A Bear Named Trouble (3 page)

"Mmm," Dad said, looking down at the path and the busy goose. "Convenient to spill the popcorn when Mama Goose was near." But even as he said it, he put an arm around Jonathan's shoulders and gave him a hug, so he wasn't angry.

"Yeah," Jonathan said, giggling and looking fondly at the goose's bobbing white head. "Mighty convenient."

"Anyway, I was looking for you. We've got
a couple of orphaned moose calves that need a bottle-feeding. Like to help out?"

"Sure thing, Dad." Jonathan fell into step beside his father. "I'd like that a lot."

His dad gave his back a pat.

Jonathan skipped a couple of times to keep up with his father's long strides. Already he could feel the orphaned moose calves tugging at the bottles. Their noses would be soft and warm. Their thick pink tongues would curl around the nipples, pulling at the milk.

And before Jonathan had even arrived at the pen, he had already slipped inside one of the moose babies. He tottered on skinny, gangly legs, his big head heavy on his short neck. He reached for the bottle, and the warm milk slid down his throat. His stubby tail wagged itself into a blur.

Still, deep inside his chest something had caught into a hard knot. "Mama!" the orphaned moose calf cried, even as it took the milk in eager gulps. "Mama! Mama!"

N
IGHT
had fallen, but the young bear ran on without considering his destination. He had long since left behind the territory he and his mother knew, so where he went no longer mattered. All that lay before, around, behind him was new and strange.

The cub had been born and lived all his life near Anchorage, but though some bears wandered through the city itself, he and his mother had always stayed away. She had been adept at finding food for both of them. Why should she go near the strangely altered landscape of the city with its hive of humans?

As the young bear forged ahead, he hardly noticed that clipped lawns and ornamental
shrubs had begun to replace the marsh and meadow and forest he was accustomed to. He noticed little, in fact, except that his jaw hurt horribly, that he was alone, that he wanted his mother.

He paused once to sample some grass the April melt had uncovered, but his sore mouth made chewing difficult. He moved on. He didn't stop again until he came to a strange metal object. It was saturated with a scent his mother had taught him to avoid ... humans. But beyond the human scent was another, even more pungent. It was the totally compelling smell of rotting food.

He sniffed around the can, tipped it over with an experimental blow from one paw, and when the cover came off and rolled away, settled down to enjoy the contents. His first meal of human garbage. Delicious, delicious garbage! And much of it soft enough that he could eat it without aggravating the pain in his jaw.

He ate and ate, then moved on, looking for more.

***

Jonathan lay watching the undulating bands of light that poured through the skylight in his bedroom. Pink and blue and green flashed across the sky like a rainbow gone mad.

He thought of calling his father to come see the show, but he didn't. Dad would just point out that the northern lights came often here and that they both needed their sleep.

If his mom were here, she would watch the dancing lights with him. Jonathan could remember once when he was a very little boy and his mother plucked him, sleeping, out of his bed on a summer's night and carried him to the backyard to see a display not nearly as spectacular as this one.

He didn't remember Dad being there to watch the night sky with them, though.

Mom said that Dad was a practical man, more of a scientist than a poet. And Jonathan knew that to be true.

Mom loved poetry. She loved music and
soft trailing scarves and flowery scents. Dad came home from work smelling of the big cats, and when Jonathan had dared to say that he, too, wanted to be a zookeeper when he grew up, Dad had said, "Then you must learn to pay attention, son. You can't dream among the animals the way you do."

It didn't occur to his father that "dreaming among the animals" might be just another way of paying attention.

Jonathan closed his eyes and turned over onto his side. Dad was right about one thing. He did need to get some sleep. Another quiz tomorrow. Social studies this time. Why didn't anyone ever ask him what it felt like to be a polar bear ... or a moose calf ... or a white goose? Now
that
would be something worth taking a quiz about!

Jonathan was just drifting toward sleep when a sound brought him awake again. A thud ... like something falling. Like
someone
falling. It seemed to come from the deck just below his window.

He jumped out of bed, taking a tangle of covers with him. He kicked the blankets aside and peered out the window. Despite a light layer of new snow on the deck, it was too dark down there to see anything. He scrabbled under the bed for his slippers. He couldn't go outside without something on his feet. He found one moccasin-style slipper and one sneaker and pulled them on. The sneaker was for the wrong foot, but he didn't care.

He hurried down the stairs on tiptoe. At the sliding deck door he stopped and peered out. The house was surrounded by enormous fir trees, so even though the sky still flashed brightly, the shadows of the tall trees fell across the deck, obscuring everything.

Jonathan flipped on the light switch. No light. Of course. That was his fault. Before supper, Dad had asked him to replace the bulb on the deck. He had said he would—and he'd meant to do it, really—but then he'd forgotten.

Another sound. Almost a moan. Someone in pain?

Dad? Had his father gone outside and fallen down because the bulb hadn't been replaced? Maybe he had come out to see the northern lights blazing across the sky after all.

Quickly, silently, Jonathan slid the glass door open and stepped out onto the deck. The cold night air slapped him in the face. It would be a long time before it would be warm here, longer even than it took to warm up in Duluth. Snow crunched lightly under his feet.

He could see nothing. "Dad?" he called in a voice that surprised even him with its tremor. "Are you out here?"

No answer. Only that noise again, a little louder this time. Jonathan took another step.

And then he saw. Not his father. A brownie! It wasn't full grown, but plenty big enough. And close enough, too! The shadowy hulk rose not six feet from the spot where
Jonathan stood. Jonathan could make out the hump of muscle between the shoulders and the profile of the slightly scooped face that distinguishes brown bears from black.

The other way people said you could tell the difference between the two was that if you climbed a tree, a black bear would climb up after you and eat you. A brown bear would stay on the ground and shake you out of the tree and
then
eat you. Jonathan wished he could manage not to remember things like that.

The bear stood so close that Jonathan could smell the rotting food on the brownie's breath and some other, darker smell that must be the bear himself. If the creature had wanted to, he could have reached out and knocked Jonathan down with one of those huge paws. But he didn't seem to want to. In fact, as surprised as Jonathan was to be standing there on his own deck staring into the eyes of a bear, the bear seemed equally surprised to be confronted by a boy.

And then, with a kind of strangled moan, a sound similar to the one Rhonda made when Mom was brushing tangles out of her long hair and she was trying really hard not to cry, the brownie bounded past Jonathan, down the snowy steps and was gone.

Jonathan stood rooted for a long moment listening to the pounding of his own heart.

T
HE
bear kept moving, steadily, stopping now and then to nose at a possible source of food. Everything around him was totally unfamiliar, but the smell of food seemed to permeate the air. Along with the smell of humans.

Still ... the human he had just encountered hadn't hurt him. And here, surrounded by their presence, and their smell, other bears didn't appear at every turn to run him off.

He came across a bird feeder and rose on his hind legs to take it delicately between his paws. His long tongue took up the task of drawing every last seed into his mouth.

Maybe this strange human place would be his new range.

If only he weren't so lonely

***

"Jonathan!"

The name drifted up from the bottom of the stairwell, and Jonathan came awake suddenly. Not Jon. Not Jonnie.
Jonathan.
He must be in trouble. He sat up, instantly awake. "Yeah?" he called back.

"Would you come down here, please?"

What had he done now? He couldn't figure. He'd washed the dishes last night, hadn't he? The few dishes left over from the boxed macaroni and cheese Dad had fixed. Mom made mac and cheese from scratch, a whole different dish. Hers was creamy and sharp with good cheddar. The stuff Dad had made—

"Jonathan? Are you coming?"

"Yes, Dad." He put his feet on the cold floor, dropping his head between his knees to look under his bed for his slippers. One was out of reach in the far corner. The other was close at hand, as was one black, high-topped sneaker. They would do.

It was the pulling on of the mismatched footwear that brought the memory back. The bear! He had met a brownie on the deck last night. Wait until Dad heard!

Jonathan hurried down the stairs.

He didn't have a chance to tell his wonderful news, though. When he arrived, his father was already talking. "Look at that, would you?" he was saying. And then, "I'd like an explanation." He pointed toward the deck.

Jonathan looked. There it was, imprinted in the thin layer of new snow on the deck, a complete record of last night's adventure. Bear tracks. The tracks of a brown bear for sure, because black bear tracks are broken. The pads on black bears' feet aren't solid. Brownie tracks look more like a whole human footprint. A very large human footprint.

And there were his own footprints, too. The one smooth—that was his moccasin—the other crisscrossed with diamonds, his wrong-footed sneaker. The two sets of tracks
faced one another. Close. Very close. Looking at them, Jonathan could almost smell the brownie again. He had never smelled a brownie before.

Dad looked down at Jonathan's oddly clad feet, then up at his face. "Jonathan?" he said again. The name formed a question, a serious one.

"I heard a noise," Jonathan said, the words coming out in a rush. "I came downstairs because I heard a noise. I thought maybe it was you. That you'd gone on the deck and had fallen down or something. I didn't know it was a brownie until I went outside. And then I—" The flow of words stopped as abruptly as it had begun, and Jonathan waited. Was his father going to be angry?

But Dad said only, "And then you practically bumped into it from the looks of things."

"Yeah," Jonathan admitted with a shrug. "I think we were both surprised."

"I'll bet." His father was stroking the dark
stubble on his chin in that way he had when he was amused and trying not to show it. But then his eyebrows pulled together and the amusement—if that is what it had been—passed. "You know," he said, "that brown bears are dangerous. It's not like the black bears that we used to see sometimes in Duluth."

Jonathan nodded. He had heard the lecture. Dad had given it before they moved here and at least once every couple of weeks since they'd arrived. But then his father used to warn him about the Minnesota black bears when they lived in Duluth, too. Once, when he was in kindergarten, he had been walking to school along a hedge and when he came to the end of the hedge, he found himself nose to nose with a black bear that had been walking along on the other side. When he'd gone home to tell the story, his father had given him a stern warning about that bear—as though he'd invited the creature to walk to school with him.

"The brownie didn't do anything, Dad. He just looked at me. And I looked at him. Then he ran off."

"You were lucky."

Jonathan nodded. Of course. He knew he'd been lucky. His pounding heart had told him that last night.

"Remember, Jon. Brownies aren't teddy bears. They're wild animals. And very dangerous. Next time don't be so quick to go waltzing out onto the deck. If you hear a noise outside, come wake me up instead."

Jonathan nodded. "Sure, Dad," he said. He knew perfectly well that his father was right, though he couldn't help wondering, just a bit, what Dad would have said last night if he had awakened him. Perhaps:
There's nothing out there ... nothing. Go back to bed.

In any case, his answer satisfied his father. Dad nodded and headed back upstairs to take a shower.

Alone just inside the sliding deck door,
Jonathan didn't move. He stood still, one hand on the cool glass, feeling a shaggy brown coat growing, feeling the way it protected him from heat and cold alike. He could feel his great muscles rippling beneath all that fur, too.

And he could feel his hunger.

His hunger was huge, and mere food didn't begin to satisfy it.

T
HE
young bear had slept through the day in a clump of trees. Now it was evening again, and he woke to search for food once more. In the wild, he usually slept at night, but in this place, with humans everywhere, he had quickly adapted his habits to hiding himself away and sleeping in the daytime.

His jaw still ached miserably. Only the softest food would do. But there seemed to be plenty of that here.

He had visited a couple more garbage cans and several bird feeders when he came to a tall fence. He turned and began to follow along its length. From beyond the fence more good smells came. Food. All kinds of food. But even
more important, now that his stomach no longer ached with hunger, he could make out the distinct smell of another bear.

Not his mother. He knew his mother's smell the way he knew his own. But one of his own kind, nonetheless. A male.