Sometimes you have to help the spiritual world to make things happen. That’s how Diana saw it. The ceremony was a first step. How hard could it be to get some doughnuts out of a trap?
She waited until after they’d put the tractor away and saw where Alan was headed – inside for a Coke and a football game – before she announced she was going to visit Jake and Ruby’s grave. She’d get it done, and then call Jonah.
What Diana knew of love, she thought as she walked alone back up the tractor trail, was that all successful long-term love stories start out as complete non-sequiturs. Short-term success comes from compatibility. Forever love comes from deep fascination, a sort of honey-sweet wildness, a haunting. Alan would say that no two identically shaped pieces of a jigsaw puzzle ever meshed together and hung on.
What Diana knew of death was that a lot of things that don’t matter really don’t matter. And that things like protecting the wild in us and in nature do.
She got to the barn and the head of the new trail Wildlife had cut through the thicket. She started lifting away the branches stacked there to discourage people like her.
Animals take such a hit from us, she thought. That bear was killed today in part for peace of mind about rabies. Diana had been looking through the family photo albums at night, and she remembered a picture of her grandmother who was a Nurse Cadet in World War II. She had worked at an OBGYN clinic during the war and one of her duties was going to the bus station to meet the farmer who supplied the clinic with rabbits for pregnancy tests. Each rabbit was injected with a woman’s urine, and then killed in order to inspect the ovaries. Diana wondered if the nurse who euthanized the rabbit had thanked it for its sacrifice.
The trap sat in a small clearing. It took Diana ten minutes to get there because she had to keep clearing the trail. The trap was a long silver culvert with a heavy gravity operated door at one end. She examined the simple contraption. The safety pin on the door was either very cleverly hidden or purposely removed.
And there were the doughnuts. A row of them leading to the back screen and a leaver which appeared to be covered with them. The sight made Diana think of garbage. And money and corruption. And high fructose corn syrup and obesity and diabetes and how the entire health care system sucks. It was enough. She was ready to act.
She rigged a substitute safety catch with a piece of stick, wedging it into the hole. Then she grabbed one of the many nearby branches and reached into the trap with it, easily raking out the doughnuts. The hard part, as she knew it would be, was the back leaver eight feet away, which was the triggering mechanism that activated the trap door, which she had locked open with the stick. The doughnut seemed to be tied onto the leaver and she had to crawl into the trap to get it.
She was halfway into the barrel when a couple of crows dove down to the trap to get the Krispy Kremes Diana had brushed to the ground. One crow landed on the trap with a thump. Diana didn’t know what it was. She froze, her heart pounding in her ears. The crow cawed and Diana breathed a sigh of relief, grabbed the final doughnut and began to back out. She almost made it. The makeshift safety plug broke, and the iron door slammed down, crushing Diana’s right femur.
Diana cried out in horror and pain. She’d heard the crunch of one of her body’s largest bones. She smelled the blood soaking her jeans. A compound fracture, the very worst. She whimpered and tried to staunch the blood flow with her scarf, but she was too weak and too cold, the trap too awkward and cold. Everything was so cold. She couldn’t call for help anymore, and no one could hear her. She was losing it, woozing in and out.
And then she heard puffs and grunts and felt blasts of air from a bear’s nostrils, its snout sticking through the grated door like a thick black branch sniffing Diana deeply. The bear’s smell was rich and gagging and just as Diana was losing consciousness again she heard the bear somewhere off in the distance bellowing. Black bears don’t bellow a lot like grizzlies, and when they do, it’s chilling. It’s a roar that seems to come from inside a cavern, loud and deep. No one on Berry Road who was outside that Saturday afternoon could have missed it.
Justin Dean and his son Elden heard it from their backyard.
The bear ran down the tractor trail to the O’Neil’s driveway and bellowed again. Alan Peterson heard it inside over the Dallas Cowboys football game and raced outside to see the bear bellow once again in full view of Alan and disappear.
Alan knew he had just been given a message, but he didn’t know what it was.
Just then, Justin Dean ran breathless into the O’Neil’s driveway and he and Alan quickly assessed the situation. Justin had heard the bear’s first bellow from the forest south of both of their properties, where the trap was. Together they traced Diana’s route through the forest to the trap. Diana was unconscious, barely alive from blood loss. Justin called 911 on his cell phone, which miraculously had more than one bar of reception. The bear was far away deep in her den when the ambulance came screaming up Berry Road.
Chapter 9
Diana remembered knowing the bear was there. She remembered its snuffling her and how it whimpered right along with her. As she was wheeled into surgery by Sylvia, Diana thanked the bear with all her heart.
She was a Providence hospital patient for three days, the tables turned. She saw how her nursing friends were fierce and they made her proud. She felt her own fierceness adjusted, though. A bear had moved through her life and calmed her.
Which was a good thing since the world was focused on her for a couple of news cycles. Bear Medicine to the Rescue was the Kitsap Sun headline. The article called Diana a conundrum, a nursing student become a patient, a Save the Bear advocate who was saved by a bear. Alan called her lucky, and Janie wanted to know if she’d seen a bright light or glowing tunnel. She hadn’t.
Greg Harvey called her a radical animal rights activist.
Jay Leno called her Diana, Greek Goddess, Lady of Wild Things. Letterman called her Bear Whisperer.
Jonah just called her.
Later in the week on Thanksgiving itself, she was missing Jake as she lay in his old spot on the couch. And then Jonah came over with some of his homegrown turkey, a DVD player, and a very long chic flick and Diana felt better.
The bear was never caught.
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About the Author
Christi Killien's fiction publication includes six children's and young adult novels with Houghton Mifflin and Scholastic. Her nonfiction publication includes numerous essays and the book WRITING IN A NEW CONVERTIBLE WITH THE TOP DOWN, co-authored with Sheila Bender and published by Warner and Blue Heron. Christi lives in Olalla, Washington with her husband.
Connect with Me Online
My blog: https://farmlet.wordpress.com/
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