The bear looked at him with its pale eyes and then walked heavily to the zookeeper door and lay its head against the small opening there.
Is that how it is? Bill said, but he walked to the door and put his hand through the opening and scratched the bear’s rough fur, the skull underneath a hard uneven shape. How we doin’, buddy? he said, repeating those words and words like them as he scratched, the bear shifting so that Bill’s hand scratched the top of his head and then behind his ears and then the thick fur of his neck, Majer’s breath coming short and loud with the pleasure of it.
Don’t get too excited, Bill said, smiling. He patted the bear twice on the head and pulled his hand from the opening, stepping back from the door. You ready for breakfast?
Majer looked up at him, still panting, his lips curled in a wide grin.
Dang, you’re a cheap date, Bill said. I’ll go get it. We got salmon from BTC.
He walked to the barn and opened the big sliding door. Straw dust circling in beams of light. He went to the bank of refrigerators and freezers and opened one and extracted a whole salmon and two heads of lettuce and dropped them both into a bucket and then returned to Majer’s enclosure and slid all of it into his metal feed box. Majer stood and watched him all the while, or seemed to, his blind eyes following as he moved, standing in his great silver-tipped bulk beyond the fence until Bill pulled the heavy counterweight so that the second gate slid up along its track. Breakfast time, Bill said, and the bear stepped through to eat, his bulk rocking slowly from side to side with the motion of his body.
The air’s chill was deep and sharp. Winter was coming. In the mornings along the birch path: bubbles flowing under shells of November ice. They would need to pull the water into the heated sections of the enclosures soon, for already the first task of the morning was breaking loose the bright clear windows that encased each animal’s drinking trough. How those sharp-edged shields glowed in the morning sunlight. Rime ice curling the office windows. Hoarfrost boxing the fence wires. By late morning the bunched needles would drip sunlight onto dark soggy earth, but there would be fewer such days now. He knew it. The animals knew it. All of them, in their ways, preparing for the snow. Bedding for the martens and for Zeke. The raptors scratching about in their nests, lining them with rags and tufts of cotton and dry leaves. Even Majer, despite his age, swelling in size, putting on the fat-weight that would get him through the four or five months of his hibernation. Soon he would disappear into the cave at the back of his enclosure. Months in the snowdark, not moving, his heartbeat and body temperature slipping down and down until it was nearly indistinguishable from death, silent in that darkness of hibernation for the months of the heaviest snows.
The lesson is that we all go to ground. Some by slowing. Some by quickening. Some by consuming more and doing less. Some by curling into their own dark interior places. Dying into the winter’s cold and clambering out of our dens when the snowstorms break and spring begins. Thin green seed leaves from black earth. Dwarf shoots. Spiral scales. The fascicles curl from the bud, and we clamber out of our dens sniffing the air for the scent of a meal.
Next month, he would close to the public for the winter and send the volunteers home, opening up again once the roads were clear enough for day-to-day movement from town. Grace would come up when the weather allowed it, sometimes in her truck, occasionally via snowmobile, but for long stretches he would be alone with the animals and the snow and no sound but that which they made, sometimes for many days. The martens streaking across white hills. The owl peering out at him from her perch. The mountain lion’s silent flowing motion. The wolf’s yellow eyes watching him through the black trunks of the big pines. A geography of snowed-over silence. Elk would come down through the trees on their way to the meadows in the south, their calls echoing up from those blank white plains. And moose on the river road.
For the first four years he had anticipated those months of isolation with a mixture of relief and dread. Now was the time he looked forward to most: the silence of it, the rhythm of those short days, waking at dawn and coming down the birch path, the big trees frosted over and so very quiet, his snowshoes crunching against the ice. Of the path itself, he had once told Grace that it was like something out of a fairy tale. He had thought of it that way when he was a child and had first visited his uncle David and when he returned so many years later the path from the trailer to the animals seemed even more so. My god that you could walk through such a landscape. My god that such a landscape existed anywhere but in your dreams. And yet here it was. Were a fox to step out from behind the trees and speak in human words, or a raven to descend wearing a suit coat and a top hat, you would not have been surprised. Worlds overlapping.
He unlocked the office and started the coffeepot and then unlocked the tiny gift shop down by the parking lot and then the medical room and finally stood in front of the wolf enclosure once more. He thought he had seen Zeke when he had turned up the path from the gift shop, the wolf’s body a quick blur against the fence line, but there was no sign of him at all now. Though he waited there for the animal’s appearance, the wolf did not come. Bill resigned himself to that fact and returned to the bare, boxlike construction trailer that he used as an office, pouring himself a mug of coffee and then sitting for a time looking at invoices he knew he could not currently pay, a process he had hardly started before Bess arrived, knocking twice on the office door and then opening it. Morning, she said.
Morning.