I put my hands into that pile, and when I saw my hands next they held the only weapon I had ever understood, the only one I had ever wielded against another: not spear or axe, not machete, not bow or sling. Instead, my hands had sought what they knew, and remembered into their grip the largest of my traps, like the others in everything but size, and never before used: on this end a steel jaw, ready to be pried open, set to collapse, and on the other a chain waiting to be wrapped around my wrist and forearm, then sewn deep into the fur of my armor—and then, at the fingerling’s suggestion, stitched deeper, into the arm below, so that no blow might rip it free.
Memory as reminder that I was no hunter, no good tracker: Like a fool, I first marched to the cave, but the bear did not so easily give itself up, and once inside I could not even find the tricky entrance to the lower passages where I assumed it slept.
There was only one method I had employed to cause the bear to appear, and so wearing my thick-layered suit I set my traps again, manipulated their intricate devices to capture what best beasts the woods had left, the widest-antlered bucks, never before caught and as yet undiminished, but soon broken-boned, velvet-robbed; and then another such prize, a well-plumed peacock, whose blooded coverts I twisted free from their roots, weaving their long-quilled eyes through the seams of my armor. For weeks I wore my armor and I stalked the woods and I killed every mink and otter and polecat, bashing their heads where they were caught, lifting the sewn-in trap above my shoulders, crashing it down upon their hissing, their mewing mouths. All these and more I interred beneath the burying ground, my aggression escalated so that I might fill the boneyard dirt with the best dead, so that the bear might be compelled to call them free, their shapes necessary to restock its domain. And all this time I remained stuck within my armor and then stuck to it, its threaded seams and hems leaving no place for me to slip free. For some stretch I ate and slept and pissed and shat within, filled those furs with sweat and filth, staying in the woods until my ash-streaked cheeks were smeared with my frustration and with my disgust at my stink, and surely in this state there could have been no sneaking up on the bear, who even from within the deepest depths of its cave might have smelled my stiff-legged approach, the bloodied, muddied layers of my furs.
The woods, never loud, hushed now at my actions, until at last I woke to a morning where all my traps waited empty and quiet, there being nothing to catch or else nothing so dumb as to approach the bloody steel, the sure paths of stench and sign I left everywhere. Satisfied, I returned to the house once more, to cover myself again in hearth ash, and to wait for nightfall, the better dark within which I hoped to hunt the bear.
FIRST THE WHITE MOON RISING, then the newly red one, both wrongly full night after night and that night too, when beneath their rays I lifted my stiff-stitched and stinking self from off our porch, felt the pull of the trap’s chain upon my skin, and with my loudest voice I called the fingerling to duty.
Soon I arrived at the burying ground to find the floor of that clearing flipped at last, some buried bodies of beavers and badgers and wolverines dug free of their shallow plots, their gore dried or else drying. Everywhere there was the fresh mark of the bear, its footprints wide as my face, urine like acid prickling my nostrils, fallen fur crawling with fistfuls of lice—and at that sight the fingerling squirmed nervous at the back of my mouth. I pressed him back down, and also myself forward, toward the median of that boneyard, toward what meeting awaited me there: the bear rising, unfolding its limbs from their rest, all its massive size matted in the butchery of my trappings.
The fearsome beast of our first meeting was long gone, and instead there was only this new creature, lowed, submissive in posture if not in fact, its previous wound expanded, expounded upon: The bear that stood before me now stomped unsteadily on its meat-thin limbs, its fur-torn, bone-sprung body led wobblingly forward by its squared head, that skull burst through the tearing skin of face and snout. Orbital bone gleamed bright around the jaundiced eyes it was meant to protect, those spheres drooped upon distressed tendon, sleepy on frayed muscle, and my eyes roved mad too, took in all its shape, its stomping stance, its claws flexing free of its threatening paw. Its voice tore from its lungs, the sound of that roar so fierce it stumbled me even before the bear tensed its body forward, ready to lean into the angry first step of its charge—and as it roared again I heard its true voice for the first time, a speech like no other.
Despite this show of confidence, I reckoned well the seeming diminishment of the approaching bear, for hidden inside my own hackle of found fur was the same wearied lack, the same bones carved only brave enough—and then all that remained of me arrived at its test, the bear falling upon me, all hot breath and battle, and now memory again, of conflict reached:
To plan to close the distance between us by striking the first blow.
To drop the trap from my right hand, to catch its falling chain and swing it back overhead with my left.
To watch the heavy trap orbit once, then again, the only revolutions I had the strength for, all the bear’s charge allowed.
To throw my hand forward, the trap escaping my grip to slam its open sharpness into the side of the bear’s opening face, catching its growl between those quick-closing jaws of my own.
To set my feet, to dig the hard heels of my boots into the dirt—the dirt beneath the woods’ thin floor—and then, as the caught bear tried to wheel away, to begin to pull its face down to my level, to the dirt, turning the chain hand over hand, tightening it in my grip, wrapping its length around my forearm.
To hear the fingerling cry out as I dragged the bear, to feel his cheer loosen him from his hard small place, celebrating a victory yet unearned; and in that move he unbound what part of my resolve he had made, even as the bear turned back, as it charged again, as even with my trap undoing its face it closed our slim distance, intending to undo much more of me.
The bear roared, its voice constrained but never caught, and then it stood into that sound, lifting the enormous dark of its body upon its hind legs, and me with it, up from off my own thinner limbs. Its head was now three lengths above the forest floor, my trap still embedded in the crushed flesh and scraped bone of its cheek, and from the other end of the trap’s chain I was left to dangle and kick and also to support my sewn-in arm with the other, trying to reduce the pull of that deadly weight, its tearing free.
My armor came apart beneath every swipe of the bear’s claws, its uselessness made more obvious with each tugging of the bear’s trapped head, each new blow ribboning my flesh beneath. Before long my caught shoulder separated from its socket, muscle and bone pop-popping beneath my skin, and now both the bear and I were howling, our shared frustration loud enough to empty the woods, to drive every still-living thing from that burying ground.
The bear continued to stand, swung and batted and pulled against my caught chain until it damaged not just my body but its own. Inch by inch I fell, my weight dragging the trap down the bear’s muzzle, that sliding steel unbinding some rare part of its still-skinned skull, squeaking metal on bone, scratching a swath of hair from off its face as it worked itself free. My feet kicked for the relief of the ground, but despite my slow falling, the last few inches remained a gap I couldn’t yet close, and as I swung within the bear’s anger, I continued to be caught by its blows, my tattered shirts filling with more and more of my dumb blood. In my shoulder I watched some strained bone at last break through the skin, and when I nearly fainted at the sight and the spilling, then the fingerling inserted himself into the action, keeping me awake, urging my eyes again, commanding me to hang on, to somehow climb the chain with my good hand even as he moved out of my chest and into my trapped shoulder. As he stretched his length up that side of my body, I felt how he worked his own secret skill, making some new connections to bridge muscle to tendon, tendon to bone, and above it all he spun skin to contain what he had repaired, and as I realized what he had done I cried out again, all at once so sore afraid.