Black Bear, Russet Hen, Brown Dog, White Elephant

“The bear just thinks it’s tame and we feed it chickens at this point,” Uncle Rog says, smiling, over his beer, all gap teeth and white whiskers. He won’t say it to Aunt Lucy, of course. Her voice would get all high pitched telling him it was an awful thing to say. But she would also just quietly stop replacing the chickens, and they make her so happy, each brown egg a source of as much pride as if she’d laid it herself. She often watches through the bay window with hands wrapped around her coffee mug as they scratch in the yard. Uncle Rog will come back triumphant from the woodpile with a fat white grub, and she’ll squeal with delight as she decides which hen deserves the treat. Uncle Rog trusts that I understand all that.

The kids are parked in front of PJ Masks, which is why I can be out on the deck with a glass of wine for golden hour. The sun disappeared behind the peak at my back nearly an hour ago, but it still hasn’t sunk below the real horizon, the one you could see if the mountain weren’t there, so the sky has only just now caught fire. 

Good Dog readjusts his chin on top of my foot, living up to his name for this moment of relief from Tanner’s harassment. I reach down and run my fingers through the fur of his floppy ears. I probably should have boarded him for the trip so that we could have a nice visit instead of the constant tantrums, but Caylin gave me a lecture about how he was a member of the family. Little enough for PJ Masks, big enough for moral lectures. 

Rog and Lucy love them, come up with all kinds of projects for them to do: filling the bird feeders, checking the red squirrel traps and keeping the tally to report the population to the ecology department down at the U, picking blackberries, making leaf identification books, gathering the eggs. Tanner is good at that and can manage it by himself, even fitting his little tennis shoes carefully inside the sandals that stay beside the pen so that no chicken filth gets tracked in the house. I can hardly remember the first few rounds of Tanner refusing and devolving in screaming tears, insisting that he already knew what to do. 

Of course, if I do something he doesn’t like, he’ll punish me by running into the chicken pen in his regular tennis shoes. Nothing to be done then but wash them. Publicly. So that Aunt Lucy can see me washing them and know that I have cared about her rules. 

It’s not fair of me to say it like that. Lucy’s perspective on children’s behavior and rules has changed a lot with all my reading and parent training. She tolerates so much that she would have judged a decade ago. It’s also not fair for me to say that Tanner punishes me; he doesn’t know that his actions force me to do more work and performative penance. Tanner knows that I feel I stress when he goes to the chicken coop without the sandals, and when he’s escalated, he wants me to feel that way too. 

Garret got us a puppy for Christmas. Some kind of a poodle-mixed brown mutt. He put it in a box that he brought in at the last minute and everything, so that Caylin could open it and we would be an instagram family with a puppy in a box and a ribbon: the family that came with the frame. We tried to call him Rogaine, because poodles don’t shed, but Tanner was unwavering in his insistence on “Good Dog,” typically literal in the extreme. Then he turned him into a very bad dog, with almost single-minded determination. Tanner never hurts Good Dog. He never annoys him on purpose. And never leaves him alone. 

Lucy returns from feeding the chickens as the color in the sky fades to grayish. “I was right. Weak Tea didn’t come back,” she sang out past the kids to us out on the deck. All her chickens were named for their color or the color of their eggshells: Oil, Cloudy Day, Adobe, Piano Keys, Penny, Copper Wire. Tanner noticed her return and came to show her the bandaid on his hand and get folded in her softness, rub the loose old-lady flesh on the back of her arm.

“Look! I got a ouch. Good Dog bited me.”

“Oh no! Good Dog bit you? That’s terrible!” she said with exaggerated sympathy. “Oh, no, honey, you don’t have to show me. No, please don’t take the bandaid off. No, honey, leave the bandaid. Oh. Okay. Let’s try not to waste bandaids next time.” 

She slid open the screen door, pocketing the folded bandaid. “That’s some injury he’s got there,” she said, widening her eyes and sniffing a few bursts of mirth out through her nose. 

“It makes him feel better so he can move on,” I say. It’s much better than a year ago, when I had to put bandaids on his toys and the furniture to keep him from screaming when they were accidentally kicked.

She hasn’t noticed that he followed her to the door and is listening to us.

She settles herself at the table. “Weak Tea’s been going down the hill. Remind me to check again before bed. If she gets left out, the bear’ll eat her.”

“Relax, honey,” Rog suggests, reaching out his hand to cover hers. “It might be the cougar.” Aunt Lucy cries out in irritation and throws a wadded-up napkin at him.

“You guys just have one bear and one cougar out there?” I indicate the whole broad view of the mountainside, almost perfectly unbroken by human construction. 

“Territorial.”

The screen door has been sliding open inch by inch. Good Dog is starting to growl very low under my chair. 

“Tanner, honey, Good Dog is telling you he doesn’t want you to pet him. Listen to him.” I slide out of my chair and down the level where Tanner is creeping through the doorway, escaping no one’s notice but keeping up the pretense. “Let me help you pet him so gently.” Good Dog stops growling now that I’m there. I walk Tanner through holding out his hand, palm down. Good Dog responds, licking his hand, which sets Tanner shrieking with laughter like a blade in the ear. Tanner reaches out his fingers to pet Good Dog on top of the head. One stroke. Two strokes. I’m reaching into my pocket to give him a sweet tart for being so gentle when he covers the dog’s eyes with his hand like a game of guess who and the growl rumbles out again; teeth show. I move Tanner’s hand away, “he doesn’t like that.” Tanner’s voice shrills, “Mo-om! Stop it!” he forces his hand down again. Good Dog gives a more forceful growl and a sharp warning bark.

Lucy tries to be helpful, saying “now, Tanner, we can’t treat dogs that way.” As if he’ll respond to talk when it comes to this marvelous creature that not only moves and has soft bumps of curled fur, but also hilariously gets angry on demand, barking, snapping and hiding under sofas. 

I put a hand out to comfort the dog. Tanner does too. One stroke, two strokes. The candy comes out of my pocket. Tanner abruptly changes motion, rubbing the fur irritatingly in the wrong direction. Should that count? Do I give it to him? “Okay, honey, you were doing great. Just pet his fur the right way so I can give this to you.” Another stroke in the wrong direction. 

Good Dog gets to his feet and tries to leave, but finds himself penned in. I tell Tanner to move and let him pass. Tanner moves to one side, coincidentally the side Good Dog has headed for in order to nose past him. Good Dog switches to the other side, and Tanner howls with laughter again. He feints side to side, thwarting the hound’s exit and causing him to shift uncertainly side to side. Tanner covers Good Dog’s eyes again.

“Stop it!” I scream. “Just leave the dog alone!” One hand lifts up in a threatening gesture, my face full of rage.

Tanner looks up at me. He’s not scared. He knows better than I do that I won’t smack him, but in his surprise, the dog jumps over his legs and runs through the screen door. 

“Mo-om!” He shrills. 

Caylin appears in the doorway as I declare, “Okay, now the dog’s in timeout. You may not touch the dog.” 

“Mom, it’s not fair to punish Good Dog!” She blocks Tanner from following until the dog can get through the room and out of eyeshot. 

“Stop it!” he screams at her. She doesn’t move. “You’re ruining everything!” he shrieks. Then it’s just a succession of high-pitched screams. Several pairs of palms rise to block ears, and, for just a second, I scan for what he might destroy, what route he might use to launch himself over the deck. 

Rog sips his beer, his laughter becoming audible in the gaping hole left when Tanner’s screams subside. “Boys, man,” he says.

“It’s not because he’s a boy,” I snap. I’m just going to tell him not to laugh when I see Tanner watching him, a smile cracking his face. Tanner spits out a few phony guffaws in imitation, and the tantrum is past.

Caylin softens now that he’s smiling again. “Come on buddy. I paused it for you.” 

“Thank you---eee!” he sings, too loud and throws his arms around her, trying to pick her up. 

“Okay,” Caylin says, keeping her annoyance in check as she backs him up from the aggressive embrace. She holds her hand out and he takes it, doing a ludicrously adorable cartoon foot shuffle, revving up to leave. Then he slaps my knee just to have the last word.

I shift my weight from a crouch to a sit, balance one elbow on my crooked knee and cover my face in my hands. I take a minute in that position.

“It’s not your fault, babe.” Aunt Lucy. So kind, so right in knowing what makes it hurt.

“It is. I fly off the handle. He didn’t contact reinforcement a single time in that interaction, just got a lot of reaction for crappy behavior.”

“Honey, no one can keep it together when a kid does that to a dog.”

“You’re right. It’s the dog.” And she can hear it in my voice.

“Jamie, he didn’t mean to. He just. He didn’t know it would affect Tanner like this.”

Rog has clammed up, tracing wet circles around the rim of his beer mug and feeling his upper lip with his lower teeth.

“Exactly. He’s off on an oil rig six months at a time and just wants them to smile at him when he’s home. He has no idea what living with Tanner and a dog would be like.” I wipe snot with the back of my hand and sit there blaming Garret for another minute before I get up to wash it off.

Good Dog is still hiding when I head to bed. Tanner has calmed down with the temptation out of view. He reads all his sight words in the fish book I read to him and sings me the ABCs. He gives me exactly three kisses: right cheek, nose, left cheek and recites “Good night! Sleep tight! Don’t let the bears or anything bite!” Strange. He usually says just “anything.” I lie there smelling his little boy scent, loving him so hard I think it must weigh him down further into the bed. So sorry about the raised voice, the raised hand, the limits of my toleration. But you just can’t do anything else. Protecting the dog is always urgent. 

In the morning I fill the Good Dog’s dish but I don’t see him. The door’s open, so I guess Uncle Rog has taken him out on the ATV with him. We get busy with breakfast and making blackberry cobbler and then go out for a walk. Tanner and Caylin run ahead, oversized walking sticks in hand. Caylin runs back to me to show me berries or bugs and ask me what they are. “Wild raspberry,” “a hemiptera; probably some kind of stink bug” I say, sniffing. Tanner watches and then runs with blades of grass or a handful of pebbles. I say “grass” and “rocks.” He shouts out “okay thanks!” and scurries away. 

I catch a moment when the kids are holding hands, Caylin bending her knees as she points to something at the side of the road and Tanner looks. I send the picture to his dad, consider a second, send it to his special ed teacher too. Joint attention: the whole concept achieved in one photo. I give a candy from my pocket. “Thanks for looking at stuff Caylin likes, buddy.” Caylin’s face turns up hopefully. I pop a sweet tart in her mouth, too. She learns the lesson easily.

I thank Rog silently for taking the dog away.

It’s only when we come back and find Rog alone that anybody realizes that Good Dog hasn’t been seen all day. We go back out shouting “come and get a treat!” but he doesn’t come. Several strategies are bandied about over lunch, including just leaving food out for the bear. Why chase prey when you’re already full? Lucy thinks we’re being dramatic. The bear runs off when she bangs a pot: it’s not going to tolerate being barked at. 

Rog suggests splitting up and going down all the paths. I’m scared that’ll teach Tanner to run off down them alone. “Then I’ll take them out for a joyride!” Rog declares. The kids load on to the ATV and set out, stopping every 200 yards to shout into the woods. It’s only after he’s gone that it occurs to me that Tanner’s voice might keep Good Dog away. And then only after that that I hope so.

They come back with no dog. “I only had to grab him off a ledge twice.” Rog summarizes with twinkling eyes, and I don’t know whether that happened or not.

“He was a good boy,” Caylin says in the praising-Tanner voice he’s meant to overhear. “He sat on his seat and wore the belt.”

“I drove!” Tanner announces, chest puffed with pride. I look up alarmed. Rog gives me a tiny head shake and turned down mouth to let me know he didn’t really, but he says, “You sure did, big guy!”

The kids are deflated. Caylin cries a little. When Tanner comes to put his arms around her and asks “what’s wrong?” she says she misses dad. She won’t tell him that she’s worried about Good Dog in the woods. There is no mention of the bear.

“You could call him,” Tanner suggests. “Caw ‘im,” it comes out in his baby voice. But when she does call Garret, Tanner runs out of the room, too overwhelmed to talk. 

At bedtime, he comes to the stairs after being told only twice to turn off the TV. But then he turns and runs back to the living room and out the back door onto the deck. I go after him, already fussing, “no. Tanner, come. It’s time to brush teeth.”

He steps on the bottom rung of the deck rail, speeding my steps in case he’s climbing over, but he’s only giving himself six more inches to shout into into the gloom: “Mr. Bear! Mr. Bear! Do us a favor and don’t eat our dog!” He’s been listening. And understanding. “Do us a favor”? When had he learned that? I smile to myself. It’s not something to praise him for or give him candy to reinforce, but it’s progress.

In the morning the kids are sad, but basically compliant. Tanner accepts it pretty well when I tell him that we have to get him to school tomorrow. Lucy and Rog will take care of Good Dog when he comes back until we can come pick him up. Hopefully in four months when Garret is here to deal with the fall out, I don’t say. 

We’re pulling out of the carport onto the long dirt road when Good Dog bounds out of the forest, like it’s a damn Disney movie. Caylin sees him first and starts gasping and getting Tanner’s attention, so excited she momentarily has no words.Tanner shrieks with joy and my head splits open. He pulls his seatbelt off and starts opening the door before I’ve even come to a stop. Caylin spills out the other door. 

I put my head down on my hand on the steering wheel and take a second to get myself together. Because that isn’t true. I saw him first and tried to get away before the kids noticed.