Soon we arrived in the chamber where I assumed the bear had hibernated, where presumably she had been asleep when we first came to the dirt to build our house—or at least that theory accounted for the long habitation evident in that chamber, with its layers of bedding, of bent and torn bones, near fossils. Here too there were some scraps of fabric, ripped shreds of paper that might have belonged to us, or anyone else like us, and everything in that chamber smelled of the bear—urine and rot and feces, dank and fetid, damp fur and dug dirt and stalest milk—and while I continued to be curious about what I had found, I did not have much longer to look.
The bear placed before me some small bundle of furs, and I needed no imagination to recognize their origins. She unfolded them with her paws, opened them below my slumped body, and then after she retreated I knelt in the space she allowed and gathered the furs into my arms: Here was snout and claws attached to more fur, thick fur lined underneath with fat, all somehow still fresh, ready again to be the makings of a better-made bear than the one before me. The linger of my wife’s perfume remained, proof enough that it was indeed my wife who had song-skinned the bear’s cub, and while the bear watched, I rubbed my fingers down the seams of her cub’s separation, feeling for the places where he had ceased to be a bear, a connection severed as he became a boy, birthed out of this child already alive, already once made flesh from flesh.
The bear roared and then roared again, and in this roar I saw her cave before we came to it: How deep beneath the woods the bear slumbered then, and within her the cub, some drifting egg, some fertilized idea, unplanted.
And in this roar, more worries, that if she was disturbed before her cub was born, then he might not be born at all, or might be born in the wrong place, where he would not survive; that if the coming of her cub did not cause her to stir, then there would be a time when the cub was awake and alone in the cave, vulnerable.
And in this roar, why she put her den so low, why the entrance of her cave was so complicated, the tunnels deeper so distracting, dazing enough that some simpler thief might have lost her way, might have sought instead some easier prize to steal—but not my stubborn wife, not this mother capable only of ghosts, who would one day want more than anything a baby of her own, a baby she might give to me.
And in this roar, how after we came my wife crept downward through the bear’s tunnels, filling her boredom and loneliness with exploration, while on the dirt I toiled with my hands to raise us our house.
And in this roar, how my wife first found the bear, long asleep, long pregnant as my wife would one day wish to be pregnant. And in this roar, how my wife had placed her hands upon the bear’s swelled season, her stomach still full-furred in those days, and how my wife had held her hands there until she felt the four-footed kick of the cub.
And in this roar, what happened next, the first split of the bear’s own fur, the first growth of bone or shell to cut its way out, wounds made by my wife’s songs, by their desperate and varied attempts to slow the bear, to speed my wife’s escape after she was caught.
And in this roar, the too-early labor of the bear caused by the same, her cub loosened by the bear’s chase of my wife, by her premature return to the woods, to the tree line where I saw her for the first time.
And in this roar, how the bear tried to return to sleep, to slow the cub’s coming, how in her dreams she believed it a thing done, and yet how as she slept the cub did come.
But first how her strange pregnancy seemed to take years, the bear thought or else dreamed, and still the cub was born too soon after the bear’s angry pain, her destruction of our cargo, her retreat into the depths: her cub then a tiny thing, unable to care for himself, but with a dozing mother too hurt to nurse him right, unable to do anything but sometimes sing some simplistic bear-song, a lullaby meant to slow his growth until the bear could be made right, well healed enough to mother him.
How one day when the bear awoke, her slowed cub was gone, and she did not know where he had gone.
And then this last roar, all the truth left to telclass="underline" The bear told me that the father of her child was a bear. She told me that the father of her child was not a bear. She told me that the father of her child was here. She told me the father was not here. She told me that the father of her child was nowhere, and also everywhere, as long as everywhere did not extend to the other side of the lake, the other side of the mountains, that rich earth where things were less simple than they were upon the dirt or within the woods or beneath the lake, and so perhaps there was even more that was possible, more than she remembered.
Perhaps, she roared or, rather, not the word but what words I heard in the sound: Perhaps, but even if that was so then still that was not the way here. And in her voice I heard something so like the voice of my wife, some similar tone to that with which she had told me how we would make the dirt our own, how with new rules we would shape from it the world we wanted.
The bear woke me from my memories with more of her voice, and then she told me that upon the dirt between the lake and the woods, always there were two that appeared, and always the two made a single child.
She told me that now there were four, and too many children besides, because ours was both boy and cub, and perhaps none of the four was set upon the right place, nothing shaped as it should be shaped, and when she was done telling me this she told me what she thought should be done to put our world to right—what should be done to my wife and to one other—so there might be a right number of each, of male and female, mother and father, parent and child.
With loud and quiet roars, with a variety of vocalizations I had never heard before, a bear-song simpler than our own speech but supple enough for possible truth, she told me that if I would return her cub to her—and if I would also punish my wife for taking him—then she would take care of the other, my own complement I had not yet met, and afterward the numbers would be better balanced, as always they had been intended.
I nodded as I listened, but I knew she was not quite right, for in all her calculations she did not count the fingerling. He was my secret alone, and so long as he was within me, then there was no proper math.
THE BEAR’S CARAPACE SHIVERED, HEAVED. She lowered her shoulders to the ground, then motioned with the wedge of her head that I might climb up. I searched for purchase among her bones, dug out handfuls of fur and slipped flesh before finding promontories on which to make my nervous clenching, and after I was right-straddled atop her the bear leaped out of her chamber, climbing sure and swift into and up and through the deep tunnels to the surface. Outside her cave, the bear charged through the woods, whipped through branch and thorny bramble until my face and arms were scratched and scraped, each new blemish drawing what blood remained, and before I could voice any complaint we were arriving, already back at the burying ground.
There the bear slowed, circled once, then stopped and stood upon her hind legs, raising her half-furred face above her shoulders so that as she ascended I fell from her back, landed hard. Freed of her burden, she remained standing to howl at the moons, which at first continued their slow arc unfazed by what sound she hurled at their shapes, no matter how she carried on.