Part 2
Claire caught the carrier before I could lift it. “Leave the door shut. We can turn him so she’s facing him.”
Walt helped us move the table. The bear lowered herself when we stood near the window, then lifted her head again as the cub answered from the carrier. I couldn’t know what she made out through the glass. She remained there until he settled, and afterward she went to the far side of the yard and lay under the trees.
Claire stayed through the morning, checking the cub and talking by radio with a wildlife officer Walt knew. The treatment would be temporary and closely supervised. With the mother still in the area, they wanted to see whether he could recover near her and be returned; if she vanished or the leg failed to heal, the wildlife staff would decide on a rehabilitation facility.
“We’re giving him a chance to go back,” Claire told me. “That is the whole arrangement.”
I agreed. He had survived long enough to make a mess of the towel. Agreement came easily while she was still working to keep him alive.
That afternoon Walt brought Claire, the carrier, and me along the road on his snowmobile. He fastened the carrier securely and drove as carefully as the ruts allowed. The wildlife officer had agreed to a temporary field-care arrangement under Claire’s supervision while the mother remained nearby; he wanted a record of every feeding and check and would inspect the place himself. Claire left those instructions with me and set her next visit. Walt’s machine would ferry her from the station while my road remained blocked. Before he departed, he gave me a handheld radio and made me call his set from the porch.
“I want to hear you from my place before I leave you here,” he said. “If the little fellow gets worse, call.”
I built a bed beside the stove. I wrote down each feeding, though the amounts were small enough to make the page look nearly empty. The cub slept while I fetched wood. When he woke, he searched for the edge of the blanket with his good paws. My cabin had acquired a schedule I couldn’t ignore.
After dark I heard claws cross the boards. His mother stood below the window. I wrapped him and opened the door, keeping my feet on the cabin side of the threshold. She came up slowly, her fur wet from the creek bank. My arms wanted to pull him closer, but I held still.
Her nose ran over the blanket. She touched the cub’s muzzle once with her tongue, and he pushed toward her hard enough to make me tighten my grip. She smelled the bandage on the injured leg. Then she stepped backward, descended the porch, and went into the trees without trying to take him.
I shut the door only after the clearing was quiet. He had tucked his face into my father’s coat. I put him down and checked the latch twice.
By the third day he could put his front paws under himself and nearly get up. His rear end dropped, and he protested. I set my hand beside him. On his second effort he leaned against my fingers, steadied himself, and licked them while I tried to get out of his way.
Claire came that afternoon and found less swelling. He squirmed under her gloves, then buried his nose against my wrist. She asked me to note when he began seeking me before he needed anything.
“He needs to trust someone while he’s sick,” she said. “We also need him to manage without you.”
I blamed the gloves. She gave me a look over them and went on packing. Her twelve-year-old daughter, Tess, was waiting in town, and the weather was already making the return trip longer. I followed Claire as far as the door, repeating questions about the leg. She handed me the notes and had me tell her the plan instead.
On the fifth day I came in with an armload of wood to find the water bucket on its side. The cub stood ankle-deep in the spill, inspecting a soaked paw. He had hauled himself against the rim to investigate the face in the water and tipped it over.
I laughed.
He fled beneath the table, and I stood holding the wood, startled to have made that sound in my own kitchen.
Walt brought fish that evening. I checked Claire’s feeding instructions before cooking a small piece for the cub. Walt kept his pipe in his pocket; she’d told him the smoke did the patient no favors. Watching the cub work over the dish, Walt said he’d left something out of the wolf story.
The mother wolf, according to his coworker, had kept returning. Once a wild boar came at the man near his shack, and the wolf rushed it long enough for him to get clear. Walt offered the account with the same uncertainty he’d had that morning at the station. I could believe the man remembered being saved without pretending to know what the wolf intended.
“Tracks at the crossing again,” Walt said as he put on his coat. “Your sow’s been through there.”
I knew she was waiting. Walt didn’t say what I owed her, but he watched me watch the cub until I looked away.
That night I dreamed June was collecting pinecones and calling me to come see an animal near the creek. I woke with my arm extended. The cub had climbed onto the low cot and fallen asleep against it. I listened to his breathing and moved only when the stove needed more wood.
I let him outside for a few minutes at the end of his first week. He sneezed when his nose met the snow and sniffed around one of my boots, then the other. Before I could bring him in, the scarred bear came out of the pines. She smelled him and moved a short way back into the woods, glancing behind her. He tried to follow, managed only a few steps, and found my shin again. His leg still dragged when he tired. I knew the time had not come, though relief arrived before I could feel ashamed of it.
Three evenings later, Curtis Morrow hammered at my door. He wore camouflage and carried a rifle. Ten years earlier a bear had killed his brother. I remembered the calls that went out to find the family, and the light scar beside Curtis’s mouth from long before any of that.
“Show me the cub,” he said. “I’ll pull the sow away, then put an end to her coming around houses.”
I held the doorway. I told him the vet and the wildlife office were arranging the cub’s return. He asked whether I would be standing there when the bear came up to somebody else’s child. That was a question I had already asked myself; it deserved better than the answer he wanted to force from me.
“My brother trusted a bear to leave him alone,” Curtis said. “I was the one who had to identify him.”
I said I remembered his brother. Curtis glanced into the room, saw movement by the stove, and told me he’d return for the mother.
If I put the cub in his way, he would shoot him too.
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