A Bear Named Trouble (2 page)

T
HE
young brown bear kept moving. Twice he circled back to check out the place where he had last seen his mother. The first time she was still there. She bared her teeth and flattened her ears again. The second time she was gone. She and the big male were both gone.

The cub sniffed his way around the clearing. He picked up his mother's scent, but he got the intruder's, too. So ... the two of them had gone off together. The young bear stood, gazing off after them. The trail would have been easy to follow, but bewildered as he was, he knew better than to risk an encounter with the big male.

Should he wait for his mother to return? Somehow he knew that would be futile. Once more, he turned away.

On the edge of the clearing, he paused over the yellow flower of a skunk cabbage that had melted its way through the snow. An old cinnamon-colored female bear approached with three first-year cubs tagging after. She stared at him, her head lowered, and he moved on, leaving the tiny mouthful of food untouched.

Later he stopped to scratch at a patch of bare ground, hoping to turn up more pea-vine roots. But two other three-year-olds, a brother and sister traveling together, also on their own for the first time, emerged from a clump of birch, and he loped away. They were no larger than he, but being a pair doubled their power and gave them a place in the world that he didn't have.

At every turn, another bear exerted authority over him, each of them older than he or larger or more powerful. The young bear was
growing hungry, but there was nothing to do except to keep moving.

The smell of a ripening carcass caught his attention as he came off a small rise, running from an encounter with a larger male. Bears will kill meat when they can, but they scavenge, too. This, his nose told him, was a newborn moose calf, already dead for two or three days. A feast!

A bear's sense of smell is very sharp, and even as inexperienced as the cub was, more than the carcass should have caught his attention. But he had been running, dead out, from his last encounter, and he swerved toward the new scent without pausing to check any other smells that might have been present. He simply lunged toward the compelling odor, his mouth slavering.

What he had not reckoned with was the grieving mother, still standing watch over her dead calf. Probably he had not realized the enormous moose was there until he stopped, almost beneath her, his paws already on the
ripening carcass. And before he had a chance to back off or turn or run in another direction, her front hooves flashed out, one of them catching him smartly on the jaw.

The force of the blow tumbled the young bear onto his back. But he didn't give the moose a chance to lift her great hooves for another attack. He leapt to his feet and ran once more, his roars of pain reverberating through the forest.

***

As soon as Jonathan got home from school the next day, he called Rhonda. He and Dad had an agreement that he could call Rhonda twice a week. And with the three-hour time difference between Anchorage and Minnesota, right when he got home from school was a good time. She was done with supper by then, but Mom hadn't started getting her ready for bed yet.

Rhonda had been born with a condition called spina bifida, which meant she used a wheelchair to get around. It meant, too,
that even though she was six years old, Mom still did lots of stuff for her, like giving her a bath and helping her get into her pajamas.

"Guess what," he said, as soon as Rhonda was on the phone. "I dreamed about Mama Goose last night."

"You did?" She giggled. "What did she do?"

"She waddled into my room and asked me which I wanted for breakfast, pancakes or French toast."

"And what did you say?" Rhonda asked the question breathlessly, as though she couldn't wait to hear what he'd decided to have for his dream breakfast.

"Anything. I told her anything at all. As long as it isn't oatmeal!"

Rhonda laughed and laughed, her voice a chiming bell, so clear that she could have been in the next room instead of thousands of miles away. He'd have to get out a map some day and count just how many thousands.

She got the joke, of course. Mom probably would, too. When Dad was in charge of the cooking, he made oatmeal every morning of the world. Never pancakes or French toast or scrambled eggs, the way Mom did. Not even Malt-o-Meal or Cream of Wheat occasionally—always oatmeal. When Dad liked something himself, he saw no need for variation.

"Oh, Jonathan," she said when the laughter had faded away. Her voice was suddenly subdued. "When are you coming home?"

"I'm not coming home. Remember? You and Mom are going to come here."

"But you and Dad are coming to get us, aren't you?"

"Yes," Jonathan assured her as he had so many times before. "It'll just be two more months, and we'll be there."

"Two more months!" It came out as a wail, and Jonathan knew exactly how she felt. Sometimes he didn't think he could last that long, either. He didn't think he could
keep taking breaths and pushing them out, over and over and over and over again, for so great a time.

It would take millions and millions of breaths, probably a trillion-trillion before he would see his mother and sister again. He should have realized when Dad had said, "We men will go on ahead," that six months would be too long. At the time, though, he'd been too pleased to be considered one of the "men" to think about the amount of time involved.

But then six months would have been too long to be away from his dad, too, so there hadn't been much of a choice.

"It'll go fast, Rhonda," he said. "Really it will."

"No, it won't," she sad. "You're lying." He could practically hear her lower lip trembling. "Two months is a long, long,
long
time." And she handed the phone to Mom without even saying goodbye.

He talked to Mom a little, but he didn't tell
her about the Mama Goose dream. Hearing her voice made him feel more homesick than ever, so he hung up as quickly as he could.

Then he walked over to the zoo. The entrance was only about half a block from his house. He poked his head through the ticket window. "Hi, Frank," he said.

"You here again?" Frank replied with mock horror. "I think you spend as much time here as your dad. We're going to have to put you to work."

"Could you?" Jonathan was filled with sudden hope. "Really?"

But Frank laughed and reached to ruffle Jonathan's hair. Jonathan could feel the heat flooding his face. Frank had been kidding. Of course! Why couldn't he ever tell when grownups were kidding?

"Here." Jonathan thrust his backpack through the window, his head lowered to hide his embarrassment. "Would you keep this for a while?" It held his homework. After he was through walking around the zoo, he'd
come back and sit in the gatehouse with Frank and do his homework, waiting for his dad to get off work.

"Sure," Frank replied, taking the pack. Then he turned around, picked up a bag of freshly popped popcorn, and thrust it at Jonathan. "Would you keep this for me?"

Jonathan grinned. "Sure."

"Don't eat it now!" Frank called after Jonathan as he stepped away from the window. "I just asked you to keep it for me, not eat it."

"And don't eat my backpack," Jonathan called back cheerfully.

Still, he sighed deeply as he moved off into the zoo. Rhonda was right. Two months was a long, long,
long
time.

T
HE
kick the mother moose delivered while protecting her dead baby made only a glancing connection, but the blow was hard enough to break the young bear's lower jaw. It also knocked out several of his front teeth and shattered a lower canine tooth.

The cub ran and ran, moaning the whole time. He stopped occasionally to paw at the searing pain in his mouth. Then he ran some more.

He ran without considering where he was going. Sometimes, in his agony, he actually bumbled into a tangle of bushes and had to pull himself free or slopped into a marsh where the wet earth sucked at his paws. But as
soon as he broke free again, he ran some more.

He ran and bellowed. Bellowed and ran.

***

Jonathan scooped a few kernels of popcorn off the top of the bag with the tip of his tongue and stopped in front of the red fox's freestanding oval cage. The fox lay curled on a shelf high in the exhibit, peering down at him with bright button eyes.

"We had a quiz in math today," Jonathan told the fox. "It was pretty hard, but I think I got most of the answers right."

The fox blinked, yawned, tucked his long fluffy tail over his nose.

"Yeah," Jonathan agreed. "That's what I think about quizzes, too." Then, as if the fox's yawn had been catching, he yawned as well and moved on into the zoo.

The nights had been endless when they'd first come to Alaska, but now that spring was here, they were getting too short—only five or six hours of real darkness. They would get even shorter as the days moved toward summer. Dad said it would be daylight most of the time here in Anchorage by late June. Exactly the opposite of the way it had been when they arrived in January. Then the sun had stayed low on the southern horizon, peering at them through the trees for a few hours in the middle of the day. It had never really climbed into the sky, the way it was supposed to. Duluth was pretty far north, too, but not so far north that the sun couldn't make it up into the winter sky.

It wasn't just not having enough dark at night that kept him from sleeping, though. Sometimes he couldn't help lying awake, thinking about everything he had left behind.

His mother. His sister. His friends. He'd made some friends at school here, but he didn't know any of them really well yet. And none of them lived close enough to be able to get together much outside of school. He even missed the zoo back in Duluth. Lake Superior Zoo. His dad had been a keeper at
Lake Superior Zoo, and as long as Jonathan could remember, he'd loved that place. That zoo even had a waterfall and a stream running right through the middle of it. And a polar bear named Bubba who stood on his hind legs and threw a big red vinyl ball at his dad, who would toss it back.

Jonathan stopped walking. That was Mama Goose calling! He knew her imperious honk anywhere. He lifted his chin and honked back, then waited for a few beats. The entire zoo was heavily forested, the paths and the displays forming the only real break in the trees, so if she wasn't on one of the paths, it could be hard to see her. Then there she was, stiff-legging it through the trees, giving out a scolding honk with each step.

"Did you know you promised to make me breakfast this morning?" Jonathan asked her when she joined him on the path. "I asked for French toast, but you never delivered."

Mama Goose's thoughts weren't on French toast. They were on the bag of popcorn Jonathan held. She stretched her neck and danced around him, if a goose's side-to-side wobble could be considered dancing. He knelt on the path next to her and poured some of the popcorn out onto the ground. Popcorn wasn't supposed to be shared with the animals—they each had a special diet, and junk food wasn't any part of it—but Jonathan couldn't see that popcorn was so different from the corn his dad allowed.

The white goose gobbled the kernels in staccato bursts, so he poured more out, then put some into his own mouth. He let one hand rest on Mama Goose's back and sighed. Wouldn't it be wonderful if adopting an animal really did mean being allowed to take it home? Then he—and, of course, Rhonda when she came—could have Mama Goose close by all the time.

He hadn't known being in Anchorage with his dad would be so lonely. Even when Dad was home, even when they were sitting across the kitchen table from each other, eating, Jonathan often felt alone. When they were home in Duluth, he'd never noticed how little his father had to say. Somehow, with Mom and Rhonda around, the house was always cheerfully noisy. With just him and his father, the quiet seemed louder than any noise he knew how to make.

At least, he never felt lonely when he was with Mama Goose. He liked the other animals, too, but she was the best. You couldn't invite an elephant or a llama to come sit in your lap.

Maybe today, once he and Mama Goose had finished the popcorn, he would go see Ahpun and Oreo, the polar and brown bear cubs. The Alaska Zoo must be the only zoo in the world to have a polar bear and a brown bear living in the same display. Usually those kinds of bears didn't associate with each other, but these two had grown up together from the time they were orphaned as babies, and they were great friends. Dad had said they might get into trouble one day and have
to be separated, but for now people came from far away to see a brown bear and a polar bear side by side.

When Rhonda got here, she could pretend to be Ahpun and he would be Oreo. Rhonda would like Ahpun best, Jonathan was certain, because the white bear swam like a seal. Rhonda would love to hear Jonathan tell about how she would feel inside Ahpun's thick white coat, how she would splash around the big pool. Round and round, upside down and sideways, even turning somersaults. Swimming the way a polar bear did was almost as good as flying.

Just thinking about Ahpun, Jonathan could feel the way the cool water flowed through his white fur. Actually, a polar bear's fur wasn't really white. His dad had told him that. It was without color, and something about the light playing on it—when his father told him, Jonathan hadn't understood exactly what it was—made it look white. But it would be white to Rhonda. And she would
toss her dark curls and laugh at the freedom of skimming through the water like a fur-covered fish. Nothing,
nothing
to hold her back.

"Hi, Jon. What're you doing?"

Jonathan was so deep into his swimming reverie that he was startled at the voice. He hadn't seen his father coming. He leapt to his feet, closing the bag of popcorn as he did. "I was just going to go see Ahpun and Oreo," he said. And then, looking down at Mama Goose who was still pecking at the fluffy white kernels spread on the path, he added, "I guess I kind of spilled a little popcorn."