Tender Morsels (18 page)

And their resting against me and clambering on me—I drank up the weight and warmth of it like an ale or a cup of hot wine, it had been so long and I could have it so blamelessly and without
embarrassment. I didn’t know what her husband might think, walking in and finding his wife and daughters disposed around a bear, but certainly it would not be the same as if a visiting man were at the centre of things. I were so comfortable, though, I would have been happy for him to walk in and slay me with bow or pike; even that would have been worth this enjoyment.

Who would
not
stay in such a place, being bear by day and as good as man by night, with such a beauteous family to welcome him whenever he appeared? And so I stayed, from that midwinter through into spring. It did not occur to me to leave, so I did not seek ways to do so, and none presented themselves to me unbidden, either.

Such children I had never known, so happy, unbowed, and unbeaten. Free as the forest they were growing, but they were by no means wild. The fair girl, Branza, was as kind and dutiful and diligent a daughter as any man could wish for. Urdda had bite and spark for all of them rolled into one, but when she had tired herself with her running and her outbursts of temper, it was clear how gratefully she rested with the other two, and enjoyed both to command and to amuse them.

And the mam, well, she worked some kind of slow-growing magic on me. At first I could not admit to its happening, expecting at any time the arrival, in person or even in their conversation, of a da, of a husband. He must be a dusky type—Franitch, maybe—that Urdda took after, while Branza had the fairness of her mother. Perhaps the fear of him was why I avoided people; he might at any time be thrown up out their midst, to show me exactly the man I could never hope to match, and claim these women from me.

At any rate, he did not come and he did not come, and there was no talk of him either, from girls or mam. I never saw him; neither did I see another man or woman, although there were signs of them: a road that I came to know and avoid, the sounds of a smithy one day as I patrolled my borders. I did not need other people; I did not want them; my days were brimful and overspilling with what I had.

And alongside the smoke-tendril of hope that then crept up in my heart there grew—I allowed myself to see it—a beauty in the mam that swelled and goldened as the leaves budded and burst upon the trees. She was a fine woman, strong and lean with always moving energetically from task to task, with lifting her lovely daughters to console or converse with them, with striding from cottage to town with cloths and rushwork, and town to cottage with foods and necessities.

My love of her went undercover of some muzzier bear-instinct. In my clearer moments, I longed to sit and question her:
What life have you come from? What is your name?
And:
May I stay? May I be bear with you always? May I keep you company, and you me?
For I was content to while away my days bear-ing in the forest, if I might always return and rest my eyes on her movements, so sure and steady among the flicker and dance of her daughters, and my nose in the air of her, in the atmosphere, and my ears in her lullabies, in her fey-tales and other stories, in the prayer-whispers she offered up when she had put her daughters to bed, when she were going herself to her night’s rest.

One sun-dappled spring afternoon, Branza and Urdda had fallen to sleep across each other, like thrown cloths in the grassy shade. I found them at the end of my morning’s explorations and pleasures and duties in the woods, when I was ready again to lounge and play.

I sat and watched them and tried to remember children, girl- children, of my old home-place—more clothed and fearful girl-children, because so many more dangers beset and surrounded them. But I could not remember clearly—I could not think very clearly of that old place at all.

But I could hear, and what I could hear was the slapping of laundry down at the stream. Someone was awake and working. And singing, singing a song I thought I knew, from that home-place. Her singing lifted me and called me down through the trees, trying to work out the puzzle of it; there was something about being a bear that
took the sense out of words put to song, and at the same time made them bewitching, made me think: At any moment I will recognise this and it will all rush back, the memory, the life before.

There she was, with the stream around her like mirrors begging to be broken, like sumptuous silks and linens longing to be rolled in and creased and besmirched by kings and queens. And before I knew it, I had plunged in and was wallowing, biting fish of foam, tackling them to the round-stoned stream-bottom, leaping up with them and tossing the heavy water out of my head of fur.

And her song was gone, the mother’s, and she was laughing at me. ‘That’s the way of it, Bear!’ she cried. ‘Show the water who is lord here!’ Which I did, great clumsy me, beating it with my paws and plungings and quite wettening the woman with my splashes.

When I saw that I had done this, I came to her quietly, trying not to huff and splutter so. I nosed her elbow, which I hoped she would take for apology. Then I went up onto the bank and found myself a stretch of sunny grass. I lay down where I could doze to the sound of her singing and slapping, and wake to the sight of her.

When I was all but dry, she was done with her washing; she had spread all the cloths and garments on the grass and the bushes nearby. But I did not want her to go, and I sat up and said so.

She stood hands on hips and smiled. ‘Oh, you are awake now,’ she said, ‘now that all the hard work is done?’

I went to her and stood on all fours, my forehead against her front very lightly so as not to overbalance her. She was nothing; she was a wisp of beauty, her muscles fine as tassels of silk. I could destroy her with a swipe of my paw.

She dug her hands into my head-fur and scrumbled around my ears the way she knew I liked—they all knew. She laughed when I told her not to stop, and she did not stop, not for a long while. And then she did, and I sat back with such satisfaction that she had to laugh again. Our heads were at the same height. She stepped up to me, and at the sight of her little nude face so beloved I lifted my paw, which was bigger than that face and that whole head behind it, and I touched her cheek with what would have been my palm, had I been a man and sensitive, but on a bear was thick pads rough
as sawn wood-ends, and I could feel nothing through it, not even the warmth of her.

I tried—I tried as I had with the daughters, tried to dredge up the person-ness in myself, to see into the person of her. She was not like anyone I could remember—any woman, any man. She searched my eyes all the while. I hoped she saw in them, inside this confident, clumsy bear, that vestigial man and his confusions.

She put her hands to my face, light and cool against my sun-warmed skin, and she explored it all over right out to my mane, as if she were thinking to model me in clay and needed to memorise my shape exactly. Her breath was a sweet cloud around my head, and I, who was heavier than six of her, almost fainted from breathing it.

I closed my eyes.
She is a wife
, I told myself.
Or she has been a wife. Is she missing him? Has he died, or has he simply gone to seek his fortune?
My paw had long fallen from her face; she stood between my hind limbs and I did not touch or look at her—the slip of her, the damp, clothe-wrinkled tininess—only felt her delicate searching of my strange features, my wild face.
Bring out the man of me
, I pleaded with her in my vague bear-mind.
Reach in and bring him out of this head. Let him talk to you
.

She scratched and scratched me under my chin. ‘You big soft thing,’ she whispered. ‘Feel the size of your head. I could not lift even that.’

I licked her forehead. She tasted salty, and the simpler bear-part of me told me she would be good to eat. She laughed and stood back a little, touching the lick, her hands so finely made with all those fingers, manoeuvrable each one, her face—how
would
someone carve such a thing, catch all those live surfaces bending and folding and breathing, the movement in that mouth, those eyelashes soft as feathered moth-horns?

‘Come, then,’ she said, and started up the slope. ‘Can you chop wood? Then you can help me.’

I can, I can
, I said to her in my mind. I could remember the feel of it, stretching up, bringing down the axe; I could remember the rhythm of it, and the sweat. But I was useless to her in this body; I
was a strayed-in wild thing, that she could walk away from me like this, back to her kind and their separate life. I followed her, sad at heart, but still I must follow her, and so I followed.

And still they must follow
me
, her daughters, when they were rested and the evening had cooled and freshened their energies. ‘Shoo with you, you bouncers!’ their mother had said when they’d eaten their suppers. ‘Run and play with Bear, and let me settle things here.’

So we had run, and we were running still. Quite a way we had gone—they would have to climb aboard me and ride home at the end of this; I was right out beyond their borders, though those were not near as extensive as my own.

‘Come back, beauteous bear!’ cried Urdda. I could scarcely credit that in my lumbering I moved faster through the forest than those darting, fine-limbed girls could move. ‘You will fill your coat with burrs and thorns and there’ll be such brushing to do, bad thing!’

How sweet it was to be scolded by such a tiny. I turned and I could glimpse her, or at least the shakings of leaves that marked her, and Branza coming after her, below me on the hill. Just a little farther and I will turn, I thought, and I will let them catch me, and then carry them back to their cottage, and their mother will welcome us all.

But then I ran out across a brief clearer part of land, and the grassy ground gave under my feet, and I was turning and tumbling. A painful snap sounded through my head, through my body. I saw, each so fast upon the last that I had no time to register the separate sights: a mass of twiggy forest hazed with near-spring green; the blocks and laneways of a town rushing upward; tiny Fuller in his bear-suit chasing screaming, laughing girls; and finally, an Eelsister in a sunny cloister—flying over her, I saw that she was embroidering a dandelion clock upon her linen. Then the slate smacked up at me and I was running out the end of the twitten, and Stow was there among the laundry-slabs, shouting, ‘Where did they go, the sneaky witches!’

I had turned to warn Urdda and Branza before I realised he was speaking of town girls. ‘I did not see them,’ I said.

But I did
remember
them: the girls’ blue-white heels; the skirts above and the set of the body that was Washerwife Bean’s daughter fleeing, the last of them; her happy screams of moments, of months, ago.

‘This way!’ cried Stow, and I followed him at a run. My body was thin and fleet, and the loose, hard costume rubbed at me. ‘Quick, Ramstrong!’ he called back over his shoulder—and cannoned into just the whirl of washergirls he was after as they took the corner, faces all vivid with surprise and the glee of being girls and free today, powerful together.