He can hear the wolf panting somewhere and all he can think is that something is wrong, and then thinking again that if he can somehow will the man to his side, can summon him back from wherever he has gone, that it will be all right somehow, that the man will fix everything. But he cannot even feel the man now, cannot smell him anywhere on the freezing wind, which continues to rise from below, passing beyond mountain lion and badger and turkey vulture and eagle and porcupine and through the wire boundaries of his own enclosure, and then on past the wolf and into the forest that breaks into peeling birch and rises yet to spin around the empty trailer where the man dens and up to the top of the ridge and into the high thin dark impossible desert air, its passage curling everywhere in endless spirals like fern frost spreading upon an endless sheet of clear dark glass.
The jagged black scent of the stranger is headed away now, into the blizzarding wind so that the bear can feel him, smell him, can sense him all the way back down the road through the stands of cedar and black spruce and through the shaggy hemlock trailing, down at the river, long pale swaths of old-man’s beard that now hang heavy with ice. Through all of it moves that jagged scent, diminished now that the stranger has dropped the raw meat into the enclosures, has tossed it up and over the fences, has managed, even for those fenced in roof and all, to squeeze it through the gaps in the wire, so that every one of them has had the taste of it. He could sense that something was not right even then, could smell it through and under and above the blood, and he might have called out to them, to all the animals in all their enclosures, but he could no more do so than he could resist the raw flesh that had flopped onto the frozen and crystalline snow at his feet, and before he could even think about what it was, about the scent he had followed up from below, he had swallowed it down. They all had, and he knew it. Wolf and raccoon and porcupine and badger and eagle and turkey vulture. The jagged scent in every one of them, pulsing slowly, from one to another, into their blood.
He had known it was not right. No strangers came at night. And no strangers came when the snow fell. Only the man he knew, the man who was his friend and who sat with him day after day on the stump beyond the fence. Only he would come at night or in the storm, descending through birches the bear had never actually seen and yet could witness in his body when the wind came crosswise through their slim peeling trunks, could pick out their scent as it curved down through the others: the heart-leaved sticky twayblades sprung up through dark fragrant earth, fringed grass of Parnassus with its curled leaves and white lobed flowers, and the pale bouncing crowns of cow parsnip, those tiny blossoms held aloft on thick stalks filled with milky sap. He could sense all of it out there, even though most of what he sensed, smelled, felt, he had never seen. And yet it was there and he knew it was there and it came to live in his body, as palpable, when the wind was right, as if he walked down that path every day with the man. And in many ways, this was exactly what he had done.
But the man he knew was not coming and the wind would not blow his scent to the bear. Instead, what he could smell came to him from the base of the mountain, the thick white stream of it rising from the river where sometimes he could feel moose and deer and elk moving along the banks and the slick and diaphanous flashes of silver fish streaking the current. There had been times when he had longed for them, when he had lain in his den with his nose crushed under his paws, trying only to will their scent away, but the silver moved in his mind evermore and would not be stilled, and he could see, feel, smell, the slick lightning of them coming up the rapids, and in his heart he grasped for them, his claws flashing in the foaming wake of the current, his breath coming in gasps.
But all that is already past now, the stranger long departed and the bear alone by the frozen pond with the snow coming down all around him and the smell of the desert deep in his body. The wolf quiet. The bear thinks he hears a distressed squawking from the raptors but the wind seems to blow in all directions at once and he can form no image of them at all. He wonders if the wolf has gone to his warm place at the far side of his enclosure, a place the bear can sometimes sense with such detail that he can nearly lie down in it himself in his mind. That enclosure was his own for so long he ceased to understand that there could be anywhere else for him to place his scent, but it had become a vast and confusing geography to him as he grew old and weakened and then lost his sight. He might have continued to live there but the man had moved him to this smaller place and there was the pond and the man had come often with his marshmallows and such things were good enough. He knows the wolf does not like the old place, perhaps because it continues to smell of bear or perhaps because the wolf still remembers running through the big trees. The bear can feel that memory all around the wolf, coming up through its blood like sharp young jack pines bursting free of black earth. In his heart are snow-covered mountains and a pack that flows down from the high places like a river.
As for his own: he still held, as a vague scent somewhere deep inside his mind, that gray winter when he and his mother came up out of the den and wandered down through the forest. Even now, in his dreams, he sometimes feels her warmth against his face. He might once have remembered her eyes, the sound of her voice, but if so these have long since disappeared from memory. What he has been left with is that moment of being totally alone, when all the trees in the forest turned black and the big bears rumbled and roared from every mountain and ridge while he trembled: a tiny furred thing mewling in the shadows of the giant trees.
The men who found him tied a rope around his neck and pulled him into a cage that smelled so strongly of dogs that the little bear screamed and fought, so sure he was that if he entered that space he would be immediately torn apart. But there was no such attack. He remained in that cage until he could hardly smell its previous occupant, peering out at a rotating group of men and women who came to stare at him as if he were some kind of exotic creature. And perhaps, to them, he was. Their smells confused him, some so strong that he could not help but press his face to the cage wire and moan.