Bearwalker
Authors: Joseph Bruchac
Joseph Bruchac
Illustrations by Sally Wern Comport
To my sons, Jim and Jesseâ
who have followed the tracks
of many bears
I
'm writing this in my journal as I lean against an old hemlock. I'm not bleeding so much now and the writing helps me focus my mind and not fall asleep. I can't allow myself to fall asleep. I have to keep my eyes and ears open. Otherwise he might creep up on me.
People talk a lot about good and evil. Some say that no one is born bad. It's just a result of the way they were raised. But that's not what my ancestors believed. Some beings, some animals and peopleâand those who are both human and animal at the same timeâare
otgont
, twisted away from the path of the good mind. All they care for is power and they're always hungry. The way he is.
Did I hear a twig crack? I listen, but I don't hear anything. And that is not such a good sign. On a night like this, when the moon is bright enough for me to see the pages of my notebook
and write in it, there are usually sounds in the woods. Unless something big is out there hunting. Then everything gets this quietâas quiet as I am trying to be. Quiet enough that the Bearwalker won't find me.
My uncle Jules told me about the Bearwalker. Long ago, he said, there was a Mohawk village. One day people began to disappear. They would go out hunting or to work in the fields and never return. Were enemies ambushing them? Was it some big animal that attacked silently and then carried off their bodies? No one knew.
Then one day a hunter found something that filled him with fear. He ran back to the village to tell everyone.
“I saw the tracks of a huge bear,” he said.
“We have all seen bear tracks before,” another hunter said. “What is so special about bear tracks?”
“Ah,” the first man said, a shiver of fear going down his back as he spoke, “these were no ordinary tracks. For as I followed them they became the tracks of a man.”
A long silence descended then upon the people. They all understood now why people had been vanishing. They knew now what creature
had come to prey upon their people. It was the one they called a monster bear, one of those
otgont
beings, neither human nor animal, but a terrible mixture of both. It could take the form of a human or the shape of a great bear. But unlike a
real
human or bear, it lived only for blood and death. Perhaps this creature had once been a human, but his lust for power had been so great that he had done the things needed to transform him into a monster bear. One of those things (and this sent a chill down my back when Uncle Jules whispered the words) was to sacrifice the life of one of his own relatives.
When it seemed human, the monster bear spoke with a voice that was pleasing, so pleasing that it would confuse those who heard it and they would follow this tall, attractive human without thinking, follow him even though he held one hand over his mouth as he spoke and when he smiled he did so with his mouth closed. This was because even when in the shape of a man, the creature still had the long, sharp canine teeth of a bear. And when that person who had been entranced by the monster's sweet voice had been led deep enough into the forest, then that awful being would suddenly turn and leap with an awful roar. All that would
be left of that unfortunate victim would be bones that the monster bear would carry back to its lair. It piled up those bones and slept upon them as a bed.
The villagers had all heard the stories of this
otgont
bear creature, but had never encountered oneâuntil now. Finally, the head clan mother spoke. Her voice was sad. “Now we know what has happened to our people who vanished,” she said. “They have surely been devoured by that unclean being. But this is not the time to become lost in sorrow. We must do something and not just wait to be victims.”
She looked around the circle of anxious faces.
“What can we do?” said the leader of the hunters. “If the stories about this creature are true, then its skin is too tough for our arrows or spears to pierce it. No weapon can kill it. If we go out to hunt it, it will just hunt us instead.”
Suddenly a small voice spoke up.
“I have an idea,” said that small voice. Everyone turned to look at the one who had said those words. It was the littlest boy in the village, the one almost everyone ignored. His parents had died and he lived with his aged grandmother in a little patched-up longhouse.
Although she loved her grandson, she was so old that her eyes were no longer good, so she did not notice that the boy's hair was never combed and that his face and clothes were never washed. In fact, his buckskin shirt and his blanket were full of holes. The name his parents had given him was Ahtondas, which means “Listener.” But everyone in the village just called him by the nickname of Dirty Face, because of the way he looked.
One of the hunters laughed at the boy. “What do you know?” the hunter said. “You are just a little boy with ragged clothing.”
Others joined in the laughter. But the laughter ended suddenly when the head clan mother held up her hand.
“Let the boy speak,” she said. “I have seen how he sits by the fire listening when stories are told. Those holes in his clothing have come from the sparks that leap out from the fire. He listens so closely that he does not even brush those sparks away.”
Little Dirty Face stood up and stepped forward. “I remember it being said in the stories that if someone challenges the monster bear to a race and wins, he may be able to destroy it.”
The people looked around at each other
and nodded their heads. It was true. That was what more than one story said.
“Good,” said the head clan mother. “This young one has spoken well. Now, who among us will be the one to race that creature?”
Once again there was a long silence. None of the men lifted their heads to speak up. Even the leader of the hunters stared down at his own moccasins.
“If no one else will do this,” a little voice finally said, “then I will try to do it. I will challenge the monster bear.”
It was, of course, Ahtondas, the boy everyone called Dirty Face. And this time no one laughed at him.
That boy went out and did as he said he would do. When the Bearwalker came to him in the shape of a man, he saw it for the monster it was. He challenged it and the race began. For four days he pursued it, making a fire each night and sitting with his back to the fire for safety. At last the Bearwalker could run no farther. It fell to the ground exhausted, right in front of the cave where the piled bones of its victims lay.
Ahtondas lifted up his bow to shoot the monster. As he did so, the Bearwalker laughed.
“Your arrow cannot kill me,” it snarled up at
him. “My skin is too thick. Shoot it and then I will rise up and kill you and gnaw the flesh from your bones.”
I imagine that boy standing there, his bow drawn back, his arrow pointed at the Bearwalker. The smell of death and decay comes out of that cave where the bones of the monster's victims lie piled in a great heap. The Bearwalker's teeth are long and sharp. Ahtondas can see the hunger in its eyes. But his hands do not shake.
“I know your weakness,” Ahtondas says. “Your heart is hidden behind that white spot on your body.”
Then he shoots his arrow.
That story I loved so much as a child has become all too real to me now. But I'm not the boy in that old story who could run forever without tiring. I don't have a bow and arrow. No weapons at all. And my own hands are shaking as I write this.
I
hate the name of my school. Almost as much as I hate the fact that I am the shortest kid in eighth grade. There are even sixth graders taller than me.
But I am not small enough to be forgotten by at least one person as I slouch in my corner desk with my head down.
“Baron,” Mr. Wilbur says from the door of the classroom. “Come on, buddy. Let's go. Everybody else is outside.”
So much for my wonderful idea. I should have known it was too good to be true when the principal announced over the PA that any student who was not outside promptly at 9
A.M
. and lined up for the bus would be left behind.
I shoulder my backpack and go out the front door of the school. I'm mad that my idea about getting out of this “special experience” hasn't worked. I don't notice that Mr. Wilbur
has turned back to get something and is not behind me. Mistake number one. Mistake number two is walking out in the blinding sunlight without noticing what gang of three boys is hanging around the door. The three main reasons I am dreading the days ahead.
“Oops,” says a familiar voice, just before a leg hits my shin at just the right place to send me sprawling onto my face. My hands scrape the pavement, but at least I don't hit my face and get a bloody nose like I did the first time this happened to me. One thing I've learned in the time I've been at Pioneer Junior High is how to fall.
I look up over my shoulder at the big round face of Asa Denham. His long blond hair is like a halo lit by the sun around his head, but his amused expression is not that of an attentive angel. His two buddiesâwho hang around him like the other two-thirds of a set of Siamese tripletsâlook over each of his shoulders. Ernie Crimmins and Harle Clark look just as self-satisfied as their leader. I don't know which one of the three tripped me, but they're all enjoying the spectacle of me flattened on the sidewalk like roadkill.
“Sorry,” Asa says.
“Yeah,” Ernie agrees. “Sorry you're such a clumsy little shrimp.”
“Shrimp,” Harle repeats. His imagination is limited.
Not surprisingly, seeing as how downed prey always attracts the pack, other kids have quickly gathered round.
“Fight?” someone says in a hopeful voice. As if I were about to get up just to get even more convincingly flattened.
“Yo,” a foghorn tone chips in, “what happened to Baron? He trip over an ant?” It's Willy Donner, of course. Willy is a weird match for that big voice of his. He's as skinny as I am short. But he is always so quick with his sarcasm that no one ever gets a chance to make a crack about him before he makes some biting remark of his own.
Someone pushes his way in front, takes my arm and lifts me up.
“Come on, Baron,” he says. It takes me a moment to realize who it is. I'd been expecting a teacher to be the one to step in, but it's not. It's Cody Campbell. Cody is not just one of the biggest, he's also the best-looking guy in the eighth grade. Sort of a teenage Brad Pitt. The girls swoon over him. And because he's the best
football player in school, the guys all respect him, too. Asa and his crew have already taken a few steps backward to disappear into the crowd.
I'm still trying to get over my shock about Cody actually noticing me, much less lending a helping hand to me, when I hear the AP's brusque voice.
“Move aside,” he snaps, as if he actually had to say something for the crowd to part before him like the waters of the Red Sea. No one ever wants to get on the wrong side of Assistant Principal Stark. He stares down at me as if trying to identify some lower form of life that just crawled out from under a rock.
“What's going on here, Mr. Braun?” he says. “Did I hear someone say âfight'? Has someone been picking on you?” His hooded eyes take in the scrapes on my hands before I can put them behind my back. ZTP, I think. ZTP.
ZTP. That stands for the zero tolerance policy in effect at our school when it comes to fights. Anyone involved, including the hapless victim, gets punished. All I have to do is mention Asa's name and we'll both be up the creek. In detention, probably denied the opportunity to go on the class trip. Hmm. I'm tempted. But what works against my temptation is the
ancient junior high code of Omerta. Nobody squeals on nobody, no matter what.
“I tripped,” I say. “Mr. Campbell here just helped me up.”
“Humph,” the AP snorts. He turns on his heel and strides back into the building.
Cody slaps me once on the chest, a friendly slap that confuses me. It's as if I've done something admirable.
“You never cry, do you?” Someone else has come up next to me. It must be the Indian boy's day for having white kids sneak up on him. It's a girl this time. Her name is Tara and her desk is next to mine. She hands me a tissue. “Your hand is bleeding,” she says. Instead of saying anything, I just press the tissue against the scrape on my hand and walk away from both of them.
As the class lines up for the bus, I look back at the redbrick buildings of the school. Could it really be six months since my uncle Jules dropped me off here for the first time?
He had volunteered that first day to pick me up from the trailer park and take me to school because Grama Kateri can't drive. I was in a bad mood and Uncle Jules was good at picking up that vibe. Unlike some adults, he didn't think the right thing to do was to tell me it was all
going to work out for the best. He knew as well as I did that things didn't always work out that way. My mom might get blown up in an unarmored Humvee on the road to the Baghdad airport. Or just vanish like my dad did in Afghanistan two years ago. Uncle Jules had been a Marine himself back in World War II. Ours is a military family. Ancestors of mine have fought as U. S. soldiers, preferably Marines, in every American war from the Revolution up to the present day. Always as volunteers. Always in the front lines. There are more Purple Hearts in my family tree than branches.
I'm proud of that, but pride didn't make me any less depressed that day. I was upset about my mom going away again and having to farm me out with Grama Kateri. Not that I dislike my grandmotherâshe's great. But she's not my mom. And where my mom was going, I might not ever see her again.
To be honest, I was also upset about what I knew I was heading into. A whole new school where I'd have to make new friends (if I was lucky, which was unlikely) and avoid being stereotyped as a Native American midget (which was probably inevitable). So I was struggling between feeling worried about my mom
and feeling sorry for myself, and being angry at her for deserting me and being angry at myself for being so selfish. Although I tried not to show it, my face probably looked like a battlefield that day.
Â
A year is plenty of time to fit in, right? Like a square peg is going to fit into a round hole if you just give it time? You could say that when I arrived here in the middle of my seventh-grade year I settled into a well-defined niche that was purely my own and remains so in eighth grade. The niche of a minuscule, mouthy Mohawk misfit. And nothing is going to change that. Not even a trip to an Adirondack camp. No matter how much my teacher, Mr. Wilbur, tries to pump this up as a great adventure.
To be fair, Mr. Wilbur is a good guy. He's the first male teacherâaside from the phys ed teacherâI've ever had, and he loves books. He's in the school library as much as I am, and not just because he and our librarian, Ms. Mars, are friends.
Ms. Mars is your typical dedicated school librarian. She's always suggesting books like a literary marriage broker, wedding readers to the titles just right for them. She makes a special
effort for the kids who are (and she says this with a little significant pause before the word) readers.
Which describes me. When I was in elementary school at the Akwesasne Mohawk School and stepped into the school library for the first time, I was the kid who said in a too-loud voice, “I'm gonna read every book in here!” That earned me a hug from Mrs. Smoke, the first librarian I ever fell in love with. It also earned me a beating from Billy Jacobs and Timothy Laughing after school. Even in an Indian school with other Indian kids, if you're little and call too much attention to yourself, you attract the bullies.
At Pioneer, the first book Ms. Mars handed me was
Freak the Mighty
. Which was okay. I liked the story and the way it was written, but I thought her motivation in suggesting it to me was a little transparent. When I brought it back to her and she asked me what I thought about it, I sort of wised off.
“It was okay.” I shrugged. “What you got for me now? The biography of Tom Thumb?”
Her face got red. Then she turned around and walked away from the desk. “I'll be back,” she said.
I felt bad as I stood there. But I still thought I'd made my point. If I were the only African American kid in the class, would she have recommended
Up from Slavery
to me? She headed for Mr. Wilbur. The two of them put their heads together and did some whispering. Then she went to a back shelf and pulled out a book. When she came back, she was no longer on the verge of tears. And what she had in her hands was something really special.
I have this thing about bears. It's not just that I'm a Mohawk Indian and I belong to the Bear Clan. It goes way beyond that. I've had a lifelong fascination with bears. Their gentleness and their strength has always touched something deep in me. My mom said my first word was
bear
and I had a stuffed one that I named Buddy. I carried Buddy with me everywhere, which wasn't that easy on him. Mom patched him up a million times until he finally completely fell apart when I was five. Then my mom and dad and I had a funeral for him just like he was a person.
I can't get enough of bears. I'm always reading about them. I draw pictures of them on my notebooks. I even have a bear paw design sort of tattooed into my left arm. I did it with a
sharp pencil, poking it in and drawing blood with each stab. (I don't recommend you try that, seeing as how I got an infection that ended up making my arm swell like a balloon and I had a fever for two days.)
“Here,” Ms. Mars said, holding the book out so that I could see the design on the cover.
I snatched the book so fastâlike a grizzly grabbing a piece of raw meatâthat I almost took Ms. Mars's fingers with it. I don't even recall walking out of the library. There was just me and the book. The rest of that day I spent every spare second (and most of math class) reading it.
The Sacred Paw: the Bear in Nature, Myth, and Literature
. I brought it back to the library the next day.
Ms. Mars looked surprised when I walked up to her desk. “Returning it already?” she said.
I shook my head. “Can I buy it?” I asked.
I couldn't, of course, but Ms. Mars got on the Internet and helped me locate a used copy on eBay for four bucks. When we completed the transaction I grinned up at her.
“This,” I said, “could be the start of a beautiful friendship.”
Mr. Wilbur also has picked up on my ursophilic fascination. One of the reasons I like
him is because he lets me get away with a lot. I don't mean stuff like throwing spitballs or making rude hand gestures when his back is turned. Those things are adequately covered by Asa and his crew. I mean that he lets me turn just about every writing assignment into a treatise on bears. Like when we were doing poetry I used a poem from
The Sacred Paw
about “the heavy bear who goes with me.” (Mr. Wilbur was amused that in my critique I talked about how using bears as metaphors would work better if the poet knew something about real bears.) When we did Shakespeare I wrote three whole pages on the stage direction “Exit, pursued by a Bear.”
Mr. Wilson even aids and abets. Just last week he loaned me a book I hadn't seen before,
Touching Spirit Bear.
It's about how old-style American Indian circle justice was used on a non-Native kid who'd done a lot of bad stuff. Instead of sending him off to a juvie jail they exiled him to an island. There he ran into you know what. Eventually, after a lot of hard lessons, that kid learned to listen to his heart. I read the book in one sitting, read it again, and then returned it to him.
“You liked it,” he said, smiling. He saw the look on my face.
“You bet,” I replied. “Think we could arrange for Asa and his crew to get sent to that island?”
“Well,” he said, rubbing his chin like he was actually considering it, “maybe not an island. But there is one way we'll be getting everyone outdoors this year.”
Mr. Wilbur loves the outdoors. He's always saying things like “We need to attune our senses to the rhythms of the nature cycles.” And his favorite word seems to be
listen
. He'll just stop in the middle of a lecture and say that.
“Listen.”
Then we're all supposed to get quiet and listen. And some of us do eventually hear what it is he wants us to notice. Like maybe a cardinal calling from a branch just outside the open window of the classroom.
He's taken courses on things like animal tracking, making a fire with a bow drill, building survival shelters in the forest. Now, my being an Indian, you might imagine I would know about all that stuff. But most Indian kids, even those on the rez, are not learning those things anymore. They're too busy doing all the things other kids doâwatching DVDs, playing Xbox games, and downloading rap music on
their iPods. All that I knew about animal tracking was what I had read in books.
And the only real bears I've ever been close to are the ones I saw in the Syracuse zoo. My mom drove six hours to take me there the week before she got shipped out. I didn't want to see the elephants or the snakes or anything else. We spent the whole time with the bears. Most people just walked past because the bears weren't doing anything much except lying there. But I didn't care. I just wanted to be close to them and feel their presence. I felt as if I were in there with them, looking out of their eyes, sharing their thoughts. My mom only suggested moving on once. When I didn't answer, she sat down and put her arm around me. We stayed until one of the zoo people came and said we had to leave.