A Rumor of Bears, and: Hailstorm in the Mountains

20 The truck’s heater gasped a damp, phantom dog into the cab, redolent of rain-soaked wool. Its choke and vent was anything but warm. The day had faded dull—gray sun, gray rain. Even the slim college girls walking by wore fat coats the color of wildebeests, and the aging dour professors limping among them were plainly no threat at all. I should have known it would be like this, come as I had from the bears, having hoisted just after her blood draw the knocked-out sow up onto a low rickety gurney. Three other men and I took coarse fistfuls of grizzly hair and rolled her down a hall to a cinderblock hibernaculum, and placed her upright on her great bear gut, so that she might sleep silent until spring. After that, the tedium of roads too often seen, nullity of autumn fields, vast dullard blandness of the same way home. But when I stepped up onto the front porch, the black cat’s back arched, the snagged nuthatch fell from her jaws and flew unsteadily off. “Hey, Lily,” I said, but she hissed and skipped up A Rumor of Bears Two Poems by robert wrigley 21 the nearest tree, then glared back down at me and yowled. She kept it up even when I walked inside, where the young dog, a pup almost, rolled over, wet herself, and slunk off to another room. As for the old dog, her tail began its thump-thumping at my voice, that low familiar verity she knew, even in her diminished state— almost blind, incapable of running— as everything right and true, all things safe. “It’s me, Violet,” I said, “it’s me, girl.” That’s when I smelled my hands for the first time. They were ripe: pure bear feculence and musk, swampy crotchlands and scrotal dews, flowers of flesh and blood, a rank bouquet. I knelt down close and for just that moment feared the reek of me might kill her all by itself. Her eyes narrowed, the loose whitened cheek flaps drew back toward a snarl, she stiffened and sniffed, then took in a thing she had never smelled the shape of before. “It’s just me,” I said again, and my hand against the black rose of her durable, most sensitive nose made her flinch and retreat as I sat, a man-whiff of mouthtastes festered through sleep, all the tart pungencies of fly-blown eyes; of peristalsis, lanolin, and gristle— she could not take her snout away from me. 22 Understand, I had never been a man, an ordinary, plain man, to this dog. There was no fearsome where, there was nothing she would not have faced, or welcomed, with me, which is why she fought her way to her feet and why I stood with her and walked to the door. She was ready. She could smell the clawed thing perched mewling in the tree, and its fear too. She could smell a high fence and concrete, a thousand olfactory miles unrun, the meat cache and the scum, even some other creature’s vision— spring beauties, yellow bells, bear feasts of bulbs and grubs. Slowly, slowly, she traced a path back to the truck, useless ears pricked up and constantly searching, smelling what, I wondered, if not joy— all the wild lithe come-hithers of carrion, of tallow and gut, the lure of fine, sweet death. Though in fact the old dog is dead now too, gone within a week of that once-drab Monday, when I came to her, superfluous with meaningful stinks, explosively new, and she rose and led me into the woods, having smelled on my man’s hands a rumor of bears, the scent of a vanishing world. 23 You can hear it coming, a storm like this, the kind of atmospheric hum you stop everything to listen for, to hear through, and by the time you understand its noise you can see it too, a stalactite fog, a warp of ice the green world is weft of. Only this time you simply let it come: no hunting for shelter these last seconds, there being, after all, nowhere...