Scratch. Steve Himmer
to increase the pressure and weight of the paws.
The bear leans across his body so its hot belly swings against his thighs. The pressure on his ribs is immense, and pushes the last gasps from his lungs. His hands spring to his defense without being asked, wrapping themselves as far as they can around the bear’s legs above each of the paws, wrenches too small for the job. He pushes and pulls, struggling to move the thick legs, but they will not be budged. The pressure on his chest doesn’t increase but it doesn’t lighten up, either, and Martin wheezes and rasps, his struggle for breath made all the worse by his panic.
He feels the bear’s gaze on his face along with its hot breath, but he fights the urge to look. Some old memory, from a book he read as a child or some rerun he saw on TV, insists that the worst thing to do in a situation like this is to look a bear in the eyes. As if a situation like this happens often enough for there to be a wealth of advice.
He feels five sharp points of pain, and when he lowers his eyes without moving his head he sees that the claws of one paw have punctured the jacket, the T-shirt, his skin. The details of the holes are strangely acute, each frayed thread on his jacket individual and distinct and each curved claw glazed with its own unique pattern of cracks and chips. The other paw still presses his ribs.
Martin studies the claws for a long time, a moment so slow he starts to think he has already died and his spirit has drifted away from his body, that he’s watching all this from somewhere beyond himself. His head swims and he becomes dizzy despite lying flat on the ground. The treetops bordering his field of vision sway like the waves of a rough, green sea he is sinking under.
Then the bear grunts, and without increasing the weight on Martin’s chest it leans closer, filling his eyes with its body. Black fur streaked with copper surrounds him, and the bear smells of old meat and wet dog. Its cold black nose sniffs a circle around his head. He tries to lie still but can’t stop his body from shaking. The bear snorts beside his face and the air is so hot he feels it deep in his ear.
This is it, Martin thinks. This is the way I die.
No sooner does the thought cross his mind than the bear moves, draws its paws away from his body in a swift, sweeping motion that tears five bloody tracks through two layers of cloth and the skin underneath.
Now he does scream, loudly and at a high pitch. He sustains the harsh note until the bear rears up then slams a forefoot to the dirt beside each of his ears, shaking the scream from his throat. The back of his head bounces against the ground with the force of the impact.
The bear turns murky eyes onto Martin’s blue ones, and that hot breath makes him gag. He tries to stop his body from shaking, afraid it makes him look appetizing the way a lively fly lures a fish. He tries to look away from that wild gaze, the orange and yellow and brown of a fire, but the flame holds his eyes.
Then at last the bear’s body relaxes and the creature steps forward. It slides across Martin’s body so its hot, heavy fat slaps his face as it passes. The chaff and dust of dirty fur fill his nose, and he fights back a strong urge to sneeze. When the whole broad, black body has passed over his face, the bright light of morning rushes into his eyes and the sneeze bursts out before he can stop it.
The bear rises onto hind legs and climbs over the wall of the house. There’s a thud from outside the foundation, then Martin listens as his attacker lumbers away. He hears the thumps of the animal’s first few steps before the forest falls quiet again and there is only the pounding of his own pulse.
Then birdsong sneaks back in, leaves rustle, trunks creak and boughs crack. The world carries on as if none of that happened. As if it was no more than a dream or a story.
The cuts in his chest sting and burn. His head pounds. His peripheral vision is laced with black worms, from dehydration, or the rush of breath back into his vacant lungs, or a combination of both. Martin lies on the ground with his eyes closed, fighting to suppress his sick stomach, then gives up and rolls onto his side to spill a yellow stew on the ground. Again and again he retches, each spasm lighting a fire on his chest, and his body goes on heaving after nothing more emerges from his empty gut.
For a long time he lies still on his side, upright as the stone walls around him. The chills that follow vomiting come quickly as his bloodless face tingles and stings. Cool ground-level air makes his eyes water. When the retching subsides, his nostrils clog, and they whistle as he breathes through them.
He waits in resigned expectation for the bear to return. Having convinced himself he was seconds away from his death, that the beast’s intent was to kill him, the heavy mantle of that resignation is hard to shake off even after his attacker is gone, phantom pain from a lost limb. His chest aches from the torn skin on the surface all the way down to his heaving lungs. Gingerly, Martin feels his way up one side of his ribcage and down the other, as if he would know a broken bone when he found it. The pain stretches from top to bottom and side to side, but apart from the center-left of his chest where the claws broke the skin—where the pain is different, if no more intense—there isn’t any one spot that hurts more or less than the rest. Under the circumstances, he takes that as a good sign.
The bear does not come back, and in time Martin’s breathing returns to something near normal as the pain in his chest and back becomes familiar enough he can once again feel the more mundane aches of hunger and thirst. And a different kind of pain, too: the awareness that had he died here, had his body been left by the bear or dragged off to be eaten—if that’s what bears do—it would have been a long time before anyone in the world outside these woods knew what had happened to him. A very long time. That gloomy thought buoys Martin up, in its way, and fills him with a desire to get to his feet and find a route out of the forest. To get himself back to his trailer and his unbuilt homes, where he will see and be seen by other people.
He hasn’t any idea what time it is, or how long it will be until his employees arrive at the construction site to start work. He only knows it’s early enough for the angle of sun to be low, curling between narrow trunks instead of raining down through the leaves, but late enough for light to have risen over the mountains to reach into these woods.
On shaky limbs, Martin lifts himself onto his hands and knees. The motion makes him keenly aware of the soreness his body has already begun taking for granted, his body’s new normal for now, and he pauses in that position a long time before forcing himself to move on.
At last he rises and balances with one hand on the foundation wall. His stomach grumbles and growls, filling his mouth with rotten air, as hot and dry coming out as the bear’s breath was going in. He steps through what once was a door and staggers into the woods, then turns in slow circles as he considers all the directions he has to choose from. Which way to walk, which way did he come, which way is it back to the road? He knows the rising sun is in the east, so the stone wall heads away to the south, but neither of those details is helpful because he’s not sure where he is in relation to where he began.
He wishes for the straight lines of overhead wires, something he knew he could follow and where it could lead. He wishes he’d brought his phone with its online maps and GPS; even the robotic voice that reads him directions would be a comfort right now. But he knows the phone would be a useless black lump—he can’t connect when he’s in town, or on the wide open space of the building site at the edge of the woods, so he’d never get a signal out here.
Not the kind he’s after, at least. Not the kind of signal that might make his phone work. The forest is full of the signals of stories and dreams, humming and buzzing and bouncing off trees, passed from one head to another, though never along the straight trajectories of power lines. They’re a wireless mesh for a wireless world, and that’s why they’re becoming so tangled these days with your own buzz and hum, the dreams of a bear warped by and also warping a phone call about what? About dinner or money or nothing at all, when it pushes its way through the woods but doesn’t get through. So Martin has taken to leaving his phone in the car, after years in which the device was rarely out of his pocket or hand, because all those other voices spilling out of the trees mean he has to drive around town until he finds a spot where his phone can connect.
His stomach turns over again. He’s so hungry his knees actually