The Dancing Bear

First, she was the sound of a breaking branch. A splintered knuckle-crack shattering the quiet of these western Montana woods. It is a heavy quiet here, and no good comes when it is broken. Red men, gunslingers, and all manner of gold-crazy down-and-outs plague this wild country. My heart went to scampering.

I took up my Winchester and crept to the door. Early light played on the mud-daubed timber walls. I built this cabin ten years ago with naught but a hatchet, five yards of rope, and Jeremiah — a mule by then more dead than alive. Damned if I would give it up without a fight.

Another branch snapped and I toed the door open. The smell of dew-wet pine wafted in. I slid the rifle’s nose into the crack. I held my breath.

She was up on her haunches, weight back — all six hundred pounds of it, her arms raised — like the dancing bear I saw in Barnum Bailey’s Fantastic Roadshow when I was a boy. But this was no dancing bear. She was a grizzly. Eight feet tall and used to having her way in the world. Her dinner-plate paws thrashed apples from my apple tree. She huffed and snorted, blowing clouds of steam. She was gorging on fruit, preparing for hibernation, and I believe she was enjoying herself. The rising sun smoldered the crest of Scapegoat Ridge above her massive head.

I thought to shoot her. Even leveled the Winchester’s barrel. Her pelt would have fetched a hefty price. But I could not pull the trigger. She was magnificent. All the dreadful beauty of this territory was bound up in her figure. She ate the apples whole, picking them up between her paws and crushing them with her molars. Her fur shimmered and rolled in waves, like the windy prairie where I was born. Her pink tongue swept stray apple chunks from around her mouth.

I wondered if she had lips.

She stood to her full height, reaching for an apple high in the branches. Her body was shapely: trunk thighs widening into hips, slimming a bit through her middle before expanding again into the muscled bulk of her shoulders. She jumped and swung and caught the apple on her first claw — her index claw — and, with a snarl, tore it from the branch.

I had planned to save the apples and enjoy them as a treat on cold winter nights (nights when my cabin is a lump in the snow), but I was not angry at the bear. I was happy to watch her. I wondered if there were breasts beneath her fur.

I suddenly realized I was erect. Confusion and shame roiled my gut. I had never thought of lying with a bear before, but once I began I could not stop. I knelt, hiding my swollen cock behind the doorjamb, and, instead of thinking of protecting my home, I imagined running into her great hairy arms. Licking her throat. Inhaling her thick smell. Finding her tongue with mine, tasting apples. Tumbling back into the high grass, her legs clamped around my buttocks, both of us sticky with apple juice. Warmth. Brown eyes. A roaring tangle of limbs.

I was dizzy, the rifle slack in my arms. She looked at me, wiped her jaws, and ambled back into the woods as the sun rose over Rattle-snake Canyon.

She came back the next morning, and the next. I took to waiting for her, first in my longjohns and then naked. I stood in the doorway letting the morning sun draw the chill from my skin. She would watch me, sometimes for several minutes, unconcerned. I squared my shoulders and stuck out my chest.

My days fell into a friendly pattern. There is a deep pool in a bend of Rattlesnake Creek just east of my cabin. It is fed by melted snow from the Mission Mountains. After the bear made her way back into the forest, I would run, still naked, and plunge into the icy water. I slid around the rocky streambed like a trout...