Part 4
“Yes,” I said. The cub pressed his nose harder against my boot, and I kept looking at Tom until he accepted the answer.
In the days that followed, the cabin became an inconvenient place to keep a recovering bear. He stole a heel of bread, dragged it beneath the stove, and protested when I took it away. He found the loose lining in my father’s coat and worked at it until a strip of padding trailed across the floor.
I put the coat out of reach. For the first time in years, something in that room had worn out from being used.
Beth’s visits became shorter as the wound closed. She watched him walk before she looked at the leg, then watched him again afterward. I had learned to keep quiet during that second inspection.
“He’s improving,” she said. “Don’t make me sorry I told you.”
“I wasn’t going to ask anything.”
“You were about to ask for another week.”
I couldn’t deny it. She put the dressing she’d removed into her bag and let me sit with that for a moment.
“If you’d wanted to spare yourself this, you could have sent him to a center,” she said. “You kept talking about his mother.”
“She waited.”
Beth nodded. “She still is.”
On the twentieth morning, I woke to a strip of daylight beneath the door. The cub wasn’t on his blanket. I went outside barefoot and found him digging in the soft ground at the edge of the snow.
He had learned to lift the loose latch. When I called, he came toward me in a clumsy rush, landed against my knees, and began investigating one of my cold feet. I held him away from my toes and checked the leg before letting myself breathe normally.
He was stronger than he had been the day before. I could feel it in the small body pushing against my hands.
At Beth’s next visit, she checked the healed wound and his movement, then called Tom. There would be a scar and perhaps some lasting stiffness, but she no longer had a medical reason to keep him. They worked out the return with the mother still showing herself along the clearing.
I asked what happened if she didn’t come. Beth explained the backup plan, and I listened carefully, grateful for something practical to worry about.
That last night, I repaired the latch. Afterward I sat beside the cot with the pieces of my father’s torn coat in my lap. The cub slept on the pillow, making little sucking sounds, his damaged foot resting above the blanket.
I had spent so many nights afraid he would stop breathing that I hadn’t prepared for a night when his breathing meant I had to lose him.
“You’ll be all right out there,” I said. He opened one eye, then closed it again.
In the morning I carried him to the grassy patch on the far side of the clearing, near the pines where his mother had stood that first night. I put the blanket down and eased him onto it. Behind me, the cabin was partly hidden by branches.
He stepped off the blanket and followed when I moved away. I set him back, waited while he nosed into a fold that smelled familiar, and withdrew slowly toward the trees.
His first call brought me to a stop.
I stood with one hand against a trunk, close enough to see him turning his head. He made another small sound, then sat down. I could have crossed the clearing in seconds and carried him back inside.
Instead, I stayed where I was. The radio felt heavy in my pocket; Hank was at the station, and Beth knew what we were doing. I watched the cub and the tree line, measuring the morning by the places sunlight reached.
Almost an hour passed. He had curled into the blanket when the mother appeared between two pines, her scar pale against her muzzle. She stopped, and he lifted his head.
Then he was up and moving toward her.
His uneven little run carried him over the damp grass. She lowered her head to meet him, turning him with her muzzle and working her tongue through the fur along his face. He crowded beneath her chest, disappeared for a moment, and came out against her foreleg.
She inspected the healed leg. I found myself gripping the tree, waiting for some sign that she could see what we’d managed to save.
At last she lifted her head toward my hiding place. Whether she had smelled me all along, I couldn’t know. She held still, looking my way, then lowered her muzzle once and turned into the woods.
The cub followed. At the edge of the pines, he stopped and looked back across the clearing. I raised my hand, though I had no reason to think the gesture meant anything to him.
Then the space beside his mother was empty, and both of them were gone.
I stayed by the tree until my fingers hurt from the bark. When I crossed the clearing, I picked up the blanket and folded it badly, with one corner dragging against my boot.
Hank had come over after I called to tell him. He was sitting on a stump near the cabin, his pipe cupped in one hand.
“Both of them?” he asked.
I nodded. He made room beside him, and for a while we watched the spot where the trees had closed around them.
“What are you going to do now?”
“I haven’t figured that out.”
Hank looked at me, then at the folded blanket. “Let’s go inside awhile.”
Beth arrived toward evening with an apple pie. While she cut it, I kept looking at the bare patch beside the stove. She put a plate in front of me and waited until I picked up the fork.
“There’s fur under the cot,” I said. “I should sweep.”
“It’ll keep.” She sat across from me. “I need an assistant at the clinic. Cleaning, feeding, helping us hold patients. It’s work you could learn.”
I looked up. Beth set her fork down, plainly allowing me to hear the rest before I found a reason to refuse.
“The pay isn’t wonderful. There’s a room over the clinic you could use. Would you think about coming to town?”
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