In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods (7 page)

Memory as reminder that I was no hunter, no good tracker: Like a fool, I first marched to the cave, but the bear did not so easily give itself up, and once inside I could not even find the tricky entrance to the lower passages where I assumed it slept.

There was only one method I had employed to cause the bear to appear, and so wearing my thick-layered suit I set my traps again, manipulated their intricate devices to capture what best beasts the woods had left, the widest-antlered bucks, never before caught and as yet undiminished, but soon broken-boned, velvet-robbed; and then another such prize, a well-plumed peacock, whose blooded coverts I twisted free from their roots, weaving their long-quilled eyes through the seams of my armor. For weeks I wore my armor and I stalked the woods and I killed every mink and otter and polecat, bashing their heads where they were caught, lifting the sewn-in trap above my shoulders, crashing it down upon their hissing, their mewing mouths. All these and more I interred beneath the burying ground, my aggression escalated so that I might fill the boneyard dirt with the best dead, so that the bear might be compelled to call them free, their shapes necessary to restock its domain. And all this time I remained stuck within my armor and then stuck to it, its threaded seams and hems leaving no place for me to slip free. For some stretch
I ate and slept and pissed and shat within, filled those furs with sweat and filth, staying in the woods until my ash-streaked cheeks were smeared with my frustration and with my disgust at my stink, and surely in this state there could have been no sneaking up on the bear, who even from within the deepest depths of its cave might have smelled my stiff-legged approach, the bloodied, muddied layers of my furs.

The woods, never loud, hushed now at my actions, until at last I woke to a morning where all my traps waited empty and quiet, there being nothing to catch or else nothing so dumb as to approach the bloody steel, the sure paths of stench and sign I left everywhere. Satisfied, I returned to the house once more, to cover myself again in hearth ash, and to wait for nightfall, the better dark within which I hoped to hunt the bear.

F
IRST THE WHITE MOON RISING
, then the newly red one, both wrongly full night after night and that night too, when beneath their rays I lifted my stiff-stitched and stinking self from off our porch, felt the pull of the trap’s chain upon my skin, and with my loudest voice I called the fingerling to duty.

Soon I arrived at the burying ground to find the floor of that clearing flipped at last, some buried bodies of beavers and badgers and wolverines dug free of their shallow plots, their gore dried or else drying. Everywhere there was the fresh mark of the bear, its footprints wide as my face, urine like acid prickling my nostrils, fallen fur crawling with fistfuls of lice—and at that sight the fingerling squirmed nervous at the back of my mouth. I pressed him back down, and also myself forward, toward the median of that boneyard, toward what meeting awaited me there: the bear rising, unfolding its limbs from their rest, all its massive size matted in the butchery of my trappings.

The fearsome beast of our first meeting was long gone, and instead there was only this new creature, lowed, submissive in posture if
not in fact, its previous wound expanded, expounded upon: The bear that stood before me now stomped unsteadily on its meat-thin limbs, its fur-torn, bone-sprung body led wobblingly forward by its squared head, that skull burst through the tearing skin of face and snout. Orbital bone gleamed bright around the jaundiced eyes it was meant to protect, those spheres drooped upon distressed tendon, sleepy on frayed muscle, and my eyes roved mad too, took in all its shape, its stomping stance, its claws flexing free of its threatening paw. Its voice tore from its lungs, the sound of that roar so fierce it stumbled me even before the bear tensed its body forward, ready to lean into the angry first step of its charge—and as it roared again I heard its true voice for the first time, a speech like no other.

Despite this show of confidence, I reckoned well the seeming diminishment of the approaching bear, for hidden inside my own hackle of found fur was the same wearied lack, the same bones carved only brave enough—and then all that remained of me arrived at its test, the bear falling upon me, all hot breath and battle, and now memory again, of conflict reached:

To plan to close the distance between us by striking the first blow.

To drop the trap from my right hand, to catch its falling chain and swing it back overhead with my left.

To watch the heavy trap orbit once, then again, the only revolutions I had the strength for, all the bear’s charge allowed.

To throw my hand forward, the trap escaping my grip to slam its open sharpness into the side of the bear’s opening face, catching its growl between those quick-closing jaws of my own.

To set my feet, to dig the hard heels of my boots into the dirt—the dirt beneath the woods’ thin floor—and then, as the caught
bear tried to wheel away, to begin to pull its face down to my level, to the dirt, turning the chain hand over hand, tightening it in my grip, wrapping its length around my forearm.

To hear the fingerling cry out as I dragged the bear, to feel his cheer loosen him from his hard small place, celebrating a victory yet unearned; and in that move he unbound what part of my resolve he had made, even as the bear turned back, as it charged again, as even with my trap undoing its face it closed our slim distance, intending to undo much more of me.

The bear roared, its voice constrained but never caught, and then it stood into that sound, lifting the enormous dark of its body upon its hind legs, and me with it, up from off my own thinner limbs. Its head was now three lengths above the forest floor, my trap still embedded in the crushed flesh and scraped bone of its cheek, and from the other end of the trap’s chain I was left to dangle and kick and also to support my sewn-in arm with the other, trying to reduce the pull of that deadly weight, its tearing free.

My armor came apart beneath every swipe of the bear’s claws, its uselessness made more obvious with each tugging of the bear’s trapped head, each new blow ribboning my flesh beneath. Before long my caught shoulder separated from its socket, muscle and bone pop-popping beneath my skin, and now both the bear and I were howling, our shared frustration loud enough to empty the woods, to drive every still-living thing from that burying ground.

The bear continued to stand, swung and batted and pulled against my caught chain until it damaged not just my body but its own. Inch by inch I fell, my weight dragging the trap down the bear’s muzzle, that sliding steel unbinding some rare part of its still-skinned skull, squeaking metal on bone, scratching a swath of hair from off its face as it worked itself free. My feet kicked for
the relief of the ground, but despite my slow falling, the last few inches remained a gap I couldn’t yet close, and as I swung within the bear’s anger, I continued to be caught by its blows, my tattered shirts filling with more and more of my dumb blood. In my shoulder I watched some strained bone at last break through the skin, and when I nearly fainted at the sight and the spilling, then the fingerling inserted himself into the action, keeping me awake, urging my eyes again, commanding me to hang on, to somehow climb the chain with my good hand even as he moved out of my chest and into my trapped shoulder. As he stretched his length up that side of my body, I felt how he worked his own secret skill, making some new connections to bridge muscle to tendon, tendon to bone, and above it all he spun skin to contain what he had repaired, and as I realized what he had done I cried out again, all at once so sore afraid.

M
Y REBUILT SHOULDER HELD, AND
upon its strength I pulled myself up the chain toward the bear’s throat, where I thought to put my skinning blade to right use, but then came some cruder event, the fingerling snapping, or else something snapping in the fingerling, his cries echoing inside mine, their loudest sound escaping my mouth to be mistaken as some fiercer threat. The bear howled at my howls, tossing its head and its shoulders and me too, my body swinging in time with its movements until at last I fell free, the momentum of my bloody weight screeching bone, pulling the trap’s jaw clear of the bear’s snout, the bear’s freedom and mine bought at the cost of most of its nostril, and also a ropy skein of maggoted, loused fur torn from nose to ear.

I faced the untrammeled bear, its open roaring, and what latest bear met my looking, enormous upon its hind legs: I saw for the first time its rows of sore-pocked nipples, four across its chest exposed from thinning fur, nearly choked shut by the bone sprung through the bear’s winter coat, then the lower set, the pair almost hidden behind a furred thickness still untouched by the surrounding decay. The bear waited until it saw I had seen, and then it
laid its length upon the forest floor, rolled its body back and forth across the madness of mud our tangle had made, as if the cool earth might soothe the damage I had done its face.

Or rather, not its face, but
hers
: She whined and whimpered in the agony of her ruined mouth, pressed it hard against the forest floor, biting and tearing at the earth, yellow teeth staining with dark dirt. How little I still knew of the bear then, despite all the other mammals I had trapped and gutted, despite all the others and parts of others I had buried, and all the dusks and dawns I had stood on the dirt side of the tree line, watching her move about the clearing of the burying ground, waiting for her to leave before I made my own approach, some leftover rabbit in my hand, and how wrong I was to believe the bear a he instead of a she—

For now I was sure the foundling was no boy but rather a cub, stolen from this once-sleeping mother, this wooded power who slept no more.

And no wonder the sun could not rise. No wonder winter could not fully come. No wonder in those days it was always the far end of fall, always almost-night, when such a thing could come true, such a thing as the theft of a cub, as a song to make a boy.

All this, because my wife took what was the bear’s to love and loved it herself, because she entreated me to love it as she did.

All this, and still there was also with me my own secret child, the one we made but did not finish, whom I had not revealed, only buried away inside my breast and belly.

I stood up into that fear, into the pain that surrounded it, and on unsteady feet I spoke to the bear.

I said, I know what my wife took from you.

I said, I know you have come to my house looking for what is yours.

I said, The child you seek, I promise it has never been mine. I
have not claimed what remains yours to claim, or if I have, it has only been these small beasts buried here, these trifles, of no importance to me.

But never your child, I said. Never that.

To the bear, whining, writhing beneath my words, I said, It was my wife who made your cub her own, who made him no bear at all.

As I spoke—as I waited for the bear to respond—I found I could not lift my right arm, its length still swaddled in deep-sewn chain. The impulses of my brain failed again and again to reach the nerves of that limb, and I saw how that length of my armor was swollen with what I had spilled. I began to fear I would lose the arm, until what else was there to do but make any mistake that might first save me, and still I swear I did it almost without thinking—or else it was only what thoughts floated behind my speech, the speech I spoke to the bear even as my remainder asked the fingerling for his help, asked without knowing if he could—and then the fingerling agreed, too eager, and only once my body thrummed with his process did I keen the cost of our agreement: He knitted my flesh, remade complete what he had begun while I hung from the bear’s grip, but also he took some other part of me with which to do so, as his mother had done to make her moon, forming it not only from song but from some fraction dug from each of us, and for some short time after I would be less whole than before, even past what fractures I already possessed, and with each stitch that pushed the trap-chain from out my skin or reknit my flesh, so some other bound the fingerling tighter to me than ever before.

With my arm again wholed, I set my knife to quickest work, cutting through layers until I had shed my shredded armor, and then
I pulled tight the remainder of my undershirt to cover the still-flapping skin of my chest and belly. The bear’s lungs sucked air and breathed blood, so that her teeth specked with the evidence of her deep wounds, but what was there to do for her within my few powers? I was not the healer my wife was, not the shaper of flesh she had somehow become. Softly I stroked the bear’s coat, paining myself not to pull even more fur from her already-unthreaded skin, and then the bear roared, and with her roar she told me what mistake I had made: Until my confession, she had not known where her child went, had thought him dead, his now-furless smell so alien she had not guessed my wife’s son had been that cub so long gone missing, so furiously missed.

T
HE BEAR DID NOT SPEAK
precisely, could not form the mouth-shapes necessary to make the words of our language. I moved to make some response to her roarings—this speech so unlike my own yet somehow translated by the fingerling—but that ghosted son moved first, marshaled his new shapes to possess some smaller set of tools, my tongue numbed as he muscled behind it his own wet weight. As he spoke he swam from my head to my heart to my many other hurts, and then to all of them at once, something he had not before been able to do, and even as I struggled to understand the bear I also feared to know the powers this new ability portended: The fingerling’s securing of my shoulder—and the snapping that had followed—had done him some damage, and now he was not just one shape but many. In each of the wrong and wounded spaces within me, some fingerling came up to call a chorus, to give voice to
WHAT NOW
, to
WHAT NEXT
, to
WHAT COWARD
,
WHAT COWARD
—and how I tried to ignore him, the many of him there were, and how he expanded everywhere against my shattered nerves, so that I might not.