black guys, a lot of them. They’d never been in subzero cold and five-day blizzards and twenty-four-hour darkness; they must’ve thought they were in hell. Local legend had it a third of them went crazy. He could see going crazy here, even without the blizzards.

One foot sore now, must be a blister, but he couldn’t stop to look. He hopped along the crumbled ribbon of the road, shrubs taller and nearby, one eye on the sky, and there was the bunkie. Long low building, wood, no door, but still a roof on it.

Quick, into the shadow. Then he waited. It was so quiet.

Plates of junkyard metal, scraps of wood, rusted wire. Beds must have been over there. Armchair ripped apart. Radio shell, must have been once; the rounded breadloaf shape of that decade. A knob on it still. Spoon. Remains of a stove. Smell of tar. Sunlight through ceiling crack, sifting through dust. Wisps of long-gone desolation, bleached-out grief.

The waiting was worse than the walking. Parts of him throbbed: feet, heart. His breath was so raucous.

Then he wondered if he himself was bugged; if Chuck had done that, just in case — slipped a mini-transmitter into his back pocket when he wasn’t looking. If so, he was barbecue: they could be hearing him breathing right now. They’d even have heard him singing. They’d pinpoint him, shoot a mini-rocket at him, and poof.

Nothing to be done.

After — what? an hour? — he saw the ornodrone coming in low. Yes, from the northeast: Norman Wells. It went straight to the crash and made a couple of passes, transmitting visuals. Whoever was controlling it back at its base made a decision. It fired at the broken wing where Chuck lay concealed, couple of thuds. Then it blew up whatever was left of the ’thopter. It was as if Zeb could hear the voices: Nobody left alive. You sure? Couldn’t be. Both of them? Has to be. Anyway, made sure, scorched earth now.

He held his breath, but the drone didn’t follow the trail of the floating vest, and it ignored the derelict Canol bunkie; it merely turned and headed back to where it came from. They’d have wanted to get there first and mop up, then disappear fast before Bearlift Repair showed up.

Which it did, in its usual leisurely fashion. Get a move on, Zeb thought. I’m hungry. Repair hovered over the wreckage, Oh-my-Godding, no doubt, Poor-bastarding, Never-had-a-chancing. Then it, too, departed, back towards Whitehorse.

As the red twilight settled in and the mist gathered and the temperature fell, Zeb made a small fire on top of a slab of metal so he wouldn’t burn the place down, inside the building so the smoke would hit the ceiling and disperse. No telltale column. He got himself a little warmer that way. Then he did some cooking. Then he ate.

“Just like that?” says Toby. “Wasn’t it a little abrupt?”

“What?”

“Well, it was … I mean …”

“You mean it was meat? You pulling a vegetarian?”

“Don’t be wicked.”

“You wanted me to say a prayer? Thank you, God, for making Chuck such a fuckwit and having him provide for me in this unselfish though truly unintentional dumbass manner?”

“You’re making fun.”

“Then don’t go all old Gardener on me.”

“Hey! You’re old Gardener yourself! You were Adam One’s right-hand man, you were a pillar of …”

“Well, I wasn’t then. A fucking pillar. Anyway, that’s a whole other story.”

Bigfoot

It wasn’t that easy, of course. Zeb cut small chunks and used a rusted-wire skewer, and also gave a lecture to himself — This is Nutrition, capital N! You think you’ll make it out of here without Nutrition? Nonetheless, there were some swallowing issues. Luckily he’d had a lot of practise in distancing himself from things that went into his mouth, most recently the grub at Bearlift — some of which probably was grub, a popular protein-enhancer in dried and ground form.

But his first tests of that nature had come earlier, one of the Rev’s instructive punishments being that those with potty-mouths should be forced to eat the contents of said potty. How not to smell, how not to taste, how not to think: it was like the See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil blind, deaf, and mute monkeys who sat on the miniature oil drum on his mother’s dressing table with their paws clamped over their upper orifices, providing a role model for her that she was happy to follow. Have you been sick? What’s that on your chin? He said, You’re a dog, eat your own vomit. He pushed my head into the … Now, Zebulon, don’t make up stories. You know your father wouldn’t have done such a thing! He loves you!

Slam the trapdoor on that one, roll a boulder. More to the point was how to stay warm. There was some crumbling tarpaper in the corner, not much use but some. He spread it on the floor, hoping it would act as a heat-retaining vapour barrier. Dry socks would have helped; he made a little teepee of sticks, draped the damp socks over it near the dying embers of his fire, hoping they wouldn’t scorch. Then he heated several medium-sized stones in the coals. He bundled his cold feet inside the down vest, unfolded the two space-age reflecting survival blankets, his own and Chuck’s, scrunched himself up inside them, added the hot stones underneath. Keep the core warm, that was Lesson One. Keep the feet from dropping off, always a good plan going forward. Remember that hands without fingers are not much use for tasks requiring small-muscle skills, such as doing up your bootlaces.

Was there grunting outside the bunkie in the dim hours, was there scratching? No door on the place, anything could walk right in. Wolverine, wolf, bear. Maybe the smoke kept them off. Did he sleep? He must have. It got light soon enough.

He woke up singing.

Roamin’ here, roamin’ there, roamin’ in my underwear,

I got a sweetie covered in hair,

She’s all pussy everywhere …

Some hoarse, twisted stagtime bellowing event. Energizing, though. Instant man-cave bonding. “Shut up,” he told himself. “You want to die frivolously?” “Don’t much matter, nobody’s looking,” he riposted.

His socks weren’t dry, but they were drier. What a fool, he should’ve taken Chuck’s socks from his gone but not forgotten fishbelly feet. He put the socks on, folded up the survival blankets, and stuffed them into his pockets — damn things would never go back into their little envelopes once you took them out — packed up his Practical Pig toolguy trinkets and the remains of his picnic, then took a cautious look out the door.

Mist everywhere. Grey as an emphysema cough. Just as well because now the flying visibility would be low, a good deterrent for airborne snoopers. Though not so good for Zeb himself because now he wouldn’t know where he was going, as such. But surely it was a case of follow the yellow brick road, minus the bricks and with no Emerald City at the end.

There were only two possible directions: northeast to Norman Wells, rough going on a decaying track jumbled with glacier-dumped boulders; or southwest to Whitehorse, through the chilly, misty mountain valleys. Both of those destinations were far, far away, and if he were making odds he wouldn’t have bet on himself. But the Whitehorse route hooked up on the Yukon side with a real road, one that could handle motorized vehicles. More chance of a hitchhike pickup there. Or something. Or other.

He set off through the mist, keeping to the degraded gravel surface. If this were a movie he’d be fading to white, then gone, and the credits would be rolling up over him. But not so fast, not so fast, he was still alive. “Enjoy the moment,” he urged himself.

I love to go a-wandering, along the bums of sluts,

And as I go I love to sing, although they drive me nuts.

Fuckeree, fuckera, fuckeree, fucker ah hah hah hah hah ha …

“You are not taking this seriously,” he scolded. “Oh shut up,” he replied. “I’ve heard that a lot.” Talking to yourself, not so positive. Doing it out loud, even worse. Delirium had not set in, however; though how could he be sure?

The mist burnt off at eleven a.m. or so; the sky turned blue; a wind began to blow. Two ravens were shadowing him, high in the air, dipping to eyeball him, passing rude remarks about him back and forth. They were waiting for something to begin eating him so they could pitch in and grab a snack: not so deft at making the first incisions, ravens, they always hunted with hunters. He ate a Joltbar, he came to a stream with a washed-out bridge, he had to choose: wet boots or crippled bare feet? He chose the boots, removing his socks first. The water was cold, with an X for Xtra. “This freezing sucks,” he said, and it did.

Then he had to choose between putting the socks back on and getting them wet or the dubious delight of hiking in boots only, sure to accentuate the blister he already had. The boots themselves would soon be borderline useless.

“You get the picture,” he says. “On and on. It was that kind of thing all day, with the wind blowing and the sun shining.”

“How far had you gone?” says Toby.

“How to measure? Out there, miles don’t count. Let’s just say not far enough,” he says. “And by then I was running on empty.”

He spent the night hunkered down between two boulders, shivering like a timber despite the two crackly metal survival blankets and the fire he’d made from dead willow and creekside mini-birch.

By the time the next pink sunset had come round he’d run out of food. He’d stopped worrying about bears; in fact, he was longing to meet one, a big fat one he could sink his teeth into. He dreamed of little globules of fat sifting down through the air like snow, the pellet-shaped kind of snow, not the flakes; he dreamed of it settling down on him, into his bodily creases and crannies, plumping him up. The brain was 100 per cent cholesterol, so he needed the boost, he hungered for it. He could visualize the inside of his body, the ribs encasing a hollow, a hollow lined with teeth. If he stuck out his tongue in such a fatfall the air would taste like chicken soup.

In the gloaming there was a caribou. It looked at him, he looked at it. Too far away for him to shoot, too fast for him to chase. Those things could skim over the top of the muskeg as if on skis.

The next day was bright and almost hot; things in the distance were wobbly at the edges, like a mirage. Was he hungry any more? Hard to tell. He could sense words rising from him, burning away in the sun. Soon he’d be wordless, and then would he still be able to think? No and yes, yes and no. He’d be up against it, up against everything that filled the space he was moving through, with no glass pane of language coming between him and not-him. Not-him was seeping into him through his defences, through his edges, eating away at form, sending its rootlets into his head like reverse hairs. Soon he’d be overgrown, one with the moss. He needed to keep moving, preserve his outlines, define himself by his own shockwaves, the wake he left in the air. To keep alert, to stay attuned to the, to the what? To whatever might come at him and stop him dead.

At the next washed-out bridge a bear congealed from the low shrubs flanking the river. It was not there and then it was there, and it reared up, startled, offering itself. Was there growling, a roar, a stench? No doubt, but Zeb can’t remember. He must have sprayed its eyes with the bear spray and shot it point-blank, but there’s no photo record.

Next thing he knew he was butchering it, hacking away at it with his inadequate knife. Blood up to the wrists, then bonanza: the meat, the fur. The two ravens stood at a distance, making R noises, waiting their turn: gobbets for him, followed by pickings for them.

“Not too much,” he told himself, chewing, recalling the dangers of stuffing yourself on an empty stomach, especially on something so rich and supersaturated. “Little at a time.” His voice came to him muffled, as if he was telephoning himself from underground. What did this taste like? Who cared? Having eaten the heart, could he now speak the language of bears?

Picture him the next day or the next or sometime, halfway there, wherever there is, though he retains the belief that it is in fact somewhere. He’s got new footgear — wraps of hide, fur side in, tied with crisscross strips like a fashion item in a cave-man comic. He’s got a fur cape, he’s got a fur hat, and all of it doubles as sleeping gear, heavy and stinky. He’s porting a meat cargo and a big wad of fat. If he had the time he’d render the fat into grease and smear it on himself, but as it is he injects it into his mouth like bite-sized fuel. And it is fuel, he’s burning it; he can feel the heat of it travelling through his veins.

“Goodbye to care,” he sings. The ravens are sticking with him, shadowing him. Now there are four of them: he’s the Pied Piper of ravens. “There’s a bluebird on my windowsill,” he sings to them. His mother went in for cheerful, upbeat retro crap. That, and perky hymns.

And now, coming towards him along the relatively smooth stretch of road ahead, far in the distance, there’s a cyclist. Some rugged mountain bike adventurer out of his mind on endorphins. They pass through Whitehorse from time to time, augment their kits at the outfitter stores, head for the hills to test their endurance mettle on the Old Canol Trail. They pedal as far as the bunkie — that’s their usual trajectory. Then they pedal back, thinner, stringier, madder. Some bring tales of alien abductions, some of talking foxes, some of human voices on the tundra at night. Or semi-human voices. Trying to lure them.

No, two cyclists. One quite a bit ahead. Lovers’ tiff, he speculates. The normal thing would be to stick together.

Useful things, mountain bikes. Also pannier packs and whatever might be in them.

Zeb hides in the creekside shrubbery, waits for the first one to go past. A woman, blond, sporting the thighs of a stainless-steel nutcracker goddess in her shiny skintight cyclewear. Under her streamlined helmet she’s squinting into the wind, frowning fit to kill with her skimpy eyebrows over her trendy little wind/sun goggles. Away she goes, bumpity-bump, ass taut as an implanted tit, and now here comes the guy, keeping his distance, morose, mouth down at the corners. He’s pissed her off, he’s feeling the whip. He’s burdened with a misery Zeb can alleviate.

“Arrgh,” Zeb yells, or words to that effect.

“Arrgh?” says Toby, laughing.

“You know what I mean,” says Zeb.

Short form: he leaps out of the bushes and onto the guy, making a growly noise, in his bear-fur coverings. There’s a strangled yelp from the target, then a metallic toppling. No need to bash the poor sucker, he’s out cold anyway. Just take the cycle with its twin saddle packs and make off.

When he looks behind, the girl has stopped. He can picture her recently clamped mouth an open O, the O of woe. Now she’ll be sorry she tongue-lashed the sad bugger. She’ll thunder-thigh back, kneel and minister, rock and cradle, dab at scrapes, shed tears. The lad will come to and gaze into her ungoggled eyes, the simp, and all will be forgiven, whatever it was. Then they will use her cellphone to call for aid.

What will they say? He can imagine.

When he’s out of sight, down a hill, and around a corner, he goes through the saddlebags. What a trove: a poker hand of Joltbars, some sort of quasi-cheese product, an extra windcheater, a mini-stove with fuel cylinder, a pair of dry socks, spare boots with thick soles — too small, but he’ll cut out the toes. A cellphone. Best of all, an identity: he can use some of that. He mashes the cellphone and hides it under a rock, then makes his way sideways over the tundra, squish squish, bike and all.

Luckily there’s a palsa that’s been ripped open, no doubt by an enraged grolar in search of evasive ground squirrels. Zeb digs himself and the bike into the moist black earth, leaving a vantage point between clods. After a long damp wait, here comes the ’thopter. It hovers over where the two young cyclists must be hugging and shivering and thanking their lucky stars, and down goes the ladder, and, after a time, up go the lovers, and then they’re carried away in the slow, low ’thopter, flippity-flop, blimpity-blimp. What a story they will have to tell.

And they tell it. Once in Whitehorse, having shed his bearskin wrappings some time back and sunk them in a pond, having changed into the fresh gear provided by Fortune, having grabbed a hitchhike, having freshened up considerably and altered his hairstyle, having hacked certain features of the cyclist’s identity and run some cash through a backdoor known to him by memory, and having swiftly topped up his own cash flow thereby, he reads all about it.

Sasquatches are real after all, and they’ve migrated to the Mackenzie Mountain Barrens. No, it couldn’t have been a bear because bears can’t ride mountain bikes. Anyway, this thing was seven feet tall with eyes almost like a man’s, and it smelled terrible, and it showed signs of almost-human intelligence. There’s even a picture, taken on the girl’s cellphone: a brown blob, with a red circle around it to signal which of the many brown blobs in the picture is the significant one.

Within a week, Bigfoot-believers from around the world have formed a posse and mounted an expedition to the site of the discovery, and are combing the area for footprints and tufts of hair and piles of dung. Soon, says their leader, they will have a batch of definitive DNA, and then the scoffers will be shown up for the corrupt, fossilized, obsolete truth-deniers that they are.

Very soon.

The Story of Zeb and Thank You and Good Night

Thank you for bringing me this fish.

Thank you means … Thank you means you did something good for me. Or something you thought was good. And that good thing was giving me a fish. So that made me happy, but the part that really made me happy was that you wanted me to be happy. That’s what Thank you means.

No, you don’t need to give me another fish. I am happy enough for now.

Don’t you want to hear about Zeb?

Then you must listen.

After Zeb came back from the high and tall mountains with snow on top, and after he had taken off the skin of the bear and put it on himself, he said Thank You to the bear. To the spirit of the bear.

Because the bear didn’t eat him, but allowed him to eat it instead, and also because it gave him its fur skin to put on.

A spirit is the part of you that doesn’t die when your body dies.

Dies is … it’s what the fish do when they are caught and then cooked.

No, it is not only fish that die. People do it as well.

Yes. Everyone.

Yes, you as well. Sometime. Not yet. Not for a long time.

I don’t know why. Crake made it that way.

Because …

Because if nothing ever died, but everything had more and more babies, the world would get too full and there wouldn’t be any room.

No, you will not be cooked on a fire when you die.

Because you are not a fish.

No, the bear was not a fish either. And it died in a bear way. Not in a fish way. So it was not cooked on a fire.

Yes, maybe Zeb said Thank You to Oryx too. As well as to the bear.

Because Oryx let Zeb eat one of her Children. Oryx knows that some of her Children eat other ones; that is the way they are made. The ones with sharp teeth. So she knew that Zeb could eat one of her Children too, because he was very hungry.

I don’t know whether Zeb said Thank You to Crake. Maybe you could ask Zeb that, the next time you see him. Anyway, Crake is not in charge of bears. Oryx is in charge of bears.

Zeb put on the bear’s fur to keep warm.

Because he was very cold. Because it was colder there. Because of the mountains all around, with snow on the top.

Snow is water that is frozen into little pieces called snowflakes. Frozen is when water becomes hard like rock.

No, snowflakes have nothing to do with Snowman-the-Jimmy. I don’t know why part of his name is almost the same as a snowflake.

I am doing this thing with my hands on my forehead because I have a headache. A headache is when there is a pain in your head.

Thank you. I am sure purring would help. But it would also help if you would stop asking so many questions.

Yes, I think Amanda must have a headache too. Or some sort of ache. Perhaps you could do some purring for her.

I think that’s enough of the story of Zeb for tonight. Look, the moon is rising. It’s your bedtime.

I know you don’t have beds. But I have a bed. So it is my bedtime now. Good night.

Good night means that I hope you will sleep well, and wake up safely in the morning, and that nothing bad will happen to you.

Well, such as … I can’t think what sort of bad things might happen to you.

Good night.