Bear

Chapter 13

The biologist arrived five minutes early the next afternoon. The doorbell rang while Sam was in her mother’s bedroom setting up lunch. Her mother straightened in bed. “Who’s that?”

“Ah,” Sam said, putting the plate down on the bedside table. A tomato and mayonnaise sandwich. Her heart was racing from the chime. Having this meeting without Elena felt like an indiscretion, but it wasn’t, it was normal, a minor chore. To emphasize that to herself, Sam said to her mother, “Someone’s here about the bear.”

Her mother’s eyes were large. “What about it?”

“To check that nothing we have is attracting it.”

“Are we in trouble?”

“No,” Sam said, “no, no,” but her pulse stayed fast. She turned up the volume of the TV. Refilled her mother’s water, fixed a pillow behind her mother’s back, then let herself out, closing the bedroom door after. The doorbell rang again. Sam pressed her lips shut.

She opened the front door to find a small, handsome woman, with a strong jaw and beautiful teeth and dark hair brushed back from her forehead. Madeline Pettit said, “Samantha?”

“Sam.”

“That’s right.” Madeline showed her identification: a tiny photo of her face, a green logo. “When you didn’t answer, I thought you might not be here after all.”

“Sorry. I’m here. I just had to deal with my mom first. She’s sick.” Madeline’s eyebrows tipped up. This was how polite people showed how sorry they were. Sam said, “Do you want to come in?”

Madeline stepped over their threshold. She started unlacing her boots and Sam said, “You don’t need to,” and Madeline said, “Please, I’ve been in the dirt all day,” and then straightened in her stocking feet. Her toes made tiny curves against the cloth. Madeline wore gray slacks and a tan button-down that had a state seal stitched over the breast pocket. Sam was in leggings and an old T-shirt. She was vividly embarrassed of her own body, the way it stood in clothes. She couldn’t pinpoint Madeline’s age, but Madeline did seem older. More together. Someone too busy to even remember Sam’s nickname.

Sam said, “I actually work with the state, too.”

Madeline had been looking down their hall, but she returned her attention to Sam. “Is that right?”

“I don’t know if that was in the report you got. Yeah. Department of Transportation.”

“No better benefits,” Madeline said. Sam made herself smile. She had allowed Madeline to misunderstand, she knew—Sam worked, in fact, for Centerplate, the ferries’ private food vendor—and so she didn’t get any of the things that probably made a career at the Department of Fish and Wildlife, where employees played in the dirt all day, grand. But Sam worked somewhere, she did something, and Madeline ought to know that much, at least. Madeline asked, “What do you do there?”

“I’m on the ferries.”

“How lovely. I came over from Anacortes this morning. It’s a beautiful ride.”

Sam looked again at Madeline’s face, the sculpted shape of it. Had this woman stopped by the galley during Sam’s shift? Ordered a croissant that Sam spent thirty seconds heating in the microwave? But wouldn’t Sam have remembered her?

Madeline looked back at her blank. Not recognizing. She said, “So tell me what you saw.”

Sam described the morning shock of the bear’s first visit. Its enormous body at their door. She showed Madeline the pictures, the brown blur. Madeline, taking notes, asked questions: did Sam’s family keep pets or livestock? Were there fruit trees on their property? Was there anything odorous in their cars? When Sam hesitated at the last one, Madeline rephrased. “Anything that smells.”

“I know that,” Sam said. “No.”

“Our goal is keeping this bear from climbing what we call the behavioral ladder. Say it finds something appealing to eat in a garage. Then it goes into an empty house, does damage, makes the news. We tag it and relocate it, but a bear has a good memory, it comes back. Finally, it’s unlucky enough to scare someone out in their yard. It’s named a nuisance bear. It gets euthanized.”

“Hold on. You’re saying it could come into our house?” Sam asked.

“No.” Madeline raised her note-taking hand, pen laced between fingers. “That level of behavior is up here.” She slid her hand down in the air. “We’re going to ensure this animal stays right here.”

They both put their shoes on. They went outside, where Madeline squinted at the front step and took photos of the walkway. Sam studied the back of Madeline’s head. The sleekness of her ponytail. Being in this position was oddly reminiscent of standing behind Elena when they were kids—waiting for Elena to rise from picking up shells and announce the rules of some fantastic game. It sent Sam back. After a few minutes, Sam said, “So that’s what you do? Tag them and take them away?”

Without turning around, Madeline again raised one hand, marking an invisible rung on the imaginary ladder. “That’s a response to escalated behavior,” she said over her shoulder. “If the animal returns.”

“But it has.”

Madeline did turn then. “Is that so?”

“Yesterday,” Sam said. “After we talked. It was right there.”

Madeline followed the line of Sam’s pointing to the corner of the house. She squatted there, in the dirt, then went slowly over the twenty feet between them. In the inspection, Sam saw Madeline’s doubt—she saw judgment. Madeline seemed to think that there would be dog food, or ripe berries, or browning banana peels scattered across the ground. That Sam and her family were doing something wrong.

Madeline stopped at the section of damaged siding by the door. “Which incident is this from?”

“That’s actually from before,” Sam said. “Our neighbor said we might have voles.”

Madeline reached out, slim-fingered, and touched the peeled vinyl edge of one strip of siding. She twisted it to look at both sides. “Quite the infestation.” Turning her tan wrist, she displayed the loose piece. “See those? Teeth marks.”

“Not a vole?” Sam asked.

“Not unless your voles weigh four hundred pounds.”

Sam frowned.

Maybe in the high light of a June afternoon, Madeline couldn’t see Sam’s expression, because she continued talking, blithely. “Usually we see this on trees. They gnaw at them to get the sap flowing. Yours picked the wrong place to focus his attention—all he was going to get at here was insulation—but he tried his best. And smell that?”

Sam did, yes. Not as strong a stink as the day before, but still something. Musk and wet soil. Hair and skin.

“The bear’s urinated here,” Madeline said.

Sam stepped back. “Jesus.”

Madeline smiled at Sam. In this sun, Madeline was perfectly illuminated. Her eyes shone. Brown-black, warm black, a rich velvety black that caught and cupped the daylight. Black that contained gold. Her cheeks were faintly, thoroughly freckled, a dust over her complexion. She looked like a woman who had everything. Every luxury, every opportunity. Sam could not even begin to imagine—what must it be like? Madeline said, “It’ll fade.”

Sam had to remember. “The smell.”

“This bear has made your home into a kind of unnatural rub tree. They mark a trunk, or a place, more generally, in this instance, with their urine, the oil in their fur, their anal gland secretions—really, don’t worry, it doesn’t do any harm—in order to communicate.”

“Communicate what?”

“Oh, well. Whatever it is they have to say. Their dominance, or that they’re looking for a mate.”

This was more alarming to Sam than Madeline, with her matter-of-fact tone, was giving room for. “Dominance?”

“It’s mating season,” Madeline said. “This is how animals talk to each other. They beat their chests and express their scent glands and generally show off how powerful they are.”

“But why is it doing that here?”

“He’s confused, I suppose.”

Sam didn’t like this. Any of it. The bear, its behavior, the source being confusion. The recurrence of the visits. Three times! Enough to make a biologist turn in surprise. And the marking. The bear had marked them. Sam asked, “So it’s going to keep coming back?”

“No, no,” Madeline said. “They have multiple rub spots. Think of it as a trail marker, not a destination.”

“We’re on a bear trail now?” said Sam, dread-filled. “So there’ll be more?” Madeline shook her head. “But how do you know?”

“It’s rare for one to come through these islands.”

“But people say it’s not. Another one came a couple years ago. And this one’s here now.”

Sam’s voice was getting tighter, higher, but Madeline was refusing to match her. “Let me emphasize that it’s extremely unusual,” she said. She was selecting each word as though she was concerned that Sam, if pressed, might rush off like a panicked animal through the trees. “But at this time of year, males, especially, will travel long distances in search of potential mates. This one just happened, on his long trip, to cross paths with you. He’s marking in order to signal his presence to females. He will keep moving, and keep marking, until he finds some.”

“Except this one’s not moving.”

“Well,” Madeline said, “he is. He came from the mainland to here. And soon, frustrated in his search, he’ll leave.”

Sam didn’t know how to get through to her. Okay, yes, the bear had come to them from elsewhere, it hadn’t erupted entire from the ground in front of this door, but the point was that now it was here, over and over, not leaving. It was standing outside their entryway, rubbing itself on their windows, following Elena down isolated trails. Madeline had said this was rare, but it didn’t matter to Sam, to her family, if usually, historically, such a thing didn’t happen. It was happening. It was happening to them right now.

“I think you should remove it,” Sam said. “I mean, I wouldn’t have reached out if it wasn’t serious. If taking it away is something you can do, then you should go ahead and do it.”

Madeline sighed. “I hear you. That said, I don’t see anything particularly alarming.”

“Okay, but I’m alarmed,” Sam said. Insisted. She could tell Madeline more, about Elena coming across the creature in the woods, but what was in front of them, on the wall and the ground, ought to be enough. “It has a habit of coming here. It’s damaging the house, you told me, and that’s a problem for us, we need to— We’re going to be selling the house, we need it not to be hurt, we can’t have it targeted by wild animals. My sister and I are counting on it. We’re going to move soon.”

Madeline showed no reaction to this, the revelation of Sam and Elena’s greatest dream. The information submerged beneath her calm. She only said, “There’s been no major harm done. I encourage you to reach out to your home insurance with your concerns. Depending on your level of coverage, they may pay for a repair.”

Home insurance claims were the sorts of things Elena handled. As Sam watched, Madeline tucked her cellphone and notebook into her tote, which was embroidered, too, with the department’s logo. Madeline’s smooth beauty felt dissonant with the uniform; she didn’t seem like the authorities Sam had known. But the next step from the state was clear: to abandon them. Madeline said, “Just don’t approach him”—

“It’s approaching us.”

—“And all will be well. What you have here is an interesting, perhaps once in a lifetime, brush with nature. Keep a respectful distance and enjoy.”

They finished things with each other out there in the yard. Madeline gave Sam a business card, and Sam kept trying to figure Madeline out. That elder-sibling attitude. Or was it simple arrogance? Like the thousands of other fancy people who rode across the channel each day? At the last goodbye, Sam couldn’t help herself: “It’s cool that you…how’d you wind up doing this?”

“I studied wildlife science in school. I’ve always been passionate about animals. How they behave, how we relate to them. My uncle used to take me trapping.”

This polished woman setting traps among trees. “That’s so funny,” Sam said. “You don’t look like you’d be good at this.”

As soon as she heard herself, she knew it was wrong. Madeline’s lips closed over her fine white teeth. No, Sam wanted to protest, I didn’t mean—it was supposed to be—but no explanation would take the words back, and, god, how she hated it, the awkward child always spilling out of her, clumsy as ever, trying and failing to keep up as women like Madeline and Elena moved confidently ahead.

“If you need anything else, our office’s contact information is on the card,” Madeline said. “Do have a good day.”

“You too,” Sam said. Bitter. Embarrassed. A feeling she hated: embarrassment. A feeling she had to live with all the time.

Sam let herself into the house. She took off her shoes—they did have dirt on them, she supposed. Then she went to check on her mother. Helped her to the bathroom. Thought, while her mother sat on the toilet, about uniforms and ponytails, business cards, elegance. The end of her conversation with Madeline kept intruding. On her knees, Sam remembered her every error, the moments she’d made Madeline stop and squint and get crisp.

And then Sam refused those memories. She hadn’t messed up, she assured herself. In fact the biologist had been the one acting strange. The toilet flushed, and through the noise Sam repeated that Madeline, not Sam, was wrong.

The rich, the overeducated, the people who believed themselves superior—those were the people Sam did not want to be around. Madeline wasn’t like Elena. How dumb to have thought that. After her mother returned to bed, Sam headed to her own room. She brought up a new survey on her phone.

Outside, voices.

Elena. The rise and fall of Elena’s voice through the wall—how? Now? Sam shoved her phone in her pocket and hurried to the door.

Elena was standing in her work clothes where their front walk met the road. Where Madeline’s car was parked. Madeline was still there, talking to her. When Sam saw the two of them from the doorway, Elena glanced over, waved, pointed. “The bear expert!”

“What are you doing here?” Sam asked.

“A fuse blew in the kitchen,” Elena said. “They sent us home until they fix it. They said it might be a few hours. And look who I found.”

Sam’s skin was hot. She was flushing, she knew. She went inside, pulled her shoes on, and exhaled, then came out to join.

“He could take down a small deer,” Madeline was telling Elena when Sam got there. “But mostly roots, fruits, grains, insects.”

“Fish,” Elena suggested.

“Fish, sure. Small mammals. They’re omnivores.”

To Elena, Sam said, “Was she just telling you we don’t need to worry about being attacked?”

Elena turned her gaze to Sam. In her black polo, with her hair pulled back, Elena’s face was dreamy, exhausted. She said, “We were talking about what bears eat,” and Madeline, beside them, said, “My understanding was that you were mainly concerned about damage to the home. Are you worried about being attacked?”

Was Madeline making fun of her? She repeated Sam’s words and made them sound idiotic, but they weren’t. Anyone who had a bear prowling around their windows would worry about being attacked. Sam said, “Of course we are. There’s a grizzly bear stalking us.”

The other two dismissed that. “Come on,” Elena said, and Madeline said, “He’s not a grizzly.” Elena faced Madeline with interest: “He’s not?”

“No. I told your sister when we first spoke. He’s a black bear, certainly.”

“But he’s not black,” Elena said.

“Some can be cinnamon or even blond,” Madeline said. The bear expert, monologuing again. “It’s not the coloration that makes it a black bear. They’re their own distinct species, more closely related to Asian black bears than North American browns.”

“I’m so surprised,” Elena said. “I think of black bears as smaller.”

“They’re medium-sized.”

“This one’s huge.”

“Medium for a bear is still substantial,” Madeline said. “Males are about five feet tall when standing upright. You wouldn’t want to get in a tussle with one.”

Low, Elena said, “He seems bigger than that.”

Sam cut in, then, to support her sister. “Elena knows. It came right up to her the other day.”

Madeline said, “Right. Well, seeing these animals up close, unexpectedly, can be shocking, and shock can do strange things to our perception.” To Elena, she said, “I’m sure opening the door on one gave you quite a fright.”

“It was all right,” Elena said.

“No, it walked up to her outside, away from here,” Sam said. “She saw it really well. She said it was a grizzly.”

Madeline appraised them both. Then she reached into her tote to take out her notebook again. “This was the sighting you mentioned on the phone. Cattle Point Road.”

“That’s right,” Sam said. “It came right up.” Elena was looking at Sam. To her sister, then, Sam said, “Tell her.”

Elena wasn’t upset, her forehead was smooth, but she wasn’t glad at this chance to talk, either. She wasn’t anything. She was radically different from the way she’d been after that trail encounter: her million texts and calls, her rapid retellings, her shine. Sam found the change so irritating. This was how Elena had been in school, too, or behaved at the club when they worked together—to strangers, she was always friendly, smiling and making small talk, but flattened. She showed them none of her true self. Sam knew that Elena’s excitement was there, trapped in her body, kept under high pressure by her skin, but Elena let it out for nobody but Sam, even in the moments, like this one, where it was required.

To Elena, Madeline said, “Right up to you? Really?”

“Not right up to me,” Elena said. “A little bit away.”

Sam had had enough of this. “You said thirty feet away.”

“Maybe,” Elena conceded.

“That must’ve been something,” Madeline said.

Elena nodded. Smiled. Vague, patient. How many times had Sam stood beside her sister in public and watched this same fakery unfold? Where Elena gave nothing, agreed with everything, waited the moment out?

Madeline reviewed her notes. “This was Friday, June second? Your sister told me you saw the animal around five-thirty that evening?”

Elena said, “That sounds right.”

“Are there any other details you can share?”

Elena, still pleasant, shook her head.

And Madeline closed her notebook. Sam couldn’t understand why. Madeline was missing everything: the details of the bear’s size, the bulk of its haunches, the light in its fur, the length of its claws. The enormous rippling energy that made Sam want to stare and scream at once. Its interest in Elena, its willingness to emerge. Its ears, its muzzle, its muscle. Everything that mattered, Madeline had missed.

“As I told Samantha, I don’t see any cause for alarm,” Madeline said. “Just be sure to keep your property free of attractants. Bear attacks really are very rare. When you saw him, was he standing on his hind legs?”

“Nope,” Elena said.

“Well, if you do happen to see him again, and he is, remember he’s likely being inquisitive. They’re curious animals. As long as you don’t attempt to feed or harm him, all will be well.”

“So you’re not going to do anything about it,” Sam said. “Track it or trap it or—”

“We are tracking it,” Madeline said, “to the extent possible. That’s why I came today.” With her pen, her bag, her dismissals. “If he comes back, please call.”

She was at last ready to leave. And Elena, clearly, was ready to go inside, but Sam, who had coordinated this day to resolve the matter of the bear and who had gotten from it no resolution at all, was truly frustrated. None of the bear behavior facts this woman had offered were going to keep Sam’s home or her family safe. They couldn’t wait around for this animal to step out from between the trees, rise to its hind legs, and snarl. Sam said, “What is calling you going to do for us?”

Elena put a hand on Sam’s arm. Squeezed. Madeline said, “Are you thinking about a reward for capture?”

No. “Is there a reward?” Sam said.

Madeline frowned. “No.”

Sam went hot with humiliation. With rage. Madeline had come to their house prepared to find trash, and she’d found it, hadn’t she, money-hungry girls too na?ve to know what they were talking about. Girls who didn’t know what a brown bear was, or how high in the air five feet went, or where money came from or what it did. All day long, passengers spoke to Sam this same way: I said no cream, when they had said cream. Or asking what the best hiking path was on Shaw Island and rolling their eyes when she said they should look at a trail map. Their whole lives, Sam and Elena had been treated like fools. Forget it—forget reaching out for help from her. From anyone.