As I slid into my customary bus seat up in seventh-grade territory, I noticed that Dan was well forward of his usual slot and nobody was sitting with him. By comparison, though, Dan was such a minor concern I dismissed him from any thought at all.
What I didn’t know was that not long after I got on that bus my father would be literally face-to-face with our nemesis, McHenry.
My dad was always too impatient to be much of a storyteller, always skipping details, but in this instance he related everything to me word-by-word and blow-by-blow. He had been on his way to work and was rumbling over a wooden bridge when he saw Jules McHenry and his eager, baying hounds racing along the riverbank, clearly on the trail of something. My dad watched the hunter vanish around the bend, making a geometric connection between what he’d just seen and our house a few miles away. It seemed likely that my fears were playing out right there: McHenry was on his way to bagging himself a grizzly.
My dad turned his Jeep around and kept his foot into it as he headed home in the light drizzle.
He called his job and told them he needed some more time due to the head injury, wondering what he could have been thinking to set off for the shop as if this were a normal day. He poured himself a cup of coffee and watched in complete bemusement as the bear came out of the pole barn through the side door, went out into the yard, and relieved himself of both bladder and bowel, just like a dog except with a lot more productivity. Then the bear yawned and wandered over to my mother’s neglected garden, where a tangle of blackberry and raspberry bushes drooped with unharvested fruit. The berries were a little small for human consumption, though to be truthful I think the reason my father didn’t ever pick them was related to the reason why I didn’t want to put away the tomato cages—my mother had spent hours out there trying to manage her berry bushes, painstakingly separating them the way she had once carefully pruned some gum out of my hair.
But then Emory stopped looking at the berries. He turned his head toward the state forest behind our property, cocking his head as if listening. My dad set down his coffee cup, seeing that some sort of change was coming over the bear. Emory stood up, lifted his nose to the wind, and sniffed.
And then he dropped to all fours and moved with amazing alacrity into the pole barn. “Hard to believe an animal that big could move that fast,” my dad said.
My father was just going for another cup of coffee, trying to figure out what had spooked Emory so badly, when he heard a noise floating on the wind, the cadence familiar and unmistakable.
Dogs.
My father found his binoculars and focused them on the hill on the other side of the creek. It didn’t take long before a pack of hounds emerged from the woods, baying, their noses seeking the rich scent of live bear.
My dad put on his bright orange and yellow hunting vest and went out to the pole barn. Emory was pacing, nervously making a chuffing noise.
“Don’t worry,” my dad said, feeling a bit silly to be talking to a bear. He closed the side door and went to the edge of the yard and waited in the misting rain with his arms crossed.
Before long the four dogs poured up the hill, surrounding and ignoring my stationary father. They thronged the yard and waxed ecstatic over the sizable pile Emory had left in the grass, but eventually it was the crack under the door that attracted them the most.
Eventually McHenry came huffing up the path, his ponytail bobbing at the back of his head. “Name’s McHenry,” he said, pulling off a glove so he could offer my dad a hand.
“We’ve met, Jules,” my dad said civilly but coolly. “I’m George Hall.”
McHenry acted like of course he remembered my father. He was distracted by the commotion his dogs were making, so as he tendered his social platitudes he had one eye on what was happening over my dad’s shoulder.
“I’ve got ‘No Hunting’ signs pretty clearly posted all along my property’s edge,” my father stated evenly. There was, in fact, exactly such a sign not far from where they stood, providing a convenient visual aid to his point. McHenry reluctantly nodded, but his eyes were getting suspicious. His dogs were still going crazy at the door. One of them had started jumping up as if to catch a glimpse of Emory through the window.
“We’re tracking bear,” McHenry said by way of explanation.
“No hunting,” my father replied pleasantly.
McHenry flushed a little at this. Probably most of the people in Selkirk River would watch him shoot their chickens and pets and children and just say, Why, there’s Mr. Jules McHenry, pouring money into the local economy.
“Call your dogs,” my dad requested.
“I think maybe a bear must have just crossed through here. Maybe you have some dog food in your barn? Bears love that. He could’ve sniffed around looking for a way in and that’s what’s got my dogs so riled up. If I could cross through, I can maybe get them back on track.”
As my dad related it to me, McHenry’s voice was very reasonable, but his eyes belied his words. His theory made no sense if you knew anything about tracking dogs—they were acting as if the trail ended at the barn.
“I’d like you to return the way you came, please. There’s no hunting on my property.”
Though I wasn’t standing there to hear him say it, I can hear the tone of my father’s voice in my head. This was a man who watched a mysterious blood cancer eat away his wife from within, a man who cried out all the emotions a person has until he was nothing but a cold, mechanical dead zone of a human being. Arguing with my father when he spoke from this place was like arguing with a stop sign—all you got back was a flat, implacable notice that you were not going to get to do what you wanted to do.
McHenry whistled at his dogs and they stared at him in disbelief.
My dad allowed him to pass to grab his dogs, which was a big mistake because it gave McHenry a view of the backyard. There was no misidentifying the spoor in the grass—his dogs couldn’t have made that big of a pile, even if it were a group effort. McHenry turned eyes astonished and accusing on my father, who merely nodded at him.
“Call your dogs,” my dad said again.
The canines were astounded they were being asked to give up the hunt and left the yard with great reluctance. McHenry’s eyes were hot when he gave my father a parting stare. He didn’t understand what was going on, but he knew he’d been made a fool of and he didn’t like it. With a sense of misgiving my father watched him and the dogs descend the trail.
Emory and I had lunch about the same time that day. For Emory, it consisted of my father wrestling a big metal container filled with birdseed out into the yard once he was satisfied that McHenry wasn’t coming back. The birdseed was an extravagance purchased when my mother first fell ill and no gift or concession seemed profligate. She wanted to feed the birds, so my father put up two giant bird feeders, bird condominiums my mother called them, and dumped fifty-pound sacks of seed into a new trash container until the thing was brimming. I loved to plunge my hands into the seeds, most of which were hard and yellow. It felt the way I imagined beach sand might feel at the ocean. I was given a scoop and it was my job to facilitate my mother’s project by keeping the feeders full.
Ironically, our neighbor Mrs. Beck told my mother she’d read that bird feeders often attract hungry bears, which dampened my mother’s enthusiasm for the whole thing. And then my mother got sicker still, and the bird-feeding project went the way of her tomato plants.
After my dad lugged the big can of seed from the garage out into the backyard, he flung open the side door of the pole barn. He also ran the hose into a three-gallon bucket and let it trickle so Emory would have a steady water supply. My dad was back in the house when Emory came out and stuck his snout in the birdseed.
For me, lunch was whatever they called the meat loaf that day.
It was with a far higher degree of confidence that I approached Beth’s table. She was still surrounded by her avian flunkies, but I’d learned to ignore them and just concentrate on the clear green eye
s across the table from me. The soaring joy I felt when I saw her watching me approach was scarcely containable, and some of it broke out into a face-splitting grin.
“Hi!” I greeted her with burbling enthusiasm.
Beth’s friends all glanced at her, waiting for her response to trigger their own. Her return expression was pretty much cold glare with a hint of anger mixed in, and I felt my grin fall off my face and plummet as if a hole had opened in the floor and swallowed it. She wasn’t glad to see me—somehow, in the space of just a single day, I’d managed to lose her.
Naturally I took the coward’s way out and pretended not to notice her attitude. “How’s lunch?” I asked inanely. “Bring any of your mom’s cookies?” Beth’s friends all glanced at each other, exchanging huge volumes of information with their flitting eyes. Beth was still watching me.
“You were in a fight yesterday?” she demanded in her always-direct fashion.
“Uh, well…” I tried to decide which would put me in a better light. Should I claim to be a tough guy, a regular brawler for whom a battle of fists was just part of my life? Or should I climb on the peace train, explain that it had really been less a boxing match than some sort of misunderstanding?
Beth, I decided, would want to be with a real man. I sighed. “Yeah, Dan Alderton.” I shrugged. Should I claim to have won? I didn’t lose, but that didn’t feel like the same thing.
“I can’t believe it,” Beth said. “Is that what you do?”
Maybe I should have gone for the peace train thing. “What do you mean?”
“You’re like, the guys who meet at the park after school for fistfights?”
The unfairness of this question froze my reply in my throat.
“When were you going to tell me?” she demanded.
I didn’t know what I was supposed to tell her or when I was supposed to tell it. I didn’t understand why she was angry and just wanted to go back to yesterday when it was apparent we were going to get married someday.
A signal went through the girls and they all stood up at the same time, like a gaggle of geese hearing a noise and raising their heads simultaneously. Beth’s eyes were flashing at me, but there was something else going on, some sort of uncertainty in those normally self-assured eyes. Even as the girls took flight, I had the sense that something about the drama we’d just played out had struck her wrong, like a badly played note in a song.
Regardless, it was junior high and so the girls were compelled by the rules of society to go stomping off with their noses in the air as if I’d just leveled some huge insult to all of femininity. Beth gave me a glance over her shoulder and I wanted to shout, What? What’s going on? to her because honestly, I just didn’t get it.
This wasn’t like losing Kay—this hurt.
I was thoroughly miserable as I headed to the boys’ room, and as soon as I entered I knew I had made a mistake. Several of the ninth graders who enjoyed laughing at me over the stall wall were hanging out by the sinks, carrying on a loose, sarcastic conversation. I involuntarily paused when I saw them, clearly telegraphing my cowardice.
I could, I decided, live with a little biological urgency for a couple of hours. I just didn’t have it in me to put up with the humiliation, that day. I started to back up.
Then a boy separated himself from the pack. It was Tim Humphrey. “It’s okay, Charlie; come on in. We’re not doing anything.”
It would have killed me to suppose that Tim knew about the ninth graders laughing at me, but his comment seemed to suggest he thought my hesitation was because I thought they were smoking or something and didn’t want to get caught up in a dragnet. I hurried past them and into the stall, blissfully left alone to do my business while the boys’ room grew quieter with each departing student.
Finally, it sounded like I was completely alone. I flushed and exited and started a bit in surprise: Tim Humphrey was standing against the sinks, his arms crossed, looking like he’d been waiting for me.
“Hi, Charlie,” he said, as if he hadn’t known I was in there.
“Hi, Tim.”
I washed my hands. Tim watched me. I dried my hands. Tim watched me. I was starting to get a little nervous.
“Hey. About Dan Alderton.”
I froze, wary.
“You know.” Tim’s face became a little flushed. “Yesterday. What he said.”
“Yeah,” I answered.
“Don’t worry about him.” Tim leaned forward, lowering his voice: “He’s a Kotex.”
I blinked at this. When we were all in grade school, “Kotex” was pretty much the worse insult one boy could hurl at another, mainly because we weren’t quite sure what a Kotex even was. Tim was grinning at me, and I grinned back. For him to employ such an anachronistic expression now was somehow comforting, even reassuring. Hey, he seemed to be saying, we’ve all been friends for years, remember? Remember when we were all the same size? When there wasn’t all this pressure; when you hung out with your classmates and ate lunch at an assigned table and nobody staged fights after school?
“Yeah, he is,” I said. “A real Kotex.”
When I got home after school it had stopped raining. My dad told me about McHenry’s dogs, and, I’m sorry to say, the story upset me so much I missed the underlying implication, which was that, when it really mattered, my dad had stood up for Emory and me. “I don’t know what’s going to happen now, Charlie. But to have a man like McHenry as an enemy—we don’t want that,” he concluded.
“Where’s Emory?” I asked impatiently. When my dad nodded in the direction of the creek I took off at a run but halted when he called me. “Charlie!”
I looked back at him.
His mouth worked as he struggled to come up with something to say to me to express what he was feeling, but that particular ability had long ago atrophied from disuse. Eventually all he could come up with was, “Stay close to home.”
I found Emory at one end of the flat floodplain that lay upstream from our house, a wide section of sandy soil that was inundated whenever melting snow and spring rains combined. Junk tended to wash up there, and Emory was investigating an old burn barrel that was lying on its side when I approached.
“Nothing to eat in there,” I said.
The bear looked at me as if I’d insulted him, then turned his back on me and strolled to the edge of the field.
“We should stick around in case of the dogs!” I called to him.
The bear dug his paw in among some bushes, trying to get at something, and when it rolled out I saw what it was: a basketball, dark with mud and a little deflated.
Basketball. Was there a sport less suited for me? I was one of the shortest boys in my grade. My hands were small, so small that the surface of the ball felt almost flat against my palm. When I sank a basket it was pretty much a random event, and any feeble attempt at a layup usually wound up with me driving my nose into somebody’s armpit.
“That’s nothing. Come on; let’s go,” I said.
Emory raised his paw and gave the ball a smack and it skittered past me, rolling to rest about twenty yards ahead. I started to walk toward it and flinched when I heard the bear coming fast. He ran to the ball and stopped, turning to look at me.
“What?” I said.
He hit the ball again and it bounced right up to my feet. I looked at it, then looked at him. He tensed, his shoulders tightening.
I kicked the basketball toward the far end of the field and Emory took off after it in a gallop. I ran, but he ran faster and got to it first and batted at it with one paw and then another. I sort of stuck my leg out, but he easily evaded me. As he rolled the ball back toward the rusty mouth of the barrel I gave chase, laughing out loud when he slapped the basketball inside like a hockey player scoring a goal.
“Okay, okay,” I said. I dug the ball out, Emory watching expectantly. “Well, you have to back up,” I told him, gesturing. Emory swung around and trotted about twenty yards away, then turned to watch.
“Here we go,”
I said.
I tried to keep the ball close like a soccer player, but Emory snagged it easily from me and we both dashed back to the barrel for him to score another goal. “That’s two,” I told him. I also told him it was three, and four, and five, but by the time I got to ten Emory was panting like a dog and I thought he was slowing down on me. I poured on the speed and he only halfheartedly gave chase and I didn’t think he was letting me; I really was tiring him out.
I was outrunning a grizzly bear!
I kicked the ball into the dead bushes at the far end of the field. “One for me!” I hooted.
I backed up and Emory put his paw on the ball. He was obviously resting.
“Well, come on. Are you worried you’ll get mud on your party dress if you run too hard?” I asked him.
Emory lowered his head and slapped the ball. I got to it before he did and turned it with my foot and when I did he crashed into me and it was like being hit by a train. I went down, hard, my air gone. I clutched my stomach in pain, trying to suck in some wind.
Emory’s enormous face filled my vision. I opened my mouth, but I couldn’t say anything. I felt his paw lightly touch my shoulder. I looked into his eyes and could swear they were filled with concern.
“I’m okay,” I finally managed to wheeze. I got on my hands and knees, doing an inventory of my bones. Nothing felt broken.
And then, in a moment I will remember for the rest of my life, Emory pulled me to him, hugging me gently for just a moment before releasing me.
Emory was in the pole barn later that evening, snoozing off the effects of our impromptu soccer match and the frozen hamburger pie I’d given him, when my father and I looked up at the sound of a truck coming down our driveway. I stood from the table and looked out the window and turned to my dad with panic in my eyes.
Written on the truck were the words “Idaho Fish and Game.”