Bearing Up
by Matthew Hughes
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
Mike’s chore was the after-dinner dishes. He was methodically scrubbing fried rice off a teflon-coated skillet whose powers of non-stickiness had long since been scratched away and not thinking about anything much when he said, “Mom, do you worry when Dad goes out on a mission?”
His mother put three plates on the counter by the sink and looked through the archway into the living room, where Dad was watching the sports report on tv.
“I used to,” she admitted. “But your father’s very good at what he does.” Then she sighed. “Besides, there’s no point worrying. He loves it. He’s not going to stop doing it. It’s a big part of who he is.”
“Pretty dangerous, though.”
“Doesn’t matter. It’s what he does. What you and I have to do is live with it.” She put a hand on Mike’s arm. “Are you afraid he might get hurt... or something?”
“Nah,” Mike said. “I was just wondering how you felt.”
* * *
On an afternoon late in September, a wind blew up, not a big wind, but big enough to whittle white points onto the grey-green chop of Georgia Strait. And that was too big for the comfort of four couples who had crowded into an undersized skiff to go hand-trolling for coho salmon three miles out from the boat launch at Point Holmes.
The boat owner, a welder who worked at Field’s sawmill, decided it would be wise to head for shore. But when he pulled the lanyard on the outboard, it started, sputtered and died. He did all the things he knew to do: checked the spark plug, checked the fuel line, checked the gas tank... and found it empty. He’d forgotten to fill up before launching.
By the time the skipper had identified the problem, the wind was brisking up, causing the overloaded skiff to wallow in steepening waves, shipping water over the gunwales.
He looked at the white faces of the three men and four women who had come out with him, without life jackets or even warm clothing, and said, “We’re gonna row in. Break out the oars.”
The oars were pulled from beneath the thwarts and run through the oarlocks, and the two strongest men tried to haul the boat shoreward. But the wind was offshore, and growing stronger as each long minute passed. Even with two men to an oar, the overloaded skiff barely made headway.
“We’re in trouble,” said the welder, watching the light fade behind thickening clouds, and reached for the emergency radio in the locker below his seat. Fortunately, he was more conscientious about the strength of the radio’s batteries than the contents of his gas tank. When he tuned to the emergency channel, depressed the talk switch and said, “Mayday, mayday,” CFB Comox came right back.
* * *
“I won’t be home for supper,” Dad said over the telephone. “There’s some boaters in trouble.” Five minutes later, they heard the Labrador racketing up from the base and heading out to sea.
An hour crawled by. Mike and his mother sat in the darkening kitchen, drinking coffee and trying not to look out the window. The clouds were low, eight shades of grey raggedly streaming on the wind that bent the tops of the fir trees out back. Cold rain tittered on the glass.
They turned on the lights and drank more coffee, talking about nothing. Mom started dinner, and Mike cleared the table, then they realized that neither of them was hungry, so they brewed more coffee.
Near eight o’clock, they heard the helicopter coming back, and started dinner again. But a few minutes later, the Labrador passed overhead again, heading back out.
By nine, with the sky black and the wind stage-whispering around the eaves, the Lab was still up. Mom called the dispatcher at the base. Mike saw her knuckles whiten on the handset, heard her brief question, watched her face go quiet. She hung up.
“There were eight of them in a little boat, out of gas,” she said. “The Lab couldn’t carry all of them and the crew too. Your father volunteered to stay in the boat until they came back for him. When they got there, no boat. Probably swamped by a wave and sunk. They’re looking.”
* * *
At eleven o’clock, Comox’s missing SARtech was the second story on the CBC late news. The tv showed file footage of Labradors taking off and a coloured map of where the search was concentrating.
Mike watched the images and heard the reporter’s accompanying voice-over: “Georgia Strait fills a deep and narrow trench between Vancouver Island and the rest of North America. Strong tidal currents sweep the bone-chilling water southeast, down past the Gulf Islands and on into the Strait of Juan de Fuca, then around the southern tip of the big island.
“Anything floating on the surface gets flushed out into the north Pacific and lost forever. Unprotected from the cold, in seas tossed high by stiff winds, a human being in the water can die in a few hours. Add a survival suit and expert knowledge, and life expectancy — and hope — increase. The search continues.”
The camera cut back to the news reader, who began talking about a freeway pile-up in Coquitlam. Mike switched off the set.
“They’ll find him, and he’ll be all right,” Mom said. Some of her friends had come over to help them wait. They talked cheerfully, in low voices.
Mike nodded and said, “Yeah, sure,” a lot, but he didn’t hear most of it.
By midnight, the sky was clearing, stars making holes in the clouds and poking through in twos and threes. CFB Comox had everything up: Labs, a Buffalo, an Aurora, and a Coast Guard ship was quartering the Strait below where Dad had last been seen.
Mike couldn’t stay inside anymore. He put on his jacket and slipped out the back door.
They lived on two cleared acres that backed up against a stand of second-growth timber in Comox’s northeast corner. The valley’s big spruce and cedar were long gone, cleared to make farmland and lumber back before the twentieth century was a toddler. The yard was unfenced, the lawn ending in a thicket of blackberry bushes that grew over a ditch between their property and the woods.
Mike sat on the back steps for a minute, but he could still hear the encouraging voices from the living room. The wind was dying, making a stillness under the trees, and he got up and crossed the lawn to where he could cut through a gap in the blackberry bushes. A few meters into the woods lay a waist-high, half-buried boulder forgotten by some careless glacier. It was a good solid place to be.
Mike walked around the rock then leaned his forearms on the old granite so that he was looking back toward the house. The stone was cold, and the wetness left by the rain seeped into his jacket sleeves. He listened: far to the east, a search plane’s engines murmured at the edge of his hearing.
The last clouds tattered and moved off, letting the full moon silver the floor of the woods. The kitchen light shone yellow between the stark bars of the trunks. Then the plane’s engines faded into the distance, and the only sound was a drop of rainwater working its way down through the branches.
In the perfect quiet, Mike caught a flicker of movement from the corner of his eye. He turned to look, but the best night vision is peripheral vision, and all he could see straight on was a darkness in the gap between the berry bushes.
And then the darkness shifted. He froze. He heard a heavy body rustling among the thorny blackberry runners, wet smacking noises, and a whuffling exhalation of breath.
People had told him about bears coming into town to gorge on blackberries. Naturally, he’d imagined meeting one. But somehow, his imagination had always supplied daylight.
Back slowly away, they’d said. But the moment he moved to ease his weight off the boulder, the berry-eating noises stopped. He distinctly heard the animal sniff twice, followed by a deep-throated huff! Then it came toward him.
Now it was just like the dream, a black mass growing steadily larger, looming between Mike and the lights of the house. And, as in the dream, he couldn’t move.
The bear eased forward, slowly but without hesitation, until only the width of the boulder separated them. It rose up and leaned its forelegs against the stone; Mike heard the scrape of claws on granite. Then the animal stopped still, as if posing for a picture of two friends leaning toward each other over a small table.
Mike’s skin moved of its own accord; his neck hairs prickled his collar. He was so completely filled by fear, it felt as if thunderless sheet lightning played across the muscles of his back and down into his thighs.
Then the lightning died and all he could sense was the unavoidable reality of the bear: the sight of its rough head silhouetted against the house lights; the oily-musty smell of its fur; the suffle of its breathing; the wet warmth of its breath on his face.
It’s so real, he thought. So completely real. But it feels just like a dream.
It was silly. He knew it was silly, but he also knew he had to speak to the bear. He whispered, “Do you want to... tell me something?”
The bear cocked its head sideways and eased back a little, as if it were deciding how to answer this unusual question.
But Mike already had the answer. As if a tap had been opened, all of the fear suddenly drained out of him, and he was filled instead with a peculiar sensation of lightness, as if he might now just float away, up through the forest canopy, off between the stars, to someplace where he was somebody else altogether, somebody who was so much more.
It could have been only seconds, or it could have been forever, that he and the bear faced each other across the boulder. Then the back door opened and his mother’s voice called, “Mike! They found him! He’s all right!”
And then, like magic, the bear was gone. He heard it scuttling through the trees. Mike laughed, because the feeling of lightness did not disappear with the bear. The feeling stayed with him, even after his father came home, enfolded Mike and Mom in one giant hug, then ate a big stack of buttermilk pancakes, and slept for sixteen hours straight.
The bear never came back, not to the woods, not to Mike’s dreams. And that summer, he and Jonah learned to fly a glider.
Copyright © 1995 by Matthew Hughes
