Then he was taken to the place where he would live all the rest of his days and he was fed berries and carrots and lettuce heads and sometimes elk or moose or beef and there were others too: raccoons and a coyote and an opossum but never, ever, another bear.
He had felt alone until the summer the boy first arrived. Even now he can remember his scent, not so different than it would be tonight were the wind to blow it to him through the trees. Were the bear not blind, he might have formed the image of the man’s face as a boy, a cub, staring back at him through the wire that first time, but in the blurred and milky darkness there is only the face of the man as he is now and when he sees that face in his mind he does not see a man at all but rather a bear.
There comes a time when there is no cloud-choked sky above him; there is only desert and the flat sagebrush plain. There runs the long straight line of the highway. And there lies the town. For a long time, there is only the anonymity of quiet movement: paint-stripped cars adrift on dusty streets, a few sweating figures on the sidewalks in front of the casinos. And then he can see the boy, a thin hot shape come racing through the afternoon light, his path an undulating swoop between lines of boxlike homes, the fences of which guard patches of yellow grass. He sits on the handlebars of a bicycle piloted by someone the bear does not recognize but he recognizes the smile on the boy’s face as the boy’s life, the life of the man he knows, runs out before him like the oxbow curves of some thin cold river, the whole of it running backward and forward at once, the sky shivering with snow, the sky the floor of the desert, the road between the places: a boy riding on his brother’s handlebars through a desert town, and everything to come after, the whole of it spread out across the sky, the bear staring up into the great depths of that dead ocean, no longer aware if his eyes are open or closed but knowing now that everything he has seen and will see has led to this moment and that no matter what happens next he cannot help the man, the thought of which brings a long warm bloom of raw desire shaking through him. Again he tries to call out to the man he knows but there is nothing but his breath and then there is not even that anymore. He can smell the snowed ridges pouring away from him in all directions. He can smell the slick silver shapes of fish pressing out across the sage, over mountains, across towns. He smells a city made of light and his friend moving through it and he smells the stranger too, the one who had brought that black jagged scent up the mountain, smells him laughing and talking and smoking cigarettes on the street, smells him screaming in pain and anger and frustration and then smells him as he is locked away. Then there is the long stretch of the desert back to Battle Mountain again, his eyes blurring with tears, and the hands that hold the wheel he knows are his own for he has become a man as surely as his friend has become a bear.
In the end, he finds himself upon a golden plain, the rise of yellow grasses in the late morning sunlight, the cold blowing in through a gap in the window glass. There is an animal atop a hill, a creature that reminds him of an elk but which, of course, is no elk and which stares down at him impassively, black-eyed. He knows he has dreamed of this animal, of this moment. He fishes a book from the backseat and on its cover is the same wheat-colored creature, the same grassy hill. Then he stands and steps out of the car. His hands are empty. He expects the animal to flee but the animal continues to watch him, without moving, without even seeming to be afraid. And then he knows that it is waiting for him. It has been waiting for them all. He steps forward, up the slope, through grasses the color of summer sunlight. The animal calls him Majer and when the man moves to correct her, his throat seizes and he sees that his pink hands have become furred claws and that in his mind there are no words at all. What he holds to in that final moment is the sense that the man he would call his friend has come to him at last and he pulls that feeling around him like a coat of fur as a scent as wild and free and clear as any he could have ever imagined wells up inside and pulls him away at last.
PART IV
THE ANIMALS
16
HE CAME TO THE GATE WITH THE THROTTLE FULL OPEN, THE flat yellow of the headlights arcing across the blurred snowfield before him and the tracks spinning a long rooster tail out behind. He could already see the cut padlock, its bent shape hanging from the spotlit gate latch, and the sound he made was a howl of panic and rage as he leaped from the sled, flinging the goggles off his face and flailing up through the snow.
The enclosures were dark and what details were held within were rendered grainy and insubstantial, shapes without color or depth, an occasional stone or tree trunk rising through the continuous fade of the onrushing snow. He called to Cinder, his fingers lacing through the fence wires, called her and called her and called her until at last a low groan rose from the muffled silence. He could just make out the snow-covered shape of her body fading up from the static, her body on its side, panting, tongue out and single eye staring up into the constantly descending snow. She growled now, low and deep, and when he tried to speak to her again the only sound he could make was a high keening whine. Still she did not rise.