I found the bear one fall day as clouds slouched up the valley, pushed by an incoming storm.  Crows flapped in the alders and before I could reason the oddness of so many, the dog was off and tearing into whatever was there below the trees.

I shouldn’t say  I found the bear.  I’d already heard rumors and wondered why I no longer found giant piles of scat  everywhere like I had all summer. Scat filled with dark pits from the wild cherry trees that lined the trail.  I found scat along the banks of the river near the swimming hole, and  near the house. Scat on the driveway and under the apple trees.  Huge mounds that slowly became more apple than cherry as the summer progressed.  But I never saw the bear.

Others did.   Neighbors saw him in their backyards. Watched him eat their apples or walk through their gardens. They found torn apart bee hives and dug up carrots.  We picked most of our apples as quick as they ripened and the bear got only the last few wormy ones.  It could have been worse. He could have easily gotten the best of them.  Or the peaches.

It started to be a thing to brag about. Who the bear visited. Who saw him or didn’t and how many times.   Then the conversation turned. The bear had gone missing. Maybe he wandered back into the forest. Some wondered if maybe he got shot. It was too early for hibernation and though we didn’t necessarily oppose the hunting and though we didn’t necessarily say this too loud,  many hoped this bear’s fate would be different.

Then someone found the bear and  word went round of his existence in the woods along the trail near the pond. That’s where I found him,  in the salmonberry bushes and ferns, a yellow rope round his left paw.  The carcass was easy to overlook really. Hidden. It was the flapping wings that got my attention. And the dog barking and snuffling about in the brush.

That the  bear had been shot was not so surprising. It was the lack of care. When I asked some hunters, they said this is not hunting.  This is something else. The way the skin was seemingly tore off and everything else left behind.
Head, paws, meat. The way they drug what was left of his shimmering black, almost obsidian self, into the brush.

I’ve read that long ago hunters  cut away the cartilage beneath a bears tongue and  buried it as a precaution against the bear’s spirit following them.  I’ve read  of  the bad fortune that can befall a person or an entire tribe if the rules aren’t respected.  I’ve read of the Finnish and Sammi and Russian reverence for bears and of  tribes that do not hunt, kill or eat bear meat so human like is the skeleton under the fur.

I wondered if the spirit of this bear rested or roamed.

I went into the bushes for the  dog.   There I saw the long grace of torso, the tufts of matted fur on the bear’s paws.  I smelled the pungent rot rising.  And the claws. The long, white curve of them ending in point, fascinated me.   Even these weren’t enough for protection, though they could tear a human apart. Maybe the bear gave himself over – let himself be taken in the way hunters once believed and some still do, that a hunter does not so much take as is given.

I pulled the dog  from the bear, got him back on the trail and leashed and wondered who would do this and why and how  would  I ever protect myself if a bear with all that power couldn’t stop  such killing.

The ground froze soon after and then snow came and covered the ground.   I’ll admit I desired the claws and returned after the snow melted, to find them.   Not that I deserved them.  They were gone though. Most everything was gone.   Scavenged or decomposed.  All I could find were a few pieces of coarse black hair. Small bits of bone.  Nothing more to  indicate the bear had been here, lain here,  died. Nothing much to show  he’d came to visit us here along the banks of the river, in our orchards and gardens. That he had wandered right into the heart of our living.