A Bear Tale
by Christi Killien
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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All rights reserved
Copyright 2011 Christi Killien
Cover photo copyright 1997 Dennis Widman
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
This book is available in print at most online retailers.
Chapter 1
Diana O'Neil walked very fast up Berry Road, and not only because it was four in the afternoon and getting dark, but because she always walked fast. Even when she didn't know exactly where she was going.
She was tall, just under five-eight, with long legs, fingers, and hair, the latter which she straightened with expensive products, and at this extremely casual moment had pulled into a high ponytail. Her ensemble -- gray sweatpants from Seattle's Roosevelt High School class of 2005, saggy lime green chenille sweater, hot pink neck scarf and running shoes -- she would wear only here in the backwoods of Salal, Washington where she would never be recognized, much less meet her long-awaited true love.
Salal is halfway between heaven and hell, a glorious retreat in the Cascadia forest, Snow Falling on Cedars territory, as well as a solitary outpost in a deep valley with one bar of cell phone reception and no cable. Weather people call it the Convergent Zone, and several neighbors agreed that the O'Neil property seemed to be at the center. The clouds never blew in one direction and it was always chillier.
The summer had been the coolest in decades. Just fifteen days above eighty degrees and every growing thing had been stunted, from the blackberry, huckleberry and salal lining the road to the potatoes, carrots, strawberries and beans in the O'Neil's gardens. Early rains had brought the potholes back before the annual grading and graveling; there was one in front of the O'Neil's place the size of a tire, right in the middle of the 3/4-mile-long road. Like a navel.
Diana reached the dead end, checked her pulse, and waited while Jake the golden retriever left several pee-mails. Then she slapped her thigh and said, "Come on, Jake! Let's go home!"
Jake looked up and gazed at Diana, his true love. He was getting old and couldn't hear as well as a pup could, but his nose still told him everything he needed to know. He bolted past her, heading north, winding his way up through the dark forest tunnel.
An evening fog began to gather. It was dusky, a car would have turned on its lights. Diana saw a huge, red maple leaf, as big as she had ever seen, picked it up by its stem-tail, and swished it as she walked.
It was not too wet, not too dry, not too cold, not too hot. Swish. Swish. There was the big white house where the dog Chester lived. What she knew of households out here was mainly the dogs. If Diana's parents had come on this walk, there would be talk about all the neighbors, stories of the Great Paving War which had ended just three years earlier. Diana did not care. She was here in the backwoods for one month doing her nursing practicum at Providence Hospital, fifteen minutes away on Highway 16. Then she would graduate, land a fabulous well-paying job, and meet Mr. Right. She was almost 25-years-old. The big picture was clear. The little day-to-day picture was what needed fine tuning, for the next 20 days to be exact. Her parents didn't even have a DVD player. Being here in no-man's land, she thought optimistically, she could hide out, fortify herself, and focus on the beauty of her future in some exotic, life-affirming, boy-heavy place.
Jake was far enough up the road now that Diana couldn't see him. Normally he'd keep her in sight, but a smell had invaded him. It was thick and he sucked it into his brain. His tongue swelled, his eyes glazed, and he wanted more of the scent than he could ever take in. He began to bark. He howled from deep in his chest.
Diana had heard Jake howl like that only once before. Jake's sister Ruby got to go on a walk when he was hurt and couldn’t. His brokenhearted cry could be heard in the tribal village of Suquamish where he was born and raised, five miles north by canoe, forty-five minutes by car. Diana strained to see Jake but couldn't. She called his name and clapped, but the sound echoed back to her off the fog. Were there two dogs barking now? Dang, Diana muttered, and she began to jog.
And then the racket stopped; Jake appeared, running toward her, his back hair bristled; and car lights suddenly shown through the mist up the road.
"Jake! CAR! COME!"
Protocol with cars was to return and sit by the side of the road, Jake knew this and was very very good at it. His job now, he thought, was to return to Diana, even though he couldn't bring her the bear.
The bear had her protocol, too, and had taken off back through the ten rough uphill acres of woods adjoining the O'Neil's five acres as soon as she heard Diana's call and clap, and then the car had turned onto the road. She normally didn't forage this far east, but times were hard, and that dog was lucky. She was pregnant and hungry. Next time...
Jake got to Diana and she made him sit and stay. He was panting and looked particularly cute although he smelled musky and he yawned in between pants, which meant he was nervous. "Where were you?"
The car approached slowly and stopped. It was the neighbor named Ben who lived in the white house, a retired lineman with bushy gray hair and a baseball cap. Ben rolled down his window and the white bulldog Chester leaned out, sniffing and whining. Jake whined back, and the two of them exchanged the bear news.
"Chester, get back in here!" said Ben, shoving Chester out of his way.
"Hi, Chester," Diana said and smiled. Her parents had a picture of Chester on their refrigerator. Seriously. Last year's Christmas card.
"Crazy dog," said Ben, and then focused back on Diana through his bifocals. "Hi, Diana. Your dad told me you were here. Welcome back!"
Ben was the one neighbor who knew her name. He also knew that Alan Peterson was her stepfather, married to her mother Janie O'Neil, but the distinction wasn't important to Ben or to Diana. Alan was a fine stepdad, as natural as pie dad to Diana since she was ten. "Thanks, but it's just for a month," she said.
"Well, your folks are great neighbors.”
Jake was calmer now. Diana stroked his head. "Jakie just went crazy about something up the road," she said.
Ben looked over at Chester, who still whined, but Chester always whined. "Something got 'em all riled up." He petted Chester's 14-year-old head. "Oh, I just remembered. Tell your dad something for me, okay? I saw Old Man Johnson this morning -- he's back from his hunting trip -- and he said the road crew was coming tomorrow. Finally. They've been backed up with the weird rain."
Diana's parents filled the potholes on Berry, and they had been putting it off because of the scheduled grading. "I'll tell him," Diana said.
"Thanks." Ben smiled. Diana remembered her mother talking about Ben hurting his foot and taking yoga and walking Chester less, but she didn't want to continue the conversation. The exhaust from Ben's SUV was getting to her, blowing away any hint of the odor Jake had brought back, and it was getting full-on dark fast.
"See ya," Diana said. She was still holding the red leaf by its stem, and she waved it as a good-bye.
"See ya," Ben said. Slowly he rolled up his window and eased away into the fog.
"Okay!" Diana said, releasing Jake, but before he could shoot away she said, "Heel!" and then clapped and repeated the command.
Jake was only marginally good at heeling. He had been sharper with all the commands before Ruby -- his sister, life companion, and chief rival -- died last year. Without her, his reason to snap-to had faded. Ruby had made everything work better. Now Jake trotted beside Diana as she half-jogged down the hill part of the road, as eager to get home as she was.
They ran down through the fog, Jake’s tail cork-screwing madly to help him keep his back end from passing his front, down the hill to lower Berry Road, and across an ancient stream bed that cut through the forest and the O'Neil's property to make a perfect black bear travel lane.
Chapter 2
Jake sniffed the deer and rabbit trails by the mailboxes where the Kitsap Sun newspaper was delivered. Diana's mother, Janie O'Neil, stood next to him and read the morning headline, Bear Attacks Woman Walking Dog, and then they both looked up the road as two huge yellow road work machines turned onto Berry Road a quarter mile away and parked.
Jake struck a magnificent pose, his chest swelled and his tail arched. Intruders!
"Things are happenin' in Berryland today!" Janie said and Jake quivered and whined to be released. But now wasn’t the time, so he trotted back across the road when Janie called him.
Diana had already left for the hospital, so she heard about the bear attack from a fellow nursing student, Bethany Rogers, who was barely five feet tall. Bethany wore the same nurse-in-training maroon scrubs that Diana wore, and had her blonde hair cut in a pageboy. Diana had carefully braided her long brown hair into pigtails, pinning them together at the nape of her neck.
"The bear was in the woodsy stuff beside the road," Bethany was saying, her eyes wide. "The lady's dog attacked it, and then the lady got between the bear and her dog." Bethany rolled her eyes then. "I know, but still. It's a busy road! The bear knocked her down, but then she stood up and yelled and it ran off."
Diana listened and considered telling her friend that her own dog Jake went berserk yesterday evening on a walk on their rural road, and now Diana wondered if it had been because of a bear.
Bethany kept going. "She got bit on the shoulder and arm, but she'll be fine. She needs surgery, and there's a big infection risk. Maybe rabies. She’s at St. Joe’s in Tacoma."
Diana realized that she hadn't actually seen anything last night. She was trained to see dangers and hazards everywhere, ones that other people don't see. The most dangerous place to be, by far, was where she was right now. Tuberculosis. MRSA. Nothing from the hospital should go in your room at home, including shoes, clothes, and scrubs. Scrubs go in a separate wash. She pulled back physically, aware that she had been hunching over tiny Bethany.
"Diana!" Bethany said loudly, unimpressed with Diana's nonreponse. "There was a bear on Rosedale. I walk down that road all the time." Bethany lived in a garage apartment in Gig Harbor with her boyfriend, a ten minute drive from Berry Road.
"Without an off-leash dog," Diana said.
Bethany stared at Diana. "True that," she conceded. Bethany wanted a dog badly. Her boyfriend was slowly coming around.
"It doesn't sound to me like that bear was vicious," Diana continued. "It was charged by the dog. It could have killed that woman and dog, easy. But it didn't.”
"The Fish and Wildlife guys have put out traps and said they'll euthanize it."
"You're kidding," Diana said.
"If it attacked once, they say it'll do it again."
"Why not just move it?"
Bethany shrugged. "They're too territorial or something."
Diana scoffed. "I don't believe it. How are they going to know they got the right bear?" She stood up even straighter and now towered above Bethany. "There are bears everywhere in the woods. It's not like this one landed here from Mars."
Bethany laughed.
"I live in a freakin' forest. We have to coexist with the bears!" Diana was a little surprised at her own adamance on this issue; she was adamant in general, but didn't know she had strong opinions on bears.
Bethany laughed again and then turned back to her computer screen.
Diana turned to look at her own patient charts. Her priority here was her patients, period. Diana's clinical instructor drilled that into her: Flip the switch. Nurse mode. It doesn't matter if it's an old lady or a hot boy, they are just someone you’re trying to help. You try to separate, but sometimes other parts don't completely click off. If the patient is a hot boy, you can think about it later. Click on. Click off.
All day at the hospital, the bear stayed in her psychic loop, though. Diana checked vitals, catheters, feeding tubes, turned patients, and recorded everything; and learned that the local school district put extra staff on the playgrounds during recess and lunch to keep students away from the wooded areas. One nurse on the floor had to arrange for her son to be picked up at the bus stop after school because of the bear alert. Children were not to be let off the bus without an adult escort. Bear attacks of any kind were very serious business.
Diana's shift ended at three along with several hundred workers from nearby Puget Sound Naval Base, including two nuclear submarine mechanics, a shop supervisor, a welder, and a former sailor who was nearing retirement as a wonk with the Department of Defense. These, including Diana in her red Subaru, were all Berry Road residents who were now stopped behind a school bus on the main Valley Road, less than a minute from Berry. The wind gusted and it started to rain. Diana looked out into the darkening afternoon.
Dense forest filled both sides of Valley Road. Most of the homes were hidden down long gravel driveways. At the very bottom of the hill was the Purdy Creek bed which ran clear back to Highway 16 and was solid berries. Bears foraged the area most of the summer, trampling the berries but causing no trouble. Most everyone knew to either stay out of there completely or at least make noise and the bears stayed away. Now the bears watched from the trees, smelling the coming storm, and thinking about their own dens.
The weather seemed to be more of a threat than the bears, Diana thought, as a small branch crashed down across the road.
Cars lined both sides of the two lane road, which had a narrow gravel shoulder. A posse of parents greeted each child as he popped out of the bus, whose lights continued to blink warning. This process took several minutes. There were lots of kids out here. Diana turned off her engine.
She checked her phone. No text from Jared, the boy she was sort-of dating back in Spokane where Washington State University's Nursing School was located. It was nothing serious, but she counted more and more on his texts to give her days umphf. The last one was two days ago. She sat back, adjusted the car's seat, and decided to fantasize about her future. The nursing job market was bleak and she knew just one nurse from the last class who was hired in the Seattle area. There was need but no money. Everyone she knew around her age was miserable and without clear direction. The only time she didn't feel the angst lately was with Jake.
Finally the bus driver pulled in the stop sign, turned off the blinkers, and things began to move. Diana turned her lights on and poked along behind the bus.
Eventually the bear-alert traffic sorted itself out and Diana turned right onto the freshly graded and graveled Berry Road. Two other cars were ahead of her, unheard of traffic density, and everyone slowed down. Even in the gloom and rain, it was a happy, cared for road.
Berry Road was a young road. The first quarter mile was cut straight north/south through the forest in 1990 when the hermit Tom Coolidge built the pole house that the O'Neils now lived in. Tom had bought the five acres from a development company, and there was no road maintenance in the deal. Over the next fifteen years, twenty-four others bought acreage, each parcel between two and ten acres, and extended the dead end road to three-quarters of a mile. Unfortunately, only half of the owners had any sort of road maintenance even mentioned in their deeds, so responsibility for upkeep was a mess from the get-go. As the road was used by more and more families, the potholes became such a problem that the Post Office threatened to stop mail delivery. Several members of the official Road Maintenance Group who were for paving sent out a letter casually discussing the topic of maybe filing liens against neighbors who refused to cooperate. It was sent to a couple of neighbors who weren’t even a part of that whole thing. They hired a lawyer. Letters went out to county officials. Tense meetings were held. Hostile e-mails were exchanged. Feelings were hurt and grudges were formed. It was a sad road that Diana's parents moved to in 2007. In the end, after a year of lawyers and neighbors not waving to each other, and of Alan and Janie voluntarily filling the potholes every month (they were new to the road and not seen as partisan), the Pavers conceded defeat in a letter written by the Group's road manager. Paving was history, he wrote. County rules had changed, and the cost of asphalt had sky-rocketed. Annual dues or voluntary contributions paid for one grading and minimal graveling per year. The Pothole Group (Alan and Janie) was separate.
A boy hoisting an enormous skateboard on his shoulder stood by the O'Neil's mailbox, having just come down the hill on the newly graded road. Diana could see him stopping and talking to Alan and her boy radar fired. And there was Jake on the side of the road.
The car in front of her stopped to talk with Alan, too, and to get the mail. It was the little 4-year-old who still wore her Cinderella Halloween costume even though it was mid-November hanging out the backseat window, and her 6-year-old brother in the passenger seat. They lived behind the O'Neil’s.
Diana drove ahead and parked in the O'Neil driveway entrance. A couple more cars went by and honked and waved. It was a circus! Grand Central Station out in the middle of the boonies! Jake let out a howl of greeting beside the car door and Diana's heart leapt for joy.
Chapter 3
I MISS YOU.
Diana read the words and shrieked, scaring her mother who then also shrieked.
Alan Peterson looked up from the kitchen table where he had just sat down with a Coke and The Atlantic magazine. He wore cheap reading glasses and his gray-brown hair in a ponytail. Alan was 58 and a retired lawyer.
"Jared texted me!" Diana felt a little juvenile, but that was part of being back here in the womb.
Jake had heard Diana's phone ring when they'd all walked into the house together, and then Diana had cried out, and then laughed, and now she sank down next to him on the kitchen floor and leaned back against the wall. He sniffed the hospital scrubs bag where she'd dropped it, and then buried his nose in her faux-fur jacket and thumped his tail on the kitchen floor. Loudly.
"For God's Sake, Diana!" Janie O'Neil stood at the sink holding a bunch of rosemary that she'd just rescued from the garden before it froze. She was 56 and a retired social worker. She'd gained weight since retiring but was still very attractive and had thick shoulder-length, snow white hair. She and Alan spent their time gardening and raising chickens and a few goats, living like the hippies they were at heart.
The cedar branches outside the kitchen window of the O'Neil's house waved in the wind. The forecast was increasing odds for lowland snow, with tons of rain crashing into freezing wind from the arctic. The changing weather and Jared's text invigorated Diana. She thought a quick walk with Jake before dark would do her good, bear or no.
"You scared me to death," Janie said and smiled.
Since Diana had moved back home, she and her mother had made a deal. Diana could talk about boys for just five minutes at a time, and her mother could do the same with her favorite subject, death. It wasn’t as macabre as it sounds. Janie almost always laughed at her metaphysical obsession along with everyone else.
"Do you love him?" Janie asked.
"I might." Diana unzipped her knee-high leather boots.
"What's wrong with him?"
"Nothing," Diana said and shrugged. "Really. Nothing. He's great."
"He hasn't got a prayer," Alan piped up, looking over his glasses.
Diana pouted.
"Don't listen to him," Janie said. "Alan thinks true love has to be a trial full of angst."
Alan looked at his wife and grinned. "So do you."
Diana felt the focus slipping away from her and Jared, which was fine. "Who was that boy with the gargantuan skateboard?" she asked and finished pulling off her boots. Jake sniffed them aggressively.
"Jonah."
"The guy you hired to dig post holes?" Diana hadn't been here this past summer so she'd never met him, but she knew he had just graduated from a two-year welding school, was a couple years younger than she was, and was a very good worker.
"He's worried about his part-time job at the shipyard. So when he got home and saw the smooth road, the old skateboard whispered to him."
"Skateboarding on a gravel road?" Diana couldn't picture it.
"He's mostly walking with it to paved hilly roads like Valley," Janie said. "He broke his elbow on that ridiculous board, did you know that? He could have died."
"I bet he was for paving this road," Diana said.
"If he was, he sure didn't mention it around his mom," Alan said. "Jonah's mother was the leader of the opposition to the Pavers. But, I agree, in his heart, Jonah is a Paver."
Diana stood up and stretched. Jake stood up and shook. He was ready to go.
"Jake and I are going for a quick walk," Diana said. "Probably just up to Valley and back. So we can admire the beautifully graded road." The heavy equipment had finished its work.
"It looks good," Alan said, "but check out those grooves in front of our place and down at Lou's. That hydraulic plow on the back of the road grader completely wasted the pothole base we've built up."
"I'll make a point of noticing," Diana said.
"Keep Jake nearby," Alan said and looked Diana in the eye.
"Will do." Diana stepped toward the front porch and her running shoes. And a raincoat.
"Make noise," Janie said.
It was four o'clock now, the same time as she was walking last night. A rooster crowed from down at Jonah's house, which was across the road from Diana's and further back in the woods. They had a little chicken and turkey farm.
Diana stood in the cold wind in the middle of Berry with Jake at her side, looked both ways, and didn't see a soul. This was Lower Berry, the oldest, most used part of the road where the potholes were worst. Diana noticed the grooves Alan had mentioned. He hadn't invented Potholeology, but he could certainly teach a class in it now.
Jake held his nose high in the air, taking in seven times more scentsations than Diana. His olfactory nerve and brain chemicals sucked in the smells stirred up by the road grader and the wind as if they were brightly colored gases wafting here and there. Diana felt color blind. The sky was white as milk and the trees so dark they had lost their green.
She decided not to walk the road after all, but to visit Ruby's grave, which was on the other side of the property from the house, up the hill from the gardens and out behind the barn. "Come on, Jake," she said.
Jake pranced beside her back up the driveway wondering what was going on.
The O'Neil's place had many trails. Diana followed what her parents called the tractor trail. It started at the driveway and tool shed, turned at the garbage and recycling area, straightened out again at the actual garden tractor (which was under a brown tarp and pole roof shelter), and then ran parallel to Berry until it went up the hill and wound away from the road and around to the cedar barn. Alan had built the barn from two milled 150-year-old, Civil War era cedars he had cut down for the gardens and more sunshine.
Janie O'Neil's cat Garfield, a tabby, ran across the path in front of Diana and Jake bristled. He hadn't grown up with a cat. Janie had rescued her first one when Jake and Ruby were six-years-old and all three kids were out of the nest. Diana’s two siblings were both in Colorado now and didn't visit as much as Diana did.
"Let's go this way," Diana said, which was a command. Jake shook off the cat intrusion, saw now where Diana was going, and led the way up the separate nature trail Diana had turned on, up through the woods.
Ruby was Jake's sister and had died last November of a genetic epilepsy. She'd had several spells, and then Janie found her dead one morning when she went downstairs. Janie called Diana within an hour of Ruby's death, and the two of them had cried together. Diana was relieved it wasn't Jakie who died, but she was deeply sad for his loss. Her mother, however, had grieved hard and nurtured Jake all year as if he were Alan making his way without her. Jake got to sleep on the couch now. Unheard of.
Diana pushed a fallen huckleberry bush off the trail and then she and Jake climbed over a downed cedar from last year that Alan planned to cut up one day. The trail was a loop that circled behind the barn, the upper goat pasture, and the chicken coup. South of the trail, and further uphill, was ten acres of dense, undeveloped forest owned by someone in Seattle. A couple of eight-foot diameter old growth stumps, rotted around most of the edges, marked the property line. The trail straddled one of them, and just downhill from that stump was Ruby's grave.
Jake knew the spot well. He sniffed her red collar which hung from an alder branch. He did this every time.
"Hi, Ruby," Diana said and knelt down to the row of rocks marking the grave. Her parents had described the entire hippy ceremony to her in detail, but all she really cared about was Jake. She'd seen enough dying to understand the blessing of a ten-year-old dog's quick and painless death in her sleep. As long as it wasn’t Jake.
And so she did not cry, but walked back over to the stump and sat down on a mossy ledge, to have a moment with Ruby's memory. But instead she thought of Jared and how much she loved kissing and cuddling him.
The wind gusted through the tall Douglas fir trees. Diana looked up into the white and saw a gigantic black figure high in the bare branches of an alder, fifty yards away through a gap in the cedars.
She looked harder and gasped. It was the size of a gorilla, sitting slightly reclined in the crook of a limb. One round ear and a toe completed the silhouette, and Diana registered that she was seeing a bear. A real, live, though completely still, BEAR.
The northern wind was not only frigid, but it was in the wrong direction for Jakie to pick up the bear, so he sat placidly by Ruby's grave as Diana's heart and mind raced.
The bear had propped its feet on an opposite branch. It was absolutely still, leaning forward and facing downward so that Diana thought it might even be asleep. The bear and Diana were in roughly the same posture.
Should she run or make noise? Diana didn't feel threat so much as see it. There was a massive predator. Her instinct was to sit still and just watch the spectacle. How could this be? A bear in a tree. They were ubiquitous in the Pacific Northwest, and yet this was maybe a once in a lifetime experience all the same. It felt potent. God it was huge. Diana couldn't take her eyes off it.
Two or three minutes passed. The bear did not move. It dozed. It had come up here for some reason that escaped its mid-November bear consciousness now. Maybe it was scouting den sites.
When the first gun shot went off, Diana thought it was a branch cracking in the wind, but then there was a second and a third, pow, pow-pow. She had no idea where it was coming from.
Jake didn't flinch. He'd grown up on the Suquamish Indian reservation with firecrackers.
Diana recognized the gunshots after the third pow. She'd heard the sound once on a walk with her parents, coming from over at Jonah's when coyotes were into their chickens. Alan told her what it was, and she'd been shocked. That was legal? Probably not, Alan surmised, but perfectly understandable and acceptable behavior in Salal.
The bear's head jerked up.
Diana heard shots again, but closer. Three more. Sound echoes are untraceable in the woods, though. The gun could have been anywhere.
The bear scrambled down the tree as if it were a greased pole. Fear of the bear running toward her clutched at Diana, diminishing her for an instant. She froze and whimpered.
Jake looked up then and Diana told him to STAY. Which he did.
She flipped into nurse mode. The bear was gone. Long gone. She would be eaten by now if she was going to be. Then she wondered if the bear had been hit by one of the bullets. That bear wasn't hurting anything, and that idiot gun could have hit her, Diana!
She hunkered down in her stump and considered that she was hiding from the gun as much as the bear. When she felt safe and clear, she let loose her adrenaline and sprinted with Jake straight down the hill, cutting through the still-unfenced upper goat pasture and then past the root cellars and into the fenced backyard and the gardens.
All evening the wind blew and the temperature dropped. The bear never left Diana’s consciousness, but she didn’t mention it. Normally she would have raced in and announced her experience loud and long, but not this time. She went to bed early.
The wall just to the right as you walked into the small second bedroom upstairs was all bookshelves full of family photo albums. All three of the O’Neil kids’ high school graduation pictures hung on the opposite wall above a small table with a bedside lamp.
Jake jumped on the bed next to Diana, sniffed her face and let her burrow her nose into his cheeks. She tugged his houndish lips, nuzzled his ears and kissed his head repeatedly. “Oh, Jakie,” she crooned. “I love you.”
Janie and Alan had gotten Jake and Ruby as puppies when Diana was thirteen. She had looked forward to cuddling Jake every weekend at her mom’s house in Suquamish, a ferry ride away from her dad’s in Seattle. Jake always eased the transition.
More kisses, and Jake melted into the blankets next to Diana’s tattered Blankie and her cell phone.
Diana had texted Jared back, but wasn’t sure now if she wanted him to respond. Her mood had shifted. She’d seen a bear and heard gunshots and strongly desired a real, live boy.
Chapter 4
Trees on each side of Berry Road threw wind-powered branches at each other all night. Sticks like spears stuck out of the bushes, and broken boughs covered the newly graded road. The miracle was that no one lost power.
Justin Dean lived behind the O’Neil’s, and he was the first neighbor on the road that morning. He worked as a nuclear submarine mechanic and was the father of three small children. A full moon cast a bright and deep shadow and Justin drove his little white car slowly because of the downed branches. He noticed the huge downed branch at the O’Neil’s driveway, but he was running late and it wasn’t blocking. His headlights lit up the twenty acres of woods across the road as he turned, the bear froze, and Justin never saw it.
It didn’t get light until almost 7:00, and by that time seven other neighbors had left for work. The teenagers who were allowed to walk to the bus even during bear alerts had long ago dropped sunflower seed shells and Jonah’s younger brother Sam, who was rebellious, threw a Gatorade bottle into the salal.
Diana didn’t have to be at the hospital until 10:00, but she was awake early and thinking about the bear. Her mother would be up soon, but Alan didn’t get up until 9:00. Diana started a pot of coffee and then put on her coat and Uggs and went out to get the newspaper. It was just barely light and very cold.
Jake led the way down the back stairs and straight to the branch blocking the driveway. His fur bristled as he smelled the bear’s scent, and he began to track it. Around the toolshed and the garbage area, down the trail to the tractor and back he sniffed, marking things furiously. “Jake!” Diana called. “COME.”
One more sniff and he followed Diana over the branch and out onto Berry. “Hooo-weee!” Diana said. “Looks like a tornado came through.”
She noticed that there had been no newspaper delivered at the mailbox, and then a car’s headlights shown from up the hill. Diana made Jake sit and stay as a small, very noisy red car roared up and stopped. Diana had never officially met Jonah, but she knew it was him. He was black, had dimples, and was very cute.
“Hey,” he said, rolling down his window. “I’m Jonah.”
Diana smiled. Her outfit could be worse, she thought, but not much. “Hey! I’m Diana.”
“Yeah, I know.” Jonah looked at Diana appreciatively, yet with respect, yet warm. “Looks like you’ve got a tree down there.” Jonah nodded to the driveway behind her, and then said, “I’ll just get that outta the way for you.”
Diana stepped back and Jonah wheeled the loud little car onto the edge of the recently graded road, turned off the engine and swung open the door all in one swoop. When Jonah wedged himself out, he was a couple of inches taller than Diana, but much bigger, muscular, his shoulders sloping and sleek even under his work clothes and coat.
He held out his hand for Diana to shake, then pulled it back and held it up to his lips to warm. “Cold,” he said and grinned. Diana melted. Then Jonah extended his hand again and Diana shook it, practically crushing his gentle clasp with her firm howdy-do.
“Nice to meet you,” Diana said, “and yes, it’s crazy cold. It’s sweet of you to stop and help.”
“You’re a damsel in distress,” Jonah said.
Diana laughed loudly. “Where’s your skateboard, Mr. Shining Knight?”
Jonah’s eyes grew wider and he smiled. “What have you got against skateboards, wench?”
“Oh,” Diana said, “just that they are death on wheels and completely insane.”
“It’s good to have opinions,” Jonah said.
“I have a few, yes I do,” Diana said.
“We should talk about them some time,” Jonah said.
Diana was thrilled. Her eyes gave Jonah the thumbs up.
Jake had been ordered to sit through all of this and was ready for some attention. So when Jonah strode over to the downed branch, which was really a small tree, Jake released himself and Diana didn’t notice.
As Jonah wrestled the branch, car headlights approached from both directions.
The car coming from Valley was the grandmother of the three Dean children who lived behind the O’Neil’s, coming to babysit. She had never met the two young people in the road, but she recognized the dog Jake standing by the mailboxes. Something was going on at the O’Neil driveway, which was part of the same easement the Dean driveway fed into. She approached slowly.
The car coming down the hill from the dead end was Greg Harvey going to a stupid business meeting – plumbing supplies – across the Bridge in Tacoma. And what crap was this in the middle of the road? If it involved that idiot lawyer Alan Peterson, and if it interfered with his, Greg Harvey’s, right way of passage, then there would be hell to pay. Greg was one of the paving supporters, a forty-year-old bachelor who lived with his sister. He was interested in improving property values, and he was not a morning person.
Whether it was the approaching cars or the giant branch that Jonah finally heaved off the driveway and sent crashing into the woods, the bear panicked and bounded across the road for all to see. She should not have still been even in the vicinity, but she didn’t seem to know that at all.
Diana watched in horror as Jake streaked away from the mailboxes, chasing after the bear with a focus beyond controlling. “Jake!” Diana screamed.
The bear stopped at the edge of the road, rose up huge to meet Jake as he lunged, and then, with a single swipe, cuffed the ninety-pound golden retriever across the head. Jake’s body flopped back from the blow and landed in the road. The bear then roared a warning, turned and was gone into the woods.
Diana and Jonah raced to Jake’s lifeless body. Diana kneeled down next to him in the gravel, threw back her head and howled.
Chapter 5
The Kitsap Sun reporter had to park out on Berry Road behind the sheriff and a Fish and Wildlife Department car, which he recognized. He stepped over fallen tree debris, and then walked up the O’Neils’ driveway, past a wheelbarrow which held a dead golden retriever, up the back stairs and into the crowded kitchen. The sheriff sat at the kitchen table with a young black man. A middle-aged man with a ponytail and two crying women, the owners, stood at the kitchen sink. The reporter went to stand by the woodstove with the Wildlife woman who he had met at the last bear attack.
The sheriff had requested that the other two eye-witnesses attend this bear inquest as well, so Greg Harvey had cancelled his meeting and hovered at the back door. Grandma Dean had just settled the three Dean children – Elden, 6; Lula, 4; and Lyle, 2 – on the couch. The children’s mother did not want them playing outside at all today, and Grandma Dean was wondering how that was going to work. Garfield hid at the top of the stairs and looked down on the proceedings.
Jonah recounted the events and Diana sobbed. Tears kept forming and falling. She listened to every word Jonah said, wishing she could turn back the clock. The body blow of Jake’s death transported her to another place where there was no switch to flip, no nurse mode and its perspective available to her. She called in sick. So had Jonah.
“Mr. Harvey was layin’ on his horn,” Jonah was saying.
“I was trying to scare the bear away!” Greg Harvey said. He stood like a sumo wrestler, feet wide apart, pot belly prominent.
“Let’s just let Jonah tell the story, okay?” Janie O’Neil said in a pleading tone, and with a smile. She would not have this sacred moment besmirched with old road rancor over paving.
Greg Harvey ignored her. “He’s told the story already. It’s not that complicated. The dog was unleashed, it attacked the bear, and paid the price for its owner’s negligence. End of story.”
Grandma Dean gasped at this insensitivity to the O’Neils, and picked up her squirming grandchild. She couldn’t stop herself. “You do not speak for all of us, Sir. You’re just louder.”
Jonah locked eyes with Diana across the room and realized he was seeing the same outraged expression his mother had any time Greg Harvey’s name was mentioned.
Diana clung to Jonah emotionally, otherwise she might have killed the creep with her bare hands.
“Is Jakie hurt?” Lula whispered loudly. Elden, her older brother, was humiliated, not that his sister had spoken up, but that she had missed the whole point. He slapped his forehead and shushed her.
“Is there a leash law in rural areas?” It was the reporter, and everyone turned to look at him. “I mean, is this a county road? Is it privately maintained?”
It was an accurate measure of Diana’s shock that she hadn’t even registered a new boy in the room. Now she did.
Her stepdad cleared his throat. “To your question about who maintains this road, it is indeed privately maintained. It is not a county road. As to any leash law, there is none. Greg Harvey knows that. He’s mad about completely unrelated stuff.”
“Are we finished here?” Greg asked the sheriff. “Common sense and common courtesy continue to be a challenge for this household.”
The reporter was taking notes furiously. All the voices smoldering low in the room were growing. Jonah’s cell phone went off, and the sheriff asked for quiet.
“Road maintenance,” the heavy-set sheriff said slowly, “is not our concern here and now this morning. We’ve got us a scary bear out here that might have attacked twice in three days.” He leaned back in the chair and it squeaked. “What is Fish and Wildlife saying now?” He looked at the woman who was in her thirties and had a crew cut.
“The story here of course is the menace to our community, and efforts to trap the bear will continue,” she said to the assemblage. “My deepest sympathies to the dog’s owners on the loss of their pet, by the way.” She nodded to Diana and her parents.
“Will you kill the bear if you catch it?” Diana addressed the Wildlife woman directly. “Because Jake charged it, like Jonah said.”
Greg Harvey hooted. “Self-defense!” he said. “That’s a good one.”
“Jakie was protecting us all,” Grandma Dean said and patted Lula’s head.
“Actually,” the Wildlife woman said, “Ms. O’Neil, is it?”
Diana nodded.
“Actually, Ms. O’Neil, a Save the Bear campaign was launched just last night by concerned Gig Harbor residents. Our reporter here is covering that story as well. We at the Department have gotten a lot of bear commentary. Forty emails last I checked. People have strong feelings about the whole thing.”
Diana felt her face flushing. She was one with strong feelings. Even now. Even more so now, somehow. “Like how do you know it’s the right bear?” Diana said. “And why can’t it be trapped and relocated?”
“Yes, those are the questions. Bears are territorial and it’s difficult to find an unclaimed area. To the euthanasia issue, the Department maintains that once a bear has attacked a human, it will be more inclined to do so again. Plus it must be tested for rabies, which can only be done after death. The attacked woman needs this information.”
“And again,” Jonah asked, “how do you know it’s the right bear?”
“Saliva.”
“Am I free to leave?” Greg Harvey said to the sheriff.
The sheriff looked at Greg and then around at everyone else and finally asked the Wildlife woman if she had any other questions for Mr. Harvey. She did not, although she warned everyone that there would be dog teams out here today, as well as traps set.
“Well, then,” the sheriff said, “the hunt is on.” Greg Harvey was out the door.
The house emptied quickly, leaving the family to their grief and burial work. The reporter and Wildlife woman had to arrange a photographer and traps respectively, and Grandma Dean had had an idea to keep the children busy and was excited about the project herself. The children were sorry that a big bad bear had got Jakie. They had never seen a bear except in books, but Elden knew he was supposed to sing and yell in the woods, which he enjoyed doing anyway.
Diana listened to the Dean children as they raced each other down the long easement singing and yelling at the top of their lungs. Then she’d had another crying jag and went to her room to lie down while Alan and Jonah dug Jake’s grave. Janie smudged the house with sage, a cleansing ritual she’d learned when they lived in Suquamish. Greg Harvey’s energy be gone! she whispered as she swished the smoking bundle of herbs in every nook.
Upstairs, Garfield lay against Diana’s broken heart. His deep wild purr soothed the ache, which she had to otherwise groan or even yelp to get relief from. Garfield had come to her of his own accord, an expert in not only giving comfort but also of finding it – the warmest, the softest, the best.
Jonah was a comfort, too. He pushed the heavy wheelbarrow up the tractor trail and then through the woods. He dug most of the grave, and then he and Alan, together, as Diana and Janie watched, lowered Jake’s cold, stiff body into the earth. Janie thanked Jake for his exuberant personality and life and Diana sobbed. Jonah said he was a good dog and then he pulled one of Jake’s tennis balls out of his pocket, stepped down into the grave beside the body, and wedged the ball under Jake’s chin.
By the time the Kitsap Sun photographer left Berry Road at dusk, the Dean children had installed their handmade white cross in the roadside gravel where Jake had died. Six-year-old Elden Dean had done the lettering – JAKE – on the cross. He knew about crosses and funerals.
Chapter 6
“I went straight home and had a big glass of wine,” Bethany Rogers said to the small group of nurses and nurses-in-training, including Diana, on Wednesday afternoon in the hospital coffee shop. Two of Bethany’s patients had died unexpectedly, and that shock trumped Diana’s dead dog in the conversation. Bethany had everyone’s full heart and attention, except Diana’s, although she was trying. It helped her to keep from thinking about Jake which made her cry. “I’m going through a bottle of wine every two days!” Bethany said to rowdy response.
“I drink a bottle every night!” “I go straight for the shots!” “I stop at the liquor store for a fifth!”
That last got Diana’s attention. She’d been home two weeks now, and had her first glass of wine last night. But that wasn’t the point. “We’re all going to end up alcoholics,” she said. “It’s the price we pay for being in nurse mode all day. It’s not natural. Or healthy, dammit. We’re not robots!”
“Oh yes we are,” said Bethany and tears welled in her eyes.
“You go, girl!” an older nurse named Sylvia who lived up in Suquamish said to Diana. “Save the bear in all of us.” She picked up a copy of the day’s newspaper from a neighboring table and waved it.
The photo of little Elden Dean hammering a cross into the shoulder of Berry Road had made the front page, with the headline, BEAR ATTACK ON BERRY ROAD. Diana was mentioned.
Ms. Diana O’Neil, owner of the deceased dog, is sympathetic to the recently formed Save the Bear movement, which is pleading for the life of the elusive first bear, which attacked a woman and her dog ten miles away and is probably not the same bear as yesterday morning’s Berry Road bear.
O’Neil points out that her dog charged the bear, and that the bear was not vicious, just bigger. “Jake was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” said the student nurse at Providence Hospital.
As of Wednesday, the first bear had not fallen for the Krispy Kreme doughnuts set in two traps. Nor have two teams of dogs picked up any scent of the bear.
Diana had read the article, which had also quoted Greg Harvey, something about reactivating old neighborhood stresses, combining city and country, et cetera. That’s not what she was thinking now though as the Suquamish nurse held up the newspaper photo of one of the traps in the Gig Harbor forest.
“Does that Krispy Kreme business piss off anybody else but me?” Diana asked.
“It’s an insult to the bear,” said Sylvia from Suquamish. “We see the power of the bear and feel anger. They were here first, we are intruding. So we must shift the power in our favor with cages and Krispy Kreme doughnuts.” Sylvia’s gray hair was mid-back length and curly and she waved her hands as she talked. “It’s like, here’s this magnificent, wild creature and its last meal is going to be a damn Krispy Kreme.”
“It’s an advertisement,” Diana said. “Krispy Kreme must be loving it.” The Associated Press had picked up the story, and it got a brief mention on CNN.
“Well, some of us did a ceremony for that first bear,” Sylvia said and locked eyes with Diana. “To inform it of the traps, and ask it to leave the area. And it seems to be working! We’ll do the same for this Berry Road bear, Diana.”
And then she invited Diana to her house to do the ceremony together that evening.
All kinds of spiritual folk were attracted to the Port Madison Indian Reservation hamlet of Suquamish where Chief Seattle was buried. Diana’s parents had lived there for eight years. Janie O’Neil had commuted to Seattle each day on the Bainbridge Island ferry, just fifteen minutes from Suquamish. Diana and her sister and brother knew that ferry well.
On her drive home from the hospital, Diana thought about how she hadn’t seen Jared for two weeks now, and the truth was that that was not a problem. He had called from Spokane and expressed his sympathies – she’d texted him the news about Jake – and he offered to come visit. Diana had said no, she was so busy. And then she had called Jonah to invite him to Suquamish to warn the bear about the Krispy Kremes, and he’d said Hell, yeah and offered to drive.
Now she sat next to him in his little red car, it was 6:00 and long dark, they were headed to Suquamish and Diana breathed deeply as they roared onto Highway 16.
Jonah smelled good. Maybe part of the earthy smell, Diana thought, came from Jonah’s elk-skin drum in the backseat. He’d been to these ceremonies before, he’d said. Nothing officially Tribal.
“One time,” Jonah said and smiled, “a guy on the beach in Suquamish asked me to bury some sacred stone for him in Salal.”
Diana laughed. She pictured the beloved local Suquamish character named Toby who was a fixture in the town, a semi-crazy looking Vietnam veteran known for painting a mural of a canoe landing on the wall of the old building that used to house the Tribal Youth Center as well as the alcohol rehab center.
“Did you do it?” Diana asked. “Bury the stone, I mean?”
“Heck, yeah. Down at the beach, just like he asked.” Jonah grinned and glanced over at Diana then. “Who knows? Some of this voodoo feels pretty powerful. Especially the drumming.”
Jonah switched lanes as they approached the village of Gorst and the interchange to Highway 3. Then they were passing Sinclair Inlet and the graveyard fleet of outdated, rusting aircraft carriers docked there forever. Jonah worked at the Puget Sound Naval Base shipyard as a laborer with the promise of some welding. Two years ago when he’d started the two-year welding degree, welders had the country by the balls. It was pick your place, signing bonus, the works. Same with nursing. None of the nurses in Diana’s class were getting job offers now, including her. Neither Jonah nor Diana wanted to talk about their doomed life plans.
“Jonah?” Diana said. “Do you have a gun?”
“Why? Are you thinking of shooting someone?”
“No, but I heard gunshots from your house once.”
“Yep. Coyotes.”
“It’s weird, and I haven’t told anyone else about this, but the night before Jake died, I swear, I saw a bear in a tree.”
Jonah looked over at her and raised his eyebrows.
“Jake never saw it. The wind was blowing gangbusters and I looked up and there it was. A huge bear! And, my God, I think it was sleeping.”
“Do you think it was the same bear that killed Jake yesterday?”
Diana shrugged. “Maybe. Probably. Who knows? But what happened is that I watched it for a while – I was stunned and it seemed kind of surreal, you know? And then there were gunshots. Six of them.”
Jonah blinked. “You thought it was me?”
“I didn’t know who it was.”
“Well, it wasn’t me. Did he hit the bear?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t know if he even saw the bear. It could have been someone keeping the coyotes out of their chickens. I’ll tell you one thing for sure, the bear was down that tree and gone in a flash.”
Jonah laughed. “Maybe it was Mr. Harvey. I wouldn’t put it past him. He ran down one of our turkeys that got loose last week.”
“One of your turkeys?”
“Thanksgiving. We’ve got seventy-three of them. Way too many turkeys.”
“Do you cut off their heads?” Diana asked.
Jonah nodded. “Yes, I do,” he said. “But I thank them for their sacrifice first.”
Diana fell in love with Jonah at that moment on Highway 3 passing the Silverdale Mall. Or at least that was when she first realized it. Whatever else happened, she was in love with Jonah.
The ceremony turned out to be about honey. Sylvia stood at the opening to her small four-circuit labyrinth which was lit with lanterns. It was dark and cold. The forest loomed around the clearing, which was the site of a 21-foot diameter old growth stump. There were ten participants including Diana and Jonah, who were the youngest. Two others besides Jonah had drums. Diana stood in the circle with the others, and felt honored to be invited to this powerful place.
Sylvia thanked everyone for coming, especially Diana O’Neil for giving her the idea of the honey with her question about the degrading doughnuts. She talked about how bear energy was, among other things, about discernment and discrimination. Going within and making choices. And they were gathered tonight to celebrate Bear and warn it not to fall for the Krispy Kremes.
They all joined hands as Sylvia called in the four directions. Jonah’s hand was warm and dry, Diana’s was just the opposite. Sylvia called in The Great Bear, the seven-star constellation of The Big Dipper, but it was too overcast to actually see the stars.
“Cultures and religions all over the world use ceremony to evoke the help of the Divine,” Sylvia said. “Tonight we use the power of ceremonial symbol to evoke a connection to Bear.”
She then walked over to a table she had set up with small pots full of blackberry honey. “Honey is the essence of the wild,” she said. “Of trees and before that the bees and before that the flowers. All that wild sweetness, it’s flavored with memory. And when we taste, we can be filled again.”
Jonah squeezed Diana’s hand. She was crying softly.
Sylvia told them they were going to take the honey – there was a pot for each of them – into the labyrinth, “Letting the honey gather our powerful thoughts and wishes for bear’s choices as well as our own as we walk the spiral path to the center where all the pots will be emptied into the bowl.”
Jonah drummed softly as everyone walked the labyrinth, and then one of the other drummers took over so Jonah could enter next to last.
It was impossible to get the honey to pour completely out of the little pot, but a drop contains the whole so no one sweated the issue for long. When it was over, Diana felt drained but also a little healed. They all then tasted the honey from the communal bowl, so Diana’s and Jonah’s first kiss was honey sweet.
Diana told her parents at breakfast the next morning that she was in love with Jonah. Neither of them was surprised, nor particularly convinced.
Alan told of a psychology study where couples who bungee jump together have a resulting soul connection that destroys them. “They think they’re compatible,” Alan said, “but they’re only bonded.”
Janie asked about the ceremony and wanted to know where in Suquamish, exactly, Sylvia lived. She might have met her at a book group whose leader had died.
Diana ate her oatmeal. She scanned the newspaper for bear stories. Then she looked up. “The house feels so different without Jake,” she said. His absence was visceral to her. He had a big, frenetic energy and it was suddenly, completely gone.
“Elvis has left the building,” Alan said softly, and Diana laughed and then she cried.
Chapter 7
A bear was trapped in Gig Harbor on Saturday, six days after the woman walking her dog on Rosedale was attacked. The Save the Bear campaign called Diana with the news. They were acting fast, notifying everyone by phone, because Fish and Wildlife had a legal protocol to euthanize.
Diana agreed to make some calls, and jotted down points for emails: Was the saliva a match, and what was that foolproof science exactly? And, after six days, hadn’t the victim already had the rabies shots?
It had poured rain all day Thursday and Friday, so the potholes on Berry Road grew fast, especially in the grooves recently made by the road grader. Alan was torn. His pothole philosophy – get them when they’re small – conflicted with his neighbor philosophy – lay low and don’t work the road on the weekend. Diana offered to help so it would go faster and Alan accepted.
The truth was that Diana wanted to be outside. She had been thinking about her wildness, or rather lack of it. Her ability to be wild was connected to her ability to love, and loving deeply was the most important thing in life.
Jonah liked to live dangerously, he said when she called and told him about the trapped bear. He said he’d write an email, but then he was going skateboarding. If she wanted to hang out later, they could even watch a movie since his brother hadn’t taken the PlayStation and its DVD player to college as Diana’s had. Diana said that sounded fun.
“Jonah?” she said then. “Did the ceremony work?”
“Who knows?”
“A bear was trapped!”
“After six days,” Jonah said. “And our bear is still free. I’d call that pretty damn good.”
Diana considered the truth of that, and liked that Jonah had said “our bear.”
“One more thing,” she said, “before you go kill yourself on your skateboard?”
“One,” he said.
“Did you know that couples who bungee jump together are doomed to lifelong love, even if they have absolutely nothing else in common?”
Jonah was silent. “I like chic flicks,” he offered.
Diana laughed. “Okay, we’ve got one thing in common then.”
She finished her phone calls and emails, changed into the perfect pothole ensemble -- tight jeans, her faux-fur black jacket, a red beret and matching gloves and scarf, and her mother’s Bogg rubber boots -- and then headed outside with the tractor key.
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