Bearwalker (2 page)

“So soon?” I said.

“Son,” the man said in a gentle voice, “was up to me, I'd let you stay all night. But we got rules here and we done bent 'em some already. It's an hour past closing time.”

But he didn't make us get up and go just yet. Instead he sat down and talked with me about the bears, how he liked taking care of them, though he'd rather see them out in the wild since there was always so much going on
in a bear's head and life had to be awful boring for them in their enclosure. That was why he gave them balls to play with and hid their food so they had to spend time figuring out where it was.

It was dark when he finally led us to the back gate and let us out.

Before we left, though, he tapped me on the shoulder.

“You might want this,” he said. He was holding a wooden carving of a bear. It was about the most beautiful, perfect little thing I'd ever seen. Not a cartoony bear, but like a real animal shrunk down, every detail just right.

“I can keep it?” I said as he placed it in my outstretched palm.

“Well, maybe it can keep you,” he said with a big grin. “Bears bring you luck, you know.”

“Thank you, Roy,” my mother said.

Our car was the only one left in the lot. It didn't hit me until Mom pressed the button on her key chain to open the doors.

“Roy?” I asked.

“He served with your dad in Afghanistan,” my mother replied. Her voice was so soft I barely heard it.

I didn't say anything after that. I just kept
my hand in my jacket pocket, holding on tight to that little bear. We pulled out onto the road and I guess I fell asleep then because I didn't wake up until hours later, when my mother opened the door to reach in and slide her arms under me. She hadn't picked me up like that since I was in second grade, and I suppose I might have protested that a mom just doesn't carry her seventh-grade son, even if he is still only knee high to a gopher. But I didn't. I just leaned my head against her shoulder and felt her strong arms—strong enough to carry the whole world—holding me safe and secure as she took me up to bed.

That year-ago drive to Syracuse with my mom was the last trip I'd really wanted to take until now. And now, whether I want to or not, I am about to get on this bus for the annual eighth-grade trip to Camp Chuckamuck. Four nights in a wilderness camp to do some of those same things that Mr. Wilbur learned. I sigh as I climb the steps. Maybe I'll really like it after all. I mean, how bad could it be? All I have to worry about is more of the usual junior high bullying I've been suffering the last six months. It's not like my life is going to be in danger.

T
he miles are whipping by. We've gone from flat farmland to rolling hills. The once-distant peaks of the Adirondacks have edged closer. They're tinged with the colors of autumn, that blood red of the maples and the yellow of the beeches flowing like colored patterns in a tapestry across the green unchanging fabric of the spruce and pines and cedars. Whiteface Mountain rises up like a volcanic peak above the others. I'm actually feeling pumped.

The thought of being among all those trees, big ones that I can get way up into, is making me feel happy as I look at those mountains that are growing larger and larger. I practically live in that big maple that grows out over the street behind Grama Kateri's trailer. I think nothing about dangling out by one hand over the road for minutes at a time from my favorite high branch.

Mom climbed plenty of trees when she was my age. And I imagine that was true for Grama Kateri as well. After all, they were once bear cubs just like me. Among our nation, you inherit your clan from your mother's side. Grama Kateri and Mom are both Bears. My dad, being Turtle Clan, stayed out of trees.

Maybe I'll find a hundred-foot pine to climb. I've read that a few old pines in the Adirondack Park are almost as big as the ones that grew before the English and French took the tallest trees to make the masts of sailing ships.

“
ENTERING ADIRONDACK PARK
.”

I read that sign by the roadside aloud. It prompts Mr. Wilbur to say something in reply. He's just come back to his seat next to me after quelling some minor disturbance in the back of the bus.

“You know we won't actually be in the park itself,” he says. “Camp Chuckamuck is on private land just outside the Blue Line.”

“It is?” I hadn't known that.

Mr. Wilbur hears the disappointment in my voice.

“Don't worry,” he reassures me. “It's just as wild at Chuckamuck as anywhere inside the
park. It was a family preserve before it became a camp and they kept it pristine. It's still that way, despite the pressure being put on the owners to sell it to developers. Plus it's way off the beaten track. You'll see when we get to the road that leads in. Ten miles of dirt! You're more likely to view megafauna here than anywhere else in the North Country. Moose and even…” He pauses for effect and then just makes a growling sound.

“Bears,” I say. I'm grinning now.

Mr. Wilbur starts to say something else, but the sudden dramatic rise of a voice from behind us drowns out his words.

“All they found of that one kid was his hand. And all the fingers had been chewed off!”

I don't even have to turn around to know who it is. Willy Donner, of course. His foghorn tones reverberate through the whole bus. He's three rows back, trying to freak out the girls in the seat across from him with stories about the cannibal of Camp Chuckamuck.

“His name,” Willy continues, pausing and lowering his voice for dramatic effect, “was Jason Jones. His parents brought him to Camp Chuckamuck twenty years ago. He was huge for his age, but he wasn't really smart. The other
kids teased him and played mean tricks. What they didn't know was that they were driving him crazy and that he was wicked strong. One night, after they put a dead rat in his bed, he just ran screaming out into the night and never came back. No one could find him. But the next night the boy who had put the rat into Jason Jones's bed vanished. A trail of blood led from his cabin into the woods.”

I take a quick look over my shoulder. Heidi and Tara, the two Willy's words are aimed at, have disinterested looks on their faces. But they're still listening as he gruesomely chronicles how one camper after another disappeared.

“They started finding things around the camp. There were piles of eyeballs that had been pulled out and human leg bones with tooth marks on them.”

Willy's voice gets louder again. He's approaching the climax. “The state police finally tracked Jason Jones down to a cave in the forest. That cave was piled high with chewed human bones and there was a big iron pot in which he was cooking up a batch of camper soup. Even though the police shot him again and again, he wouldn't die. He just kept coming at them until they finally had to use a flamethrower.”

I look over at Mr. Wilbur, who is rolling his eyes like I am. Like flamethrowers are standard issue for state troopers? Talk about overembellishing.

“But before he died, engulfed in flames,” Willy concludes, “the last words Jason Jones howled were ‘I'll be back.'”

Mr. Wilbur has his head in his hands. Like me, he doesn't know whether to laugh or cry. Although I have to admit that some of the details of that story have creeped me out.

But Willy isn't done yet. He leans toward Heidi and Tara, his voice a harsh whisper: “Every year the ghost of Jason Jones, the cannibal of Camp Chuckamuck, comes back to claim another victim. And this time it might just be…YOU!” As he shouts that last word, Willy grabs Heidi by the arm and she screams.

Mr. Wilbur stands up and turns around. He doesn't do it quickly, but he has a presence that makes people pay attention to him, whether in the classroom or on this bus full of overstimulated teenagers. He speaks just one word. Firmly.

“Enough.”

Willy sinks back into his seat and directs his eyes forward. Heidi, who enjoys acting hysterical,
stops screaming, even though she is still rubbing her wrist where Willy grabbed her. Tara, too cool to fall for Willy's tale of terror, just shakes her head in disgust.

Mr. Wilbur slides back into his seat in one easy athletic motion. He was a gymnast in college. He's the only teacher I have ever met who can do a backflip.

“Urban myths,” he says. “Well, actually rural.”

“An unconvincing mélange of overworked motifs,” I add, putting on my best professorial voice.

Mr. Wilbur chuckles and holds up his right hand to tick them off on his fingers. “
I Know What You Did Last Summer
,” he begins.

“
Friday the 13th
,” I add.

“
Halloween
,” he continues, shaking his head. “Poor Jamie Lee Curtis.”

“With a little touch of
The Terminator
,” I conclude.

“I'll be baachh,” Mr. Wilbur intones, nailing the Austrian cyborg accent.

Three seats back, Willy is talking again. Mr. Wilbur sighs but doesn't do anything. You can't keep a bad storyteller down. At least Willy is soft-pedaling it below foghorn level now. I can still hear him though.

“You know,” Willy says, “Camp Chuckamuck was built on an old Indian graveyard.”

Now I roll my eyes. It always comes back to that. Every spooky place in America, it seems, was built on an old Indian graveyard. I'm as sick of hearing that as I am of being told that the only real Indians live west of the Mississippi. But Willy isn't finished yet.

“You know what the word
Chuckamuck
really means?” he asks. “It means place of many chewed bones!”

Now I'm ready to stand up, but Mr. Wilbur holds out his hand. I settle back in my seat. I understand. It's not the time or place to get into this. All I'd be doing would be knocking my head against the wall. What Mr. Wilbur expects is that after a few days together here at the camp, things will change. We will learn in spite of ourselves, inspired (as the camp brochure reads) “by the healthy outdoor atmosphere and the natural environment of Camp Chuckamuck, whose name means Place of Happy Meetings in the language of the first peoples of this land.”

I think it's a faint hope. People don't change overnight, even in a healthy outdoor atmosphere. The bus bumps and sways into a turn. I look out the window. We've just turned onto
that dirt road Mr. Wilbur mentioned. Hills crowd in on either side, and evergreen trees are thick all around us. It's almost like we're going into a tunnel that leads to another reality.

Thinking of reality,
Chuckamuck
is not a word that means “Place of Happy Meetings” in the Mohawk language. In Mohawk it doesn't mean anything. That's par for the course when it comes to most outdoor education places. They like to use phony Indian names. Either they spell them wrong or don't translate them right or they just plain make up some weird word that they think sounds Native American.

I'm feeling sort of depressed now, despite the trees and the chance of seeing a bear. Too many things are going through my head, especially that image of Jason Jones's cannibal cave full of bones. I know the yarn that Willy was spinning is just a crock. But it's made me think of another tale, one that really is old and traditional. There
was
a real cave full of chewed human bones in the story of the monster bear.

“Y
o, Mr. Wilbur, are those real?”

“Check it out!”

“Look at that!”

Thirty-three other Pioneer Junior High eighth graders stare out the windows as our bus slows down. We're creeping over a wooden bridge that spans a swampy forest meadow and deepens into a pond created by a long beaver dam. The dam is about fifty yards back from the road and it's a miracle of animal engineering. It has to be a hundred yards long. But that intricately fashioned wall of mud and peeled sticks is not what's attracting my eyes or those of the other kids. Some of them are holding up their cell phones to take pictures of the center of all our attentions. It's our first sight of creatures we've been told about but have never seen before.

“There she goes again!”

The cow moose that is three times as big as any white-tailed deer lowers her head once more into the pond. She raises her head and water streams off her. A braid of water weeds hangs like a beard from her jaw as she chews the plants she's foraged from the bottom. She seems oblivious to the presence and noise of our passing. Behind her, in shallower water, her two calves stare over their shoulders at our bus.

For a moment I feel as if it can't get better than this. We haven't even gone a mile yet off the main road and we've already experienced something I've only imagined or seen in pictures. Those big animals seem like beings out of the past. I feel as if I'm no longer in the twenty-first century, but in a time where the old stories are alive.

Then the sarcastic voices of Asa and Ernie and Harle jolt me back into the present.

“Man, if I only had a gun.”

“How about an RPG?”

“Yeah, that'd do it. Ka-boom! Course all you'd have left would be the head.”

They're laughing like hyenas now. They've reduced this moment of awe to an adolescent fantasy of animal slaughter. I hunch into myself. I know that the Turtle is my dad's clan and not
my own, but at moments like this I find myself wishing I had a shell. I could just pull my head in and pretend the rest of the world—which can be so mean—doesn't exist.

I'm alone in the seat. Mr. Wilbur stood up and moved back along the aisle when the three moose first came into sight. He's telling the kids what he knows about moose, how they've come back into the state after being absent for so many years. It wasn't just that they'd all been killed by hunters. The disappearance of the northern forests eliminated their habitat. But now the woods have been growing back for more than a century. With forests to return to, moose have been slowly spreading west from Maine into New Hampshire, Vermont, and now the Adirondacks.

How does he do it? He's actually managed to quiet Asa and his clique with his soft-spoken lecture. He's up to the challenge of handling thirty-four eighth graders on a bus where he and the driver are the only grown-ups. The other adults coming to Camp Chuckamuck with us are in the smaller van with all the camping gear. Three parents and Mrs. Smiler, the girls' PE teacher. They fell behind when they had to stop for gas.

Mr. Wilbur drops back into his half of the seat again.

“Don't,” he says. Then he waits.

“Don't what?” I finally reply.

“Take a guess.”

“Don't let those guys get to me when they are being jerks?”

“Bingo.”

“That's easy for you to say. You're a six-foot-tall adult teacher.”

There's a longer silence this time. I'm looking out the window, but except for an occasional chipmunk or red squirrel taking its life into its paws to scurry across the road in front of the bus, there's no sign of any other animals.

“I suppose I could tell you,” Mr. Wilbur says, his voice slow and careful, “that kids who are bullies and loudmouths are that way because they don't feel good about themselves. You know, a person is not born a bully.”

“So it's not like my situation, eh?” I answer. I always have an answer when I'm in this kind of mood. “Not like being born the runt of the litter.”

“Baron,” Mr. Wilbur says, directing my gaze out the window, “look up.”

I do as he says. We've entered another cleared
area, an old decking ground for logging where the trees were cut back and a hillside is exposed. You can see the sky over that hill and there, even though it is early afternoon, is the full moon. It is just hanging there, luminescent in the west, almost as visible as it would be at night. Full moons in the autumn can be like that. Even though the sun is lower in the southern sky, the moon is still high, reflecting the sun, giving a second chance at the light. Mohawks call the moon Grandmother. We say that she watches over us when she is big and full that way.

“You don't have to be tall to see the moon,” Mr. Wilbur says.

I don't argue with that.

 

We go around one curve, dive down into a valley, and climb a steep grade. There's a small building, more of a shack than anything else, by the side of the road where some machinery is parked. Small as that building is, it has a huge padlock on its solid door. keep out and stay away are painted in large red letters on the three sides of the shack visible as we bump past. What's being kept in there?

Just past that mysterious shack the road
abruptly narrows. It's just wide enough for our bus as it passes between two steep rocky hills. Another mile or so and we come out of the gap. Now I can see the blue of water glinting ahead of us. We turn again and then we're there.

When you come to a new place, pay attention. That's one of the things my dad and mom have often told me. Part of it is from their military training and part of it is just the old Mohawk way. So I look around slowly, taking it all in. First there's the pond. It's nothing like the pond where we saw the moose. This one is bigger, clearly man-made, with a concrete dam wedged like an open palm between two small hills to hold back the water of the two streams that flow down the mountain into it. It's as neat as a picture postcard. It's been edged with white sand. There's a swimming float in the middle and a dock with a dozen boats tied to it.

Then there are the buildings. The first one we pass, which is at the start of a trail that rises quickly up the mountain to our left, is a small frame building with a porch. It looks lived in and the clothesline out back is a sure sign of that. A couple of small red-and-black patterned shirts and several pairs of wool socks are hanging from the line. As we continue to follow the
road around the pond I count the rest of the buildings. There are six and they're all log cabins, like out of a travel brochure or a corny old movie.

Several people are ranged around the biggest one, a square-built florid-faced blond man. He has one of those “I'm in charge” smiles on his face. Ten to one, he's the camp director. He and the two others with him wear khaki uniforms with little triangle-shaped designs stenciled on the left pockets, yellow ball caps with that same triangle, and identical blue-and-white sneakers. Their welcoming grins look as manufactured as their clothing. Clones.

I amend my first impression when I notice the older-looking couple standing a little off to the side. They look like real human beings. They both have deeply tanned faces. The woman wears a floral pattern dress like those Grama Kateri favors. The man holds a pipe in one hand and a splitting ax in the other. His clothes look like larger versions of the ones I saw hanging on that line. The square-built blond man notices them just then. He turns and waves a hand at them in a dismissive gesture and they disappear back around the building.

Two medium-sized single-story cabins lie
to each side of that main building, rustic signs on their log walls.
CHICKADEE JUNCTION
,
GIRLS
'
BUNKHOUSE
. Cornier than Iowa. But the boys' bunkhouse is worse.
HAWK HAVEN
, it reads. Hawk Haven? No haven for me if all the boys will be staying together there. I have no doubt that Asa and his crew of apprentice sadists will be tormenting me with unfunny practical jokes. Rather than a place of refuge, that boys' bunkhouse is where I fully expect that my life will be made into a living…

“Baron?”

I wake up from my vision of inevitable torture. Everyone else has gotten off the bus. I'm the last one left sitting inside. Surprisingly, the person who has just stepped back in and spoken my name to return me to the real but no less bitter world is not Mr. Wilbur but Tara Moody. She touches my arm lightly and smiles.

“Come on, dreamer,” she says, looking down at me with a little smile. “You're in my flight.”

Flights. It's been explained that we'll be broken up into groups called flights. Why? Because Camp Chuckamuck “gives wings to the spirits of every child.” To which I want to reply, “Give me a break instead.” Or maybe just remind
them that I'm a bear, not a bat or a bobolink.

However, I am so surprised by Tara's unexpected friendliness that my protective armor of sarcasm falls away. I get up out of my seat, smile up at her (she is a good foot taller than me), and follow her off the bus.

But as soon as I set foot on the ground and see the huge man who seems to have appeared out of nowhere, I freeze in my tracks. He's leaning back against the main camp building, the sign
EAGLE'S NEST
half obscured by his broad shoulders. A chill runs down my back.