Walking around the other side of the pond, he noticed that the trees had changed. They were sparser, more ordinary. Ahead he spied a bluff and moved toward it. Soon he was again in a sort of clearing and here he smelled the smells.
The odor of beasts is itself a kind of meat — a dream avatar of alien sirloin, strange chops and necks, oblique joints and hidden livers and secret roasts. There are nude juices in it, and licy furs, and all the flesh’s vegetation. It is friction which rubs the fleshly chemistry, releasing it, sending skyhigh the queer subversive gasses of oblique life forms. It is noxious. Separated as we are from animals in zoos by glass cages and fenced-off moats, and by the counter odors of human crowds, melting ice cream, peanut shells crushed underfoot, snow cones, mustard, butts of bun — all the detritus of a Sunday outing — we rarely smell it. What gets through is dissipated, for a beast in civilization does not even smell like a beast in the wild. Already evolution has begun its gentling work, as though the animals might actually feel compunction, some subtle, aggravating modesty. But in Plympton’s jungle the smells were uninhibited, biological, profane. Their acidity brought tears to Ashenden’s eyes and he had to rub them.
When he took his hands away he saw where he was. He had entered, he knew, the last of the pictures. Although he could not at first identify it, much was familiar. The vegetation, for example, was unmistakably Rousseau, with here and there a Gauguin calabash or stringy palm. There were other palms, hybrid as the setting itself, queer gigantic leaves flying from conventional European trunks. The odor was fierce but he couldn’t leave. At his feet were thick Rousseauvian candelabras of grass, and before him vertical pagoda clusters of enormous flowers, branches dangerously bent under the weight of heavy leaves like the notched ears of elephants. Everywhere were fernlike trees, articulated as spine or rib cage, a wide net of the greenly skeletal and the crossed swords of tall grasses. There were rusts and tawns and huge wigwam shapes and shadows like the entrances to caves, black as yawns. The odor was even more overpowering than before, and had he not seen the vegetation he would have thought himself at the fermented source of the winish world. Yet the leaves and grasses and bushes and flowers were ripe. He reached out and touched a leaf in a low branch and licked his hand: it was sweet. Still, the place stank. The smell was acrid, actually hot. Here the forest was made impenetrable by its very odor and he started to back off. Unable either to turn away from it completely or to look at it directly, he was forced to squint, and immediately he had a striking perception.
Seen through his almost closed eyes, the trees and vegetation lost their weird precision and articulation and became conventional, transformed into an ordinary arbor. Only then, half blinded, he saw at last where he was. It was Edward Hicks’s “The Peaceable Kingdom,” and unquestionably the painter had himself been squinting when he painted it. It was one of Ashenden’s favorite paintings, and he was thrilled to be where lion and fox and leopard and lamb and musk ox and goat and tiger and steer had all lain together. The animals were gone now but must have been here shortly before. He guessed that the odor was the collective conflagration of their bowels, their guts’ bonfire. I’ll have to be careful where I step, he thought, and an enormous bear came out of the woods toward him.
It was a Kamchatkan Brown from the northeastern peninsula of the U.S.S.R. between the Bering and Okhotsk seas, and though it was not yet full grown it weighed perhaps seven hundred pounds and was already taller than Ashenden. It was female, and what he had been smelling was its estrus, not shit but lust, not bowel but love’s gassy chemistry, the atoms and hormones and molecules of passion, vapors of impulse and the endocrinous spray of desire. What he had been smelling was secret, underground rivers flowing from hidden sources of intimate gland, and what the bear smelled on Brewster was the same.
Ashenden did not know this; indeed, he did not even know that it was female, or what sort of bear it was. Nor did he know that where he stood was not the setting for Hicks’s painting (that was actually in a part of the estate where he had not yet been), but had he discovered his mistake he would still have told you that he was in art, that his error had been one of grace, ego’s flashy optimism, its heroic awe. He would have been proud of having given the benefit of the doubt to the world, his precious blank check to possibility.
All this changed with the sudden appearance of the bear. Not all. He still believed — this in split seconds, more a reaction than a belief, a first impression chemical as the she-bear’s musk — that the confrontation was noble, a challenge (there’s going to be a hell of a contest, he thought), a coming to grips of disparate principles. In these first split seconds operating on that edge of instinct which is still the will, he believed not that the bear was emblematic, or even that he was, but that the two of them there in the clearing — remember, he thought he stood in “The Peaceable Kingdom”—somehow made for symbolism, or at least for meaning. As the bear came closer, however, he was disabused of even this thin hope, and in that sense the contest was already over and the bear had won.
He was terrified, but it must be said that there was in his terror (an emotion entirely new to him, nothing like his grief for his parents nor his early anxieties about the value of his usefulness or life’s, nor even his fears that he would never find Jane Löes Lipton, and so inexpert at terror, so boyish with it that he was actually like someone experiencing a new drive) a determination to survive that was rooted in principle, as though he dedicated his survival to Jane, reserving his life as a holdup victim withholds the photographs of loved ones. Even as the bear came closer this did not leave him. So there was something noble and generous even in his decision to bolt. He turned and fled. The bear would have closed the gap between them and been on him in seconds had he not stopped. Fortunately, however, he realized almost as soon as he began his sprint that he could never outrun it. (This was the first time, incidentally, that he thought of the bear as bear, the first time he used his man’s knowledge of his adversary.) He remembered that bears could cruise at thirty miles an hour, that they could climb trees. (And even if they couldn’t would any of those frail branches already bowed under their enormous leaves have supported his weight?) The brief data he recalled drove him to have more. (This also reflex, subliminal, as he jockeyed for room and position in the clearing, a rough bowl shape perhaps fifty feet across, as his eye sought possible exits, narrow places in the trees that the bear might have difficulty negotiating, as he considered the water — but of course they swam, too — a hundred yards off through a slender neck of path like a firebreak in the jungle.) He turned and faced the bear and it stopped short. They were no more than fifteen feet from each other.
It suddenly occurred to him that perhaps the bear was tame.
“Easy, Ivan,” he crooned, “easy boy, easy Ivan,” and the bear hearing his voice, a gentle, low, masculine voice, whined. Misconstruing the response, recalling another fact, that bears have weak eyesight, at the same time that he failed to recall its corollary, that they have keen hearing and a sharp sense of smell like perfect pitch, Ashenden took it to be the bear’s normal conversational tone with Plympton. “No, no, Ivan,” he said, “it isn’t Freddy, it’s not your master. Freddy’s sleeping. I’m Brewster, I’m your master’s friend, old Bruin. I’m Brewster Ashenden. I won’t hurt you, fellow.” The bear, excited by Ashenden’s playful tone, whined once more, and Brewster, who had admitted he wasn’t Plympton out of that same stockpile of gentlemanly forthrightness that forbade deception of any creature, even this bear, moved cautiously closer so that the animal might see him better and correct any false impression it might still have of him.