Bears - Александр Дарецкий

“Expose yourself to your deepest fear;
after that, fear has no power…”
Jim Morrison

I woke up not long before sunrise, feeling a bit uncomfortable. My legs ached terribly, especially the heels, as if somebody had been using them to hammer nails all night long. My back and spine felt like they were breaking apart too. The only organ that didn’t hurt that morning was my brain. Well, no wonder: it appeared to not have been working at all since my journey had begun, while the other folks had been stretched to their limits.

I always liked the moment of awakening, when reality is still dim and unshaped, yet the mind is still trying to get a grip on its surroundings. I felt as if I stood on a phantom bridge between the past and future, between the real and unreal, fishing for nimble thoughts out of a muddy stream of oblivion.

I mused about my ancestors who, for some reason, had left Africa an awfully long time ago. I saw the history of humankind streamlined into a spear, only the very tip of which represented the time period when people had learned how to write, forge metals, and weave some fancy tunics. The rest, the entire pole of that spear, however, was the Stone Age. For three million years, people had used nothing but stone as their everyday tool. They would hunt big dangerous beasts to feed their families and warm themselves by the fire, as I had done for the last three days. No, people don’t change their habits that fast, no way. What we called civilization was nothing but a thin layer of dust on the stone slab. And when the wind blew, the dust was gone.

Those numbers were impressive; however, I was ruminating about something different. I thought about those particular guys who had preceded, not humankind on the whole, but myself. Through the impenetrable murk of time, I tried to look into their faces, my people’s faces, hundreds of them, one by one. The further I slid along the scale of time, the coarser their features grew; yet, the look in their eyes grew more and more adamant and strong. They let me be here, to breathe and to think. Did I have any right to let them all down and slip off a cliff? No, I didn’t. All I had to do was just keep on going and become another link in their chain.

While I was daydreaming, my left side was getting to freezing point, while my right side, which was closer to the fire, was almost like a well-done steak. I was recollecting, how in the middle of the night, I had awaken suddenly, jolting up from a nightmare of a huge hairy beast mauling my hand. The pain was more than real, but the cause of it had been quite different — I had moved my hand too close to the fire and nearly burned it.

A short gust of wind, thick and chilly, darted through the forest with a sinister hiss, raising a whirl of ashes over the smoldering embers and blowing them on my face. I swept them off, slowly rose to my feet, and looked around. I had spent the night in a little glade, circled by spruce trees whose trunks were decorated with greenish patches of moss on their northern sides. That’s how a pathfinder could use them as the points of the compass, even if he didn’t have one.

I have a very good visual memory and had a clear snapshot of the map in my head. I knew where I was, and where I had to go. Despite all my mistakes and delays, my progress was right on schedule. The situation wasn’t that bad. In fact, it wasn’t bad at all. Realizing this made me perk up and look around again more cheerfully. The sun was rising on schedule, climbing over the nearby speckled hills. Under its rays, the soggy clouds that had clung to the tops of the cliffs at night dissipated, revealing a clear horizon and distant red-and-tan piebald rocks. I didn’t feel like writing an epic story anymore. The life of an adventurer had turned out to be just another form of routine, and making clear, sensible plans was an integral part of it.

First, I decided to go down to the nearby creek and replenish my supply of water. Next, I had to eat something and put my things in order. Then, finally, I had to complete my journey: go down the old road about twelve miles (yes, I decided to take the easiest route), reach the bus stop, take a bus to the railway station, return home by train, call Gleb, and call it a day.

I thought about Redhead. It felt like I hadn’t seen her in a million years. I imagined her sitting by the river in the late evening, all alone, her chin on her knees, looking pensively at the moon’s reflection dancing on the running water… and in the background, a small tent, not so far away, shaking and almost bursting at its seams. Yes, I wanted to see her like that, out of the tent. “Why, you jealous ass, should she sit there?” It was the firm voice of my conscience. “It’s damn cold outside. Haven’t you noticed that?” It was a fair rebuke. At that instant, I draped my imaginary Redhead in a nice warm jacket. “That’s better,” the voice said approvingly. “But it would’ve been more useful if you’d been there.” To avoid any further self-directed scolding, I grabbed my tin camping pot and made my way to bring back some water.

The creek lay down the valley, some three hundred yards away from my camp. I could even hear it gurgling in the distance. For my short trip, I took nothing but the camping tin pot, a thin, short stick (for unknown reasons), and you know it — the matches.

I reached the creek easily to discover that it turned into a fast-flowing stream about four yards wide. That was all right for that time of the year: Snowmelt had widened small creeks and streams into gushing rivers. Standing on the bank, I stretched out my hand, scooped up some ice-cold water, then looking ahead, my tin pot still clutched in my outstretched hand, froze.

On the opposite side of the stream, the dry grass had been trampled down and mixed into the mud. There were some big paw prints, a lot of them in fact. The impressions were deep, round, and showed that the animal had long claws. I might confuse one kind of a berry with another — nobody is perfect in this world — or maybe I couldn’t tell a wood goose from his black brother, but I would never mix up a bear’s prints with anything else in the universe. I straightened my back slowly, drew the tin pot to my side, and slowly swept my gaze across the opposite bank of the stream.

A bear — the ruler of the Siberian land, strong, merciless, and sly — was probably watching me from the other side of the creek. I knew something about predators’ psychology: If you run away, they will certainly chase you. On the other hand, I knew that bears could sneak up on their prey and attack by surprise, usually from the back. In that sense, I would have been an easy target. I stood there not knowing what to do — to run like hell or stay still. Finally, I did something different: I turned my head slowly enough not to arouse the bear’s suspicions (if it was indeed watching me from somewhere) and looked back. Good news man, there was no bear behind me.

I think I have to explain now why I was so terrified by the bear’s prints. Up to that moment, I had never seen a real bear, ever. There was no zoo in our city, and, from time to time, usually in the summer, a mobile menagerie would make a stop in our city. I was maybe about five when my parents had taken me to that show. I remember a wide circle of trailers standing close to each other; there were big barred cages on them, and a handful of visitors were loitering around. The animals in the cages looked miserable. There was not enough space for them in those cells. Big beasts sat apathetically in the corners; small creatures trotted back and forth. Monkeys, their dark, wrinkled faces lined with an expression of sadness, sat on a metal tree. Penguins were flapping their little wings and swaying from side to side — obviously, they suffered from the hot weather. After a very short walk, I felt sick of that shameful show and asked my parents to take me home immediately. Further on, there were bears probably too, but I just couldn’t go through it anymore.

So, I had never seen bears myself, neither at large nor behind bars, but I had seen what a bear can do to a man. My father had a friend with a very rare qualification — he was a forensic expert in bear trauma. Sometimes, criminals would kill a man and dump the body near the bear’s path to blame the murder on the beast. That expert could tell quite precisely whether it was a natural accident or just a criminal fraud. He had published a unique book about bear trauma and presented one copy to my father. That book with its inconspicuous cover had been lost for a while in our huge library. However, one day, I found it among the old books and started to flip through it. There was a stamp that said “for professional use only” on the cover. And as I saw very soon, for a very good reason.

I don’t remember the text; I didn’t read much of it, but the pictures there were absolutely horrid. The photos taken in the field looked bloodcurdling: deformed and decomposed human corpses, limbs gnawed by beasts, eaten-out faces, sticking-out brains — those pictures were definitely not for the common public. One particular picture etched itself into my memory: the half-eaten body of a man in a peculiar position on the ground with a hunting rifle in his outstretched hand — it looked like the bullets hadn’t helped him much. Most likely, he had been an inexperienced hunter taken by surprise. Probably, he hadn’t known that even if you have a machine gun in your hands and discharge its entire magazine into a bear running toward you, it doesn’t mean you will survive. The bear will surely die, but, perhaps, shortly after reaching you. The bear’s thick bones and skull, its dense fat and skin work as a natural armor, making it a very difficult target. To hunt a bear in a safe way, you need a crew of hunters and a pack of specially trained dogs. People who were capable of hunting bears alone were very rare, honored like supreme masters in the hunting society. There is a very cool yet terrifying Soviet film The Evil Spirit of Yambuy (1979) — just in case you’ve got a thing for bear hunting.

Presently, that dead guy with a rifle came to my mind once again, as I was standing all alone with a pot of water in my hand, looking at the bear tracks on the opposite side of the stream.

Apart from men, bears have no natural enemies. They might look clumsy and small-minded, but in fact, the wit of those perfect hunters can outsmart apes, dolphins, and man himself altogether. And as for their clumsiness, well, just don’t entertain any illusions: You will never escape a bear. Over a short distance, a bear can run as fast as a deer. They cannot run for miles at that speed, of course, but they don’t really need to. These cunning creatures can approach their prey quite stealthily. You won’t hear or see a thing. And when you do, it will be too late. Bears can swim, climb trees, and if someone thinks that they can save themselves by playing dead, rest assured, you will be dead, and let the bear save its time and effort. Anyway, let’s go back to the story.

I couldn’t tell whether those footprints were fresh or not. The mud was wet and gave me no extra information. Once again, I tried to calm down and think rationally. For that moment, I saw no signs of overt aggression. I hadn’t even seen a bear! Once again, I asked myself why on earth I had gone on that trip and come there if I was so terrified of bears. You know, since I knew that they might appear in those parts! I dug into my memory and got a clear answer: I had thought… they would be sleeping! Like those mosquitos. But the bears that left those tracks hadn’t obviously been notified of my calculations. I tried to cheer myself up in a funny way. I imagined a gang of dodgy bears and their boss shouting orders at them:

“You, Torn Ear, outflank him from the Northeast and wait for my signal. You, Ragged Ass, go down the stream and cut off his retreat to the main road. And I, ha-ha…”

It helped a bit. Whatever might happen, I had to go back to the camp. I turned around slowly. Not a sound could be heard — just the stream gushing. I took a few steps and stopped in confusion. Suddenly, I wasn’t sure which way to go. The forest had pulled down its dirty-brown curtains, and I couldn’t tell one passage between the trees from another. Fear flooded my mind again. To get lost a few yards from my camp — that would have been the most idiotic way to end my adventure! I stood still for a while, trying to calm my panting breath. Slowly, I regained control. Slowly, I moved ahead. After a few steps, out of the corner of my eye, I spotted a faint streak of smoke. Thank goodness, it was my fire! I let out a long sigh of relief. Still, no bears around. I walked to the fire as confidently as I could. It was clear that I had strayed from my initial route, for I came to the fire not from the same direction I had initially started from.