A Bear Named Trouble (7 page)

What was it they told you to do if a brown bear attacked you? Play dead. That was it. Fight a black bear, play dead with a brownie. Cover the back of your neck with your hands,
pull your knees up to protect your belly and just lie there and hope the bear will go away.

A shiver rattled through his body, but Jonathan ignored it and moved deeper into the trees. Just as the adults couldn't see Trouble, because the stand of trees was so dense, they wouldn't be able to see him, either. And Trouble had to be lurking in here somewhere.

Jonathan's senses were strung so taut that he felt as though he might explode. And it was in that state of hyper-awareness that he stepped around a large bush and found himself face to face with the brown bear.

For an instant he couldn't breathe. He wondered if Trouble might be having difficulty breathing, too. The animal just stared with those small dark eyes, and neither of them made a sound. Beyond the trees, from the path Jonathan could no longer see, he could hear the adults. They were walking, calling to one another, coming closer. Trouble heard them, too. The brownie swung his
great head this way and that, apparently looking for a way to escape.

Not this way!
Jonathan thought.
You can't go this way!
And he began to jump up and down, waving his hands in front of Trouble's face, and shouting.

"Go!" he cried. "Go, Trouble! Get out of here!"

***

The young bear stood, rooted to the ground, amazed at the noise issuing from the boy. Humans were coming from behind, too. He could hear their footsteps and their voices. He could smell them. But directly in front of him was the smaller one he had seen before, the one he associated with the loaf of bread he had eaten, and noise was pouring out of his mouth.

Still, the voices coming from behind pushed at him! Trouble took another step toward the young one, but the boy held his ground. He kept yelling, kept flapping his arms up and down. Trouble stepped forward one more time,
expecting the boy to give way. Still, the young one continued his infuriating dance.

For an instant, Trouble went completely still, caught, suspended. Then, trapped between the noise behind and the noise in front of him, he flattened his ears and popped his jaw in warning. Incredibly, the boy only yelled louder!

The confusion of humans on every side was too much. His grief and loneliness, his hunger and pain, were too much. And the human who bounced in front of him was no match for the power he knew resided in even a single swipe of his great paw. Trouble lifted one paw, ready to lunge, to strike.

The boy stopped jumping, stopped shouting, but still he didn't run away. He stood there and stared into Trouble's eyes. As though he thought himself the bigger bear!

The boy's stare unnerved Trouble, his bold stare combined with the voices moving up on him from behind. Trouble moaned, lifted his paw higher, moaned again. He was trapped,
and all that stood between him and freedom seemed to be this scrap of a boy.

A noise came from the boy this one soft, almost a whimper. And though he didn't know why he did it, the young bear lowered the paw he had intended to strike with, turned, and dodged away. He ran toward the ravine and the creek and the holes he had dug beneath the two fences that enclosed the zoo.

The bear had almost reached the first fence when he felt a sudden sharp sting in his shoulder. He twisted his head to snap at the thing that had penetrated his thick fur, his skin, his muscle. Snapped and missed. And then, strangely, after he had run a bit farther, his legs didn't seem to belong to him any longer. He stumbled and struggled to stay upright. A liquid warmth stole through his entire body.

As he went down, crashing into the brush at the base of the ravine, he found himself staring up at the boy, who had, incredibly, followed his flight. That was all he saw at the end, all he could remember ... the boy.

J
ONATHAN
sat up in bed, listening. The neighbors surrounding the zoo would be complaining again. It had been almost a week since Trouble was captured, and he still banged around inside his enclosure, bellowing and moaning, day and night.

Was he, Jonathan, responsible for that, too—the fact that Trouble was miserable being confined, that the neighbors were being disturbed?

No. Not even his father would blame him for those things, though he had blamed him, it seemed, for everything else. The TV reporters being there. The Fish and Game people. But mostly Dad blamed Jonathan for
being inside the zoo instead of on the school bus, for putting himself in danger to keep Trouble from rushing through the gate or back under the fence to be killed.

It didn't matter that everything had turned out all right. It didn't matter that Trouble hadn't had to be put down, that the television report had made the zoo personnel all look like heroes, that Jonathan hadn't been touched. Not so much as a nick from those long curving claws, those sharp teeth.

At first his father had been almost too angry to even notice that everything was okay. But then the relief had seeped in. Relief for Trouble, of course. His father truly didn't want to see the bear killed. But mostly relief that Jonathan hadn't been hurt. While the others went for a pallet to carry the drugged bear out of the ravine and into the den of the old polar bear exhibit where he could be held for a while, Dad had grabbed Jonathan, pulled him into the front of his denim jacket, and burst into rough tears.

"How could you?" he said, over and over again. "How ... could ... you? You might have been killed."

And even Jonathan knew what his father said was true. When he had stood, almost nose to nose with Trouble, when he had seen the desperation in the bear's eyes, he knew he had made the wrong choice. The young brownie might have swung at him as easily as he had at Mama Goose, and a boy would have about as much chance against such a blow as a too noisy goose. Everything had worked out, yes, but still he knew that he had made the wrong choice.

And how glad he was to be alive to know it.

Another roar from the captive Trouble reverberated through the neighborhood. Jonathan pulled the covers up to his chin, closed his eyes, and settled more deeply into his warm bed. Then slowly, silently, he let himself slip inside the bear. He let four strong legs carry him from one side of the
concrete enclosure to the other, let Trouble's panic, his deep longing reverberate throughout his body.

"Animals," he was explaining to Rhonda just before he finally slept, "are a lot like us. They want, just like us."

***

Though Trouble's stomach was always full, the days he spent confined to the concrete room seemed to have no end. He had no knowledge of the negotiations that were going on, the reaching out to zoos all over the world, to find a new home for him. Nor would he have been impressed if anyone could have made him understand what these humans were doing. He wanted only what he had wanted since his mother sent him away: his old life back.

The day that one of the humans laid down a path of Fig Newtons, Trouble followed the path out of the concrete room, slurping one cookie after another without noticing where they led. An interesting new taste. He approved.

What he did not approve of was the small cage he found himself confined to after the last Fig Newton had disappeared. But he soon became sleepy—the cookies had been laced with Valium—and he was snoring mightily when the wooden crate was loaded into the belly of a passenger jet.

He slept so soundly, in fact, that he didn't catch a whiff of the 40,000 pounds of fresh salmon that had been loaded into the hold of the plane with him. The delicious aroma didn't even penetrate his consciousness ... yet. When the Valium finally wore off and the young bear woke, he was many thousands of feet up in the air, somewhere over Canada. And then, of course, he smelled the salmon.

When the familiar and delicious aroma reached his nose, he proceeded to bang, to thump, to rattle his cage. He moaned and roared. And he made such a commotion that the pilot had no choice but to come on the intercom with an explanation.

"
Ladies and gentlemen," he began, "don't worry about the noise you hear. You see, we have a very special passenger on board for this flight. And by the way, his name is Trouble!
"

J
ONATHAN
taped the last box and carried it out to the trailer they would pull back to Anchorage.

"Can we go now?" he asked.

"To the zoo?" His mother smiled. It was a tired smile. They had been packing and loading for two days, but it was, nonetheless, a smile. "Sure," she said. "Our last official act before leaving Duluth will be a walk through the zoo."

Jonathan and his father had flown back to Duluth to help Mom and Rhonda pack. Now they would all drive to Anchorage. But first—Jonathan did a little jig right there on the sidewalk—they were going to visit Trouble!

How thrilled Jonathan had been when his dad had told him that the Lake Superior Zoo would take Trouble. The Duluth zoo even had a celebration when the bear arrived, complete with a band playing "Ya Got Trouble" from
The Music Man.
Jonathan wished they had been back in time to see it.

Dad said that when the veterinarian tranquilized Trouble to give him a thorough check, she'd discovered his broken jaw. That was probably the reason, she said, he'd been searching in town for food in the first place. The jaw was healing, and she'd pulled a couple of misaligned teeth. With that taken care of, Trouble could eat—with gusto—everything the zookeepers fed him. Apples, carrots, potatoes, meat, fish ... all of it.

And now, at last, Jonathan would see Trouble in his new home.

"I guess we're ready," Dad said, and they all piled into the car and headed for the zoo.

When they arrived, Dad settled Rhonda
into her chair, and Jonathan took charge of pushing. She loved having him push, because he ran with her when she asked him to, something their parents rarely did.

"All set?" he asked.

"All set!" she replied. And they took off, parents trailing far behind.

They came around a corner and through a cement tunnel and screeched to a halt in front of the bear display. And there he was, in all his brown furry glory. Trouble!

"That's him?" Rhonda asked.

"Yep," Jonathan said. "That's Trouble!"

"He looks so..." She stopped and studied the brown bear. He was busy dismembering and eating an orange and didn't look up.

"Happy?" Jonathan filled in for her.

"Yeah," she said. "Like he
likes
being a zoo bear!"

Jonathan studied the brownie, too. Trouble had finished the orange and was now concentrating on some bread slathered with peanut butter. He did look like any properly
zoo-bred bear. As though this were the life he had always lived. Or maybe the one he'd been looking for.

"Hi, Trouble," Jonathan said, tapping the glass that separated them from the large area where the bear was displayed. "How you doing, pal?"

Trouble sat back on his haunches and looked at his visitors for the first time. He licked peanut butter off his nose, then ambled over to the window. Putting a paw on the glass that separated them, he peered, first at Rhonda, then at Jonathan.

Jonathan put his hand on the other side of the window to meet the paw, and he closed his eyes. He was inside the bear, inside Trouble.

He could taste peanut butter on his tongue, feel his satisfied belly.

"He's looking at us," Jonathan whispered, looking down at Rhonda. "And you know what he's thinking?"

"What?" Rhonda asked. Her eyes were
shining, as they always did when he started the game.

"
Home,
" Jonathan said. "Trouble is thinking, '
At last, I'm home
!'"

Rhonda grinned and reached for her brother's free hand. "And we're going home, too, aren't we, Jonathan?"

"Yep," he said, turning back to watch their parents' slow approach. They looked happy to be together again, too. "The whole family. We're going home!"

***

Trouble watched the humans as they moved away. Whether he recognized the boy and remembered him would be impossible to know, but something held his attention. Only after they were out of sight and their scent no longer wafted back to him did he return to the feast waiting for him in his spacious rock-and-water home.

But now something else prompted him to lift his head and pause. From back in the holding area unavailable to the zoo's visitors, anus
other bear's voice rumbled. Trouble had been aware of the other brownie's presence from the beginning. The keepers who brought him food, who moved him out into the open enclosure and back again into his snug den, those same keepers watched over that other bear, too. Trouble could hear her at night in the den next to his. He could smell every place she had been when he came out into the open display.

And so he waited, patiently, in the way of bears, for the time when they would meet—for the day when, at last, he would no longer be alone.

A Bear Named Trouble
is based on the story of a real bear, now residing in the Lake Superior Zoo in Duluth, Minnesota. As a young brown bear in Anchorage, Alaska, he earned the name Trouble by repeatedly breaking into the Alaska Zoo.

No one can know for certain what prompted him to dig his way into the zoo. Part of the motivation may have been that his mother had, no doubt, sent him off on his own that spring. He was about three and a half, the right age for her to decide it was time for them to separate. Since he was entirely alone, the young bear probably had no siblings to share his new life, and clearly, he was lonely. Loneliness must have brought him to the zoo to visit Jake.

His jaw had been broken in some accident we can only guess at, so he was probably searching for easy food, too.

On one of his excursions, Trouble did kill Mama Goose, who was, indeed, a favorite of the children who visited the Alaska Zoo. He didn't eat her, only killed her, probably because she was doing what geese do best, making a great deal of noise.