During dinner, a storm had come up that valley and washed over them with a few impressive thunder cracks and a sudden gushing of rain from the tin roof. Clear air had blown in behind it, and the sun had come out and made a rainbow that seemed to plunge down into the valley. The scent of rain-washed cedars came in through the screen porch. Jacob spread honey on homemade bread that Elizabeth had pulled from the oven an hour ago. Life was suddenly good. He asked her about how the journey was going and what plans she had for her new life in Seattle and what sorts of things she liked to do in her spare time. She mentioned a number of activities that seemed, since they were sort of urban and high-tech, to go in one of Jacob’s ears and out the other. She also mentioned camping. Not that she was really all that interested in camping. She had done it in Girl Scouts and on family trips. It seemed almost obligatory for a healthy young person moving to Seattle to claim that she was interested in camping. That stirred his interest, anyway, and they talked about that for a little bit, just circling the black hole that was sitting there waiting patiently for them, and then, of course, they were talking about bears. Jacob mentioned that there were very few places left in the Lower Forty-Eight that still harbored grizzly, as opposed to black, bears and that northern Idaho was one of them; they were connected, by the Selkirks and the Purcells, to a vastly larger reservoir of grizzles that ran all the way up the Canadian Rockies into Alaska. Jacob dwelled, a little more than Zula was really comfortable with, on the idea that bears were attracted to menstruating women and that Zula really should not go camping in bear country when she was having her period. The modern feminist college-girl part of her thinking it was all just deeply wrong and inappropriate, the refugee/orphan/Forthrast taking a somewhat more pragmatic view.
It sounded like folklore to her. Not that this would get her anywhere in an argument with Jacob; a lot of what he believed was folklore, and the more folky it was, the more doggedly he believed it. No great insight was needed on Zula’s part to perceive that he had a chip on his shoulder regarding education and science; she’d already been warned not to mention, in his presence, the possibility that the earth might be more than six thousand years old.
All of which was easy for her. She had been dealing with men like this ever since she had come to Iowa. Men wanted to be strong. One way to be strong was to be knowledgeable. In so many areas, it was not possible to be knowledgeable without getting a Ph.D. and doing a postdoc. Guns and hunting provided an out for men who wanted to be know-it-alls but who couldn’t afford to spend the first three decades of their lives getting up to speed on quantum mechanics or oncology. You simply couldn’t go to a gun range without being cornered by a man who wanted to talk to you for hours about the ballistics of the .308 round or the relative merits of side-by-side versus over-and-under shotguns. If you couldn’t stand that heat, you needed to stay out of that kitchen, and Zula had walked right into it by crossing the threshold of Jacob and Elizabeth’s house. She smiled and nodded and pretended to be interested in Uncle Jacob’s bear lore until Aunt Elizabeth finished putting the boys to bed and came and rescued her.
Anyway, she had looked it up on the Internet (of course) when she had reached Seattle and found much (of course) conflicting information posted by people with varying levels of scientific credibility. She had ended up knowing no more about it, really, than she had before the conversation with Uncle Jacob. And yet the connection to menstrual blood struck heavy psychic resonances (which was, of course, why the myth was so widespread in the first place), and so, that early morning when she was chained to the trailer hitch under the pickup truck and she realized that the thing sniffing and pawing around was a bear, her brain went straight to her uterus and she asked herself whether she might have lost count of the days and started having her period in the middle of the night. Certainly didn’t feel that way. It was funny how the brain worked; she even permitted herself a brief excursion into meta/ironical land wondering if anyone else in the world—in history—had been in danger from gangsters, terrorists, and bears in the space of a single week. When would the pirates and dinosaurs show up?
But finally she saw and understood what it was that the bear was actually questing for and saw that the entire train of thought concerning menstrual blood had been a dangerous exercise in self-absorption. The bear was coming for what bears always came for: garbage. The empty trays of the MREs. Owing to constraints imposed by the ankle chain and the surrounding wall of stacked brush, she had not been able to dispose of these in the Girl Scout–approved manner of bagging them and hanging them from a tree far from camp.
The animal sounded, seemed, as if he were only arm’s length from her, but she told herself that her fear was making the distance seem smaller than it was. She had one more MRE left. She peeled the lid back and shoved it in the direction of that snuffling and panting sound, then withdrew beneath the truck’s undercarriage.
On its tank treads the vehicle was jacked up absurdly high, its running boards at the altitude of Zula’s hip. She couldn’t stand up beneath it but she could easily squat on her haunches with her head projecting into the space between its driveshaft and its frame. The volume beneath it was not empty, but choked with undergrowth, a mixture of shrubs and small coniferous seedlings that had passed safely beneath the truck’s bumper as it eased into this position. These remained upright and undisturbed. So she was both hiding in undergrowth and taking shelter beneath a truck, which she hoped would suffice to keep her out of the bear’s clutches. She had the idea that it was a big one. But of course she would think that. Perhaps it was too bulky to want to cram itself underneath the truck; it would be satisfied with the easier pickings of the MRE that Zula had tossed in its direction. This it certainly seemed to be enjoying. She tried to think of what she would do if it crept under here to get her. Punch it in the nose? No, that was what you were supposed to do to a shark. Might not work on a bear. With bears you were supposed to make yourself look big. Don’t try to run away. The not running away part was taken care of. Making herself look big might be difficult. The chain on her ankle was a good twenty feet long. Less than half of it had been used to connect her ankle to the trailer hitch. The remainder just trailed on the ground. She began gathering it up, wrapping it around her left hand, turning it into a fat steel club. The weight of it threw her off balance, and she threw out her right hand to steady herself against the truck’s frame. She thought it would be all solid and strong, and for the most part it was; but something small and flimsy moved beneath her hand there.
She froze and made herself still. The bear was still making hugely satisfied smacking noises, getting the most out of that MRE. But a few moments later, it too became quiet and still, as though listening, wondering about something. Zula’s first thought was that she must have made some noise or that a shift in the breeze had betrayed her presence.