The Bear

The Bear is going to sleep.

She picks up the phone and calls Roger at the cave. Roger is eating a dead rabbit and when the phone rings, he looks up, rabbit blood pooled at the corners of his lips, and decides not to answer.

Roger is aware that the Bear is just about ready to go to sleep, because it’s that time of year, and the rabbits are getting clumsier, but also less tasty, and so he knows that the Bear is going to hibernate soon, but for much longer this time, because she’s getting tired of waking up, and he knows he should answer the phone, but he hates that she called during dinner.

The phone rings. The rabbit’s tail sits still on the floor of the cave. He always saves the tail for last--as a little treat.

The Bear knows that Roger is probably eating and that she shouldn’t call during dinner, but she’s already feeling soporific and the bed she’s made for herself at the back part of her cave seems to be opening up around her, ready to swallow her whole.

Every time she hibernates, she likes to put together a different place within her modest cave to begin her slumber, because she read somewhere that you might have trouble sleeping if you report to the same bed, night after night. She’s never had trouble falling asleep, but she doesn’t want to take any chances.

It’s been a discouraging year.

First the cubs decided that they didn’t want to live in the forest with her. They wanted to go live in the next forest over with their father. She told them this was fine, but as soon as they were gone, she went down to the river and howled up at the moon, standing on her hind legs.

That woman filming the nature documentary caught her in her grief and managed to snag a few minutes of it. She’d win an Oscar for that shot, but she’d die in a bizarre parasailing accident a week before the ceremony.

What the documentarian didn’t know, and would never know, is that these hibernations have gone on now for much longer than she would ever be able to investigate. Bears, towards the end of their lives, could sleep for as little as ten years, or as long as a century. When they awoke, they were often trapped underneath a city that had previously not existed or at the bottom of an expanse of ocean that had encroached upon what used to be vegetation.

The filming of the documentary was another hurdle in a year that often felt like an unwinnable, never-ending race. The cubs leaving, the cinematic voyeurism, the fire that took out the patch of land where the Bear preferred to do her business each morning. Upon finding a spot that feels comfortable, a Bear never changes where they do conduct their daily release. To have to find another spot with only weeks to go until hibernation? That presented itself to be a special kind of hassle.

The Bear decided as she hung up the phone that she would not contact Roger again once she woke up. It’s possible he would be dead by then anyway, since this time around, she knew multiple years would pass before she opened her eyes and pushed out the blockage holding in her excrement. Normally that crude bit of necessity was when she took stock of what had happened before hibernation and what should happen after, but allowing yourself to wait to make to plans was a luxury for cubs, not a bear finishing up what would most likely be her last hibernation before the sleep that doesn’t wake itself.

If Roger managed to avoid dying before she woke up again, it was possible he would hear through the grapevine that she was out and about. She dreamt up a scenario would he appear at her cave one night, looking a bit aged, but then again, so would she. He’d explain to her that he wasn’t trying to be inconsiderate when he showed no interest in her hibernating, but that, as a mountain lion, he just had different goals for himself. Goals she couldn’t share.

The truth is, as soon as she confessed to him how messy things had gotten with the father of her cubs, he pulled away. They had been lying, post-coitus, in his cave--which was consistently filthy, rabbit bones everywhere, and yet she was happier than she’d ever been in her life. His snout grazed one of her teats, and she yipped with pleasure. That quick burst of bliss had opened something up in her, and before she knew it, she was confiding in him things she wouldn’t even admit to herself. Not even in her most honest moments.

When she was done, she noticed he wasn’t pressed up against her anymore, but halfway towards the other wall of the cave, where he kept all his vole skins. He told her he had an early day and really needed to hit the sack. She thought earlier he had hinted at having her stay over, but now it was clear something had shifted.

She realized too late that Roger liked that so much of her life was unavailable to him. After all, what kind of relationship could he have with a creature who had to sleep for a decade or longer? Didn’t she understand that all she should expect from anyone else is recreational impermanence? Why try to build a life on silt? She thought of spotting him for the first time as she was scooping fish out of the river, and how his coat shined in the morning radiation. The trout she’d caught fell back into the water as she saw him snarl at her with a growl that wasn’t threatening, but promising.

Why didn’t she understand that a male who introduces himself with aggression was not simply holding back tenderness, but tending instead to a quick fire he couldn’t wait to put out.

As she raced from Roger’s cave the night of her humiliation, a light spring rain fell on her. She found herself barreling through the woods, as if she could outrun her own mortification. Her refusal to cry sat like a turtle carcass in her stomach, and when she made it back to her cave, she was drenched to the bone and exhausted from holding in the agony of having shared her most private self with someone who wasn’t even capable of understanding why she needed to go into a void for months at a time, believing it just to be her “nature” rather than a valued way of rediscovering who she is and was and can be--far beyond just being a bear.

Roger would only see her sporadically over the new few weeks, and every time they did meet up, it was purely physical with only small talk to separate the time it took them to spread the raccoon pelts to the side so they had a flat surface to fornicate on.

“You see that woman with the camera following those wolves?”

“She’s going to get herself killed.”

“Here’s hoping.”

“Roger.”

“Sorry, bad joke.”

“Help me move this raccoon.”

“Can I, uh--”

“After we’re done.”

“Right. I’m just starving. Didn’t get a chance to eat after my hike.”

“Do you want to do this or do you want to--”

“No, I can wait to eat. Better to work off your meal before you even consume it, right?”

Afterwards, he’d nibble on whatever she had lying around, then take off back to his cave. She wouldn’t go to his cave again after that night when she had bared her soul to him, but she didn’t tell him why. He didn’t ask. There was an unspoken agreement to keep as much unspoken as possible. It didn’t seem to affect him, but it varnished her in a shame she hadn’t felt like she came upon her ex-husband in a clearing ripping apart a deer with that grizzly half his age from the neighboring forest.

She called Roger one more time, but she let the phone fall to ground as she lumbered into bed. She hoped it would ring until it drove him crazy. Until he couldn’t help but answer it. She hoped that he felt something past inconvenienced. Past irritation and annoyance. She hoped the ringing haunted him, and the more it haunted him, the more he couldn’t bear to answer the call from the Bear, and so he just learned to live with it, but in a way that was infinitely less satisfying than any kind of life he had previously experienced.

Chances are, he would answer, hear nothing, and hang up.

But as she drifted off, she imagined a ringing that would never cease, and the ringing became a lullaby.