Help! A Bear Is Eating Me!

HELP!
A Bear is
Eating Me!

Mykle Hansen

ERASERHEAD PRESS
PORTLAND, OREGON

ERASERHEAD PRESS
205 NE BRYANT
PORTLAND, OR 97211

WWW.ERASERHEADPRESS.COM

ISBN: 1-933929-69-3

Copyright © 2008 by Mykle Hansen

Cover design by Brady Clark and Mykle Hansen.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

No humans were eaten in the making of this book.

Printed in the USA.

The author would like to thank the winter residents of Baja California for their kind attention, and Karen Townsend of Afterbirth Books for her assistance with layout, proofreading and design.

This book is dedicated to bears everywhere.

1

You think
you
have problems? I’m being eaten by a bear! Oh, but I’m sorry, forgive me, let’s hear about
your
problems. Mmm-hmm? So, your boss is mean to you? Is your car not running well? Perhaps you’re concerned about the environment. Boo, hoo! Your environment just ate my foot! I’m
bleeding
on your environment! And it’s a small consolation for the pain and the mess and the fear that I would be feeling — were I not so well-prepared for adverse excitement, were I not ingesting so many miraculous pain killing drugs — a small consolation that I can now say without fear of contradiction that MY PROBLEMS ARE WORSE THAN YOURS. So just shut up about your problems, okay? Okay.

If you were real, if you were here, and if you were a decent person, I’m sure you would be right now summoning HELP. Or maybe you’d be up a tree hiding from this bear, but after this bear finally quit chewing on me and wandered home, then you’d surely come down from your pansy perch and check my vital signs, make sure that I’m okay, or at least not dead yet, and upon finding me not-dead-yet you’d run off to fetch a Forest Ranger, or an off-road ambulance, or a Search & Rescue chopper with the range to reach us up here in this stupid fancy Alaskan wilderness, carrying within it a Rescue team to rescue me, and a Search team to find this god damn black bear and shoot him in his god damn black head! And also, ideally, some kind of off-road cargo transport system, to tow my Rover back to the dealership in Anchorage, there to invoke the oh-so-costly and oh-so-worth-it All Disaster Coverage clause of my insurance, and get my poor lovely road machine repaired, polished, tuned and refueled for my triumphant recovery. And then the two of us — that is, me and my car — would drive off together into the Al-Can Highway sunset, never again to venture north of Vancouver.

Yeah, I love my car. I’m sure if you were here you’d ask me all about it: you’d want to know how well it handles (like butter on a steak), what kind of mileage it gets (rakishly poor!), and how much I paid for it (which would not be any of your fucking business — but lots, I assure you.). My car and I have spent a lot of quality time together this year: we’ve listened to my iPod through its five-point Surround Sound with Digital Bass Stiffening; slalomed across the expressways with its sure-footed Dynamic Traction Control; put the fear of man-meat into Marcia from Product Dialogue on its rear Oxford leather fold-back seat with Shiatsutronic Smart Massage; we’ve crept silently along the bike lanes like a shark by the shore, startling bicyclists with its thunderous horn before leaving them twitching in clouds of its viscous exhaust. But this is the first time — pinned as I am under its left rear independent axle, after the jack slipped and dropped the whole massive package on me, after I crawled under here for sanctuary, after the bear attacked me, after I started to change the inconceivably flat tire — this is my first bout of quality time
under
my car. Or, well, let’s call it quantity time instead, because the actual quality is quite low. The top-end luxury appointments of my option package don’t seem to extend to the bottom end. I’m telling you, it’s not pretty down here. Foolish me, I kind of imagined that when I paid Javier’s EZ-Clean twenty bucks to clean and detail my car, that Javier and his lazy illegal children cleaned and detailed
all
of it. But down here I see bolts and pipes and panels and wires caked in melted tundra, which I guess is part of the off-road aesthetic my car and I aspire to, but also covered in a thick black paté of urban road filth, and the mixture of the two is nicely rubbing off on my camel hair sport jacket, bran-dnew and now ruined. Plus — and this really would piss me off if I wasn’t so very much Thinking Positive — plus something … the radiator? The fibrillator? I don’t know, I can’t tell but
something
is very slowly dripping. A.K.A., releasing fluid. A.K.A,
leaking.
My powerful, virile and incredibly expensive car is less than a year old and already needs adult diapers. A car like this is not supposed to drip like that.

Plus that tire blowing out — ultimate cause of my current trauma … Range Rover has a lot to answer for here, I think. And I’m sure somewhere there’s a lawyer who agrees. That lawyer and I are going to make Range Rover pay my hospital bills once I get out of here, once I’m rescued, once this god damn bear quits alternating between chewing on my foot —
eeew
— and straining with the fat, stubby wolverine that is his arm to reach the rest of me here in this thankfully claustrophobic spot under the car. And he’s eating not just my foot, mind you, but also my new Lands’ End suede chukka boot: huntsman brown, size eleven and a half, left, two hundred eighty nine dollars, ninety five cents. This bear is costing me. This bear is going to pay.

Where is Edna? Where is that stupid woman, the woman I married? She’s supposed to be here. Where are the useless little men of my department? Where’s Marcia from Product Dialogue? How is it that after we all trek up here with much fanfare, at great expense, for the purpose of team-building, and a perfect team-building exercise like this one presents itself, falls in my lap you could say … why is my whole stupid team absent? Where are they? Back at base camp, most likely; thumbs up butts, unable to motivate their way out of a paper bag without me.

Note to self: fire team, divorce wife. Escape bear.

This is so not my fault! I’m not an idiot, you know. I’m not naive in the ways of Bear. I researched them on the Internet for
hours.

Fact! American Black Bears such as this one grow to between 130 and 500 pounds as adults — or larger, it would appear — and are found in 32 states, including Alaska. Fact! Black bears are solitary creatures, they forage for food in clearings like this one, in forested regions such as here, and they are omnivores, as we’ve seen. For their own safety and as a team-building exercise I had the entire hunting party memorize a set of bear facts and bear survival tips before we came, and for my own amusement I brought a bear-compatible shotgun, a Remington 870 police model with Core-Lokt Ultra Bonded Sabot slugs, which is now safely mounted above the driver’s seat of the car I’m trapped beneath, waiting to be fired bearwards by the first lucky Search and Rescue operative to get off his ass and make with some HELP!

It’s utterly not my fault. I did everything right. For instance: when I spied the bear, I did not run. Bears can outrun people. That’s a fact that I know. Instead I stood tall, turned, faced the bear, shouted at the bear and threw the tire wrench at the bear to let him know I was A) a human, and B) not afraid. The bear in response rose up upon his shaggy hind legs and tilted his head at me, snuffling his nose and waving his paws around like a stunned boxer. I took this to mean that he was getting a better look at and whiff of me, and that once he figured out he was dealing with Homo Sapiens — not just any Homo Sapiens, mind you, but MARV PUSHKIN, Senior Communications Creative, Corporate Warrior, Leader of Men, User of Women, Esquire subscriber — he would back off and return to his regularly scheduled bear lifestyle. That’s Bear Survival Tip #1, by the way, from www.GoAlaska.com: Do not run away, but let the bear know who you are. (In retrospect, I realize I could have retreated into the Rover, but that would be showing weakness, which is deadly in the face of bears and definitely not Marv Pushkin’s style.)

That was all going marvelously well until the bear sprinted up to me — who knew that much bear could move that fast? — and head-butted me backwards against the car. Then he began to sniff my pant legs, where I had recently spilled some smelly fluids and made a bit of a mess. I was dismayed and slightly embarrassed by this setback, but quick of wit and reflex. It was clearly time for www.GoAlaska.com’s Bear Survival Tip #2: If the bear attacks, play dead. (The theory is, usually a bear only attacks because he’s scared or threatened. Once he’s decided you’re not a threat he’ll just pee on you and go home. Let me tell you, merely being peed on by a bear sees like a real luxury to me now.) So, I faked a heart attack and slumped over.

And then … he bit me! Unbelievable! And then he bit me again, and again … so I turned to Bear Survival Tip #3 … for what it was worth. Actually Tip #3 is pretty worthless, but here it is: If the bear continues to attack … fight back vigorously! Oh, thanks for that one, GoAlaska dot assholes! Never would have occurred to me. Maybe if Tip #1 had been “Get in the Rover” and Tip #2 had been “Unlock the shotgun from the rack and load it with slugs” then Tip #3 would be a really handy, useful tip.

But wait … I think he’s stopped. Oh joy. I can’t hear much over the constant whir of mosquitoes, the opaque clouds of them that blot out the sun in this awful place … but I can hear that bear, breathing. He breathes like a congested linebacker hauling bricks up a staircase. He’s just sitting there panting from the exertion of speed-eating, licking his paws, digesting my foot, thinking about what next to do with his bear evening. And the light is fading. As soon as he goes away I might manage to wriggle out from under this axle, or reach the jack and lift it off me, or even if I could just reach that cardboard Wally’s box full of camping supplies — I stuck it under the car when I got the spare tire out, it’s just a few inches beyond the reach of my left hand but if I could wriggle, without looking like food, without agitating the bear — then I could have a beer, because all this violence is making me thirsty.