It was Ashenden’s false impression that was corrected. He halted before he reached the bear (he was ten feet away and had just remembered its keen hearing and honed smell) and knew, not from anything it did, not from any bearish lurch or bearish bearing, that it was not tame. This is what he saw:
A black patent-leather snout like an electric socket.
A long and even elegant run of purplish tongue, mottled, seasoned as rare delicatessen meat, that lolled idiotic inches out of the side of its mouth.
A commitment of claw (they were nonretractile, he remembered) the color of the heads of hammers.
A low black piping of lip.
A shallow mouth, a logjam of teeth.
Its solemn oval of face, direct and expressionless as a goblin’s.
Ears, high on its head and discrete as antlers.
Its stolid, plantigrade stance, a flash as it took a step toward him of the underside of its smooth, hairless paws, vaguely like the bottoms of carpet slippers.
A battering ram of head and neck, pendent from a hump of muscle on its back, high as a bull’s or buffalo’s.
The coarse shag upholstery of its blunt body, greasy as furniture.
He knew it was not tame even when it settled dog fashion on the ground and its short, thick limbs seemed to disappear, its body hiding in its body. And he whirled suddenly and ran again and the bear was after him. Over his shoulder he could see, despite its speed, the slow, ponderous meshing of muscle and fat behind its fur like children rustling a curtain, and while he was still looking at this the bear felled him. He was not sure whether it had raised its paw or butted him or collided with him, but he was sent sprawling — a grand, amusing, almost painless fall.
He found himself on the ground, his limbs spraddled, like someone old and sitting on a beach, and it was terrible to Ashenden that for all his sudden speed and the advantage of surprise and the fact that the bear had been settled dog fashion and even the distance he had been sent flying, he was no more than a few feet from the place where he had begun his run.
Actually, it took him several seconds before he realized that he no longer saw the bear.
“Thank God,” he said, “I’m saved,” and with a lightning stroke the bear reached down from behind Ashenden’s back and tore away his fly, including the underwear. Then, just as quickly, it was in front of him. “Hey,” Ashenden cried, bringing his legs together and covering himself with his hands. The tear in his trousers was exactly like the inside seam along the thigh and crotch of riding pants.
“
,” said the bear in the International Phonetic Alphabet.
Brewster scrambled to his knees while the bear watched him.
“
.”
“All right,” Ashenden said, “back off!” His voice was as sharp and commanding as he could make it. “Back off, I said!”
“
.”
“Go,” he commanded. “Go on. Shoo. Shoo, you.” And still barking orders at it — he had adopted the masterful, no-nonsense style of the animal trainer — he rose to his feet and actually shoved the bear as hard as he could. Surprisingly it yielded and Brewster, encouraged, punched it with all his considerable strength on the side of its head. It shook itself briefly and, as if it meant to do no more than simply alter its position, dropped to the ground, rolled over — the movement like the practiced effort of a cripple, clumsy yet incredibly powerful — and sat up. It was sitting in much the same position as Ashenden’s a moment before, and it was only then that he saw its sex billowing the heavy curtain of hair that hung above its groin: a swollen, grotesque ring of vulva the color and texture of an ear and crosshatched with long loose hairs; a distended pucker of vagina, a black tunnel of oviduct, an inner tube of cunt. Suddenly the she-bear strummed itself with a brusque downbeat of claw and moaned. Ashenden moved back and the bear made another gesture, oddly whorish and insistent. It was as if it beckoned Ashenden across a barrier not of animal and man but of language — Chinese, say, and Rumanian. Again it made its strange movement, and this time barked its moan, a command, a grammar of high complication, of difficult, irregular case and gender and tense, a classic of aberrant syntax. Which was exactly as Ashenden took it, like a student of language who for the first time finds himself hearing in real and ordinary life a unique textbook usage. O God, he thought, I understand Bear!
He did not know what to do, and felt in his pockets for weapons and scanned the ground for rocks. The bear, watching him, emitted a queer growl and Ashenden understood that, too. She had mistaken his rapid, reflexive frisking for courtship, and perhaps his hurried glances at the ground for some stagy, bumpkin shyness.
“Look here,” Ashenden said, “I’m a man and you’re a bear,” and it was precisely as he had addressed those wives of his hosts and fellow guests who had made overtures to him, exactly as he might put off all those girls whose station in life, inferior to his own, made them ineligible. There was reproof in his declaration, yet also an acknowledgment that he was flattered, and even, to soften his rejection, a touch of gallant regret. He turned as he might have turned in a drawing room or at the landing of a staircase, but the bear roared and Ashenden, terrorized, turned back to face it. If before he had made blunders of grace, now, inspired by his opportunities — close calls arbitrarily exalted or debased men — he corrected them and made a remarkable speech.
“You’re in rut. There are evidently no male bears here. Listen, you look familiar. I’ve seen your kind in circuses. You must be Kamchatkan. You stand on your hind legs in the center ring and wear an apron and a dowdy hat with flowers on it that stand up stiff as pipes. You wheel a cub in a carriage and do jointed, clumsy curtseys, and the muzzle’s just for show, reassurance, state law and municipal ordinance and an increment of the awful to suggest your beastliness as the apron and hat your matronliness. Your decals are on the walls of playrooms and nurseries and in the anterooms of pediatricians’ offices. So there must be something domestic in you to begin with, and it is to that which I now appeal, madam.”
The bear, seated and whimpering throughout Ashenden’s speech, was in a frenzy now, still of noise, not yet of motion, though it strummed its genitalia like a guitar, and Brewster, the concomitant insights of danger on him like prophecy, shuddered, understanding that though he now appreciated his situation he had still made one mistake. No, he thought, not madam. If there were no male bears — and wouldn’t there be if she were in estrus? — it was because the bear was not yet full-grown and had not till now needed mates. It was this which alarmed him more than anything he had yet realized. It meant that these feelings were new to her, horrid sensations of mad need, ecstasy in extremis. She would kill him.
The bear shook itself and came toward him, and Brewster realized that he would have to wrestle it. Oh Jesus, he thought, is this how I’m to be purified? Is this the test? Oh, Lord, first I was in art and now I am in allegory. Jane, I swear, I shall this day be with you in Paradise! When the bear was inches away it threw itself up on its hind legs and the two embraced each other, the tall man and the slightly taller bear, and Brewster, surprised at how light the bear’s paws seemed on his shoulders, forgot his fear and began to ruminate. See how strong I am, how easily I support this beast. But then I am beast too, he thought. There’s wolf in me now, and that gives me strength. What this means, he thought, is that my life has been too crammed with civilization.