A Bloody Bear and a Bleeding Boy

The Bear and the Slaughterhouse Boy, 3

Jack stared the snarling bear down, knowing if he so much as blinked, one of two things would happen. Either the beast would melt back into the forest, or he’d levitate the twenty feet up into Jack’s tree, all claws and teeth.

Thirty seconds of eye lock. Jack needed to breathe. He didn’t dare.

Forty seconds.

The animal snorted, bared his teeth, and charged …

Toward the hidden donuts.

Jack exhaled.

He started inching his rifle butt up to his shoulder as the bear ripped into the log pile.

The animal snorted as it lobbed chunks of wood out of the way of the stale, buried pastries. It reached for one last log and levered it up with paws the size of dinner plates.

Jack inhaled, thumbed the safety lever…

… as the bear stood on his hind legs, raised the log over his head…

…as Jack gasped at the animal’s 8 foot height. He sighted in, center mass, held his breath while willing the trembling in his arms to die away.

The bear began licking sugar off bark, snarling and snuffling like a starving child.

Jack’s finger squeezed … spider-web light. The pressure on the trigger grew, continued without end until it seemed as if nothing would happen. The rifle was broken…

… until the pressure gave way in a single shocking second and a stunning concussion rammed the stock into Jack’s shoulder.

He heard a scream over the shot, like a woman’s scream, as burning gunpowder erased both the forest’s perfume and the bear’s stench. He saw the animal falling out of the sky, felt it thump into the ground, saw it thrash and struggle for the brush, but only for an instant.

The bear stopped moving and the forest killed all sound, not even a bird daring to chirp.

In his head Jack still heard the almost-human scream that was still slicing icy tracks into his skin. He snuck, shaking and dizzy, out of his leafy perch, chambered another round and sidled the few feet up to the black mound coarse hair. Heart racing, he waited, then prodded the animal with his rifle barrel. Nothing.

The bear was dead.

When he thought back on the hunt, even years later, Jack marked this as the trip’s last ordinary experience. As dangerous and primal as the kill had been, it had felt sane and predictable, if more than a little horrible.

A man had stalked and killed his prey. He had violently, personally, and deliberately ended an animal’s life. Guilt and regret mingled with a surge of triumph that connected him viscerally to a long line of forebears extending back to the very beginning of everything. Killing and eating meat had sparked a fire that made humans human, spreading and growing until it set fire to the planet.

Later, the bear gutted, dragged out of the woods on a child’s plastic sled, and bundled with great grunts and groans into his pickup bed, Jack rattled his way to Glen’s place, the sun’s last rays long gone, twilight congealed into black ink.

“Hm,” the old guide growled. “So you killed you one after all.” He shined a flashlight into the bed., “Big. 350, close to 400 maybe.”

Jack nodded. He had no idea what the bear weighed. He just knew his muscles and lungs ached from dragging it.

“Might just be the last bear of the hunt,” the old man continued. “You shot him right about sunset, then?”

“Got totally dark while I was gutting him, yeah. Hard to see.”

“Lucky you, boy.” Glen’s voice was as dark as the sky.

Jack stared, confused. “Um, sure. But, hey, you got the directions for that DNR tag place? And they process too, right?”

“They’ll skin him up for ya. Do up the meat how ya like.”

So Jack navigated the inky forest, taking one bewildering turn after another down rutted dirt roads that felt more like trails. Hours seemed to pass before he finally spotted the shack. Only a weak yellow bulb lit the closed garage door, half revealing a cluster of old pickups.

He jumped out of his own truck, shivering. The sun had stolen all the day’s warmth as it fled.

He eyed the barn-like structure, looking for a door, listening. Nothing. He kicked through weeds and rounded a corner to spot a wooden frame and porcelain knob. Hesitated, turned, and pushed.

Stepping inside, white light blinded him. He blinked as a sea of red assaulted him.

Scarlet. Candy-apple red. Candy-caned barber poles of red and yellow. Everywhere. Blood flooded the packed-dirt floor in front of his feet. Blood filled the air, dripping musically into a muddy pool.

Yellow and white. Gobbets of fat were islands of yellow and white in the red sea.

In a fraction of the eternal second that it took for Jack to register these colors and identify their sources, he looked up.

A wave of chestnut brown and black invaded his eyes. He spotted a huge bear hanging from a hook in the ceiling. Then another. Then more. The brown beast dangling just in front of him was half naked. His coat, his fur, hung down to his waist in long strips, revealing a buttered tapioca pudding of winter fat.

Smell came next. Urine, feces, blood, musk.

Stench of burning tobacco.

Jack turned his head and spotted a man, a man smoking a cigarette. Three or four paces away, sitting at a wobbly card table, three men were smoking and drinking cheap beer out of cans.

“You Jack, then?” one of them asked.

“Um, how did you know my name?”

Jack got nothing but a stare in return. He coughed to hide his confusion. “I guess Glen told you I was coming?”

The man stood, tall and thin, grey and stubbled, a blood-soaked leather apron covering his denim and plaid. “He did. That bear out in the truck? Got him just in time, huh?”

“I guess so. You want to have a look?”

A high-pitched “Daddy!” snapped Jack’s head to the right.

A small boy was half skipping, half jumping through muddy blood puddles, bare feet leaving prints in gore, pointing an index finger straight at Jack’s face. “Is that him, Daddy? Is he the one?”

Jack stared, stunned. He could barely process his senses. A small boy of perhaps 10, shirtless in ragged gym shorts, stood in the midst of the gory scene, unaffected by the bloody carcasses.

The man grabbed the boy by the arm. “Git! Go back and help your mom in the kitchen. Now!”

“Ow! But Mom said! I wanna help. Just tell me. Please, I wanna know if this is really the last bear of the …”

A cracking slap, full in the face, cut the boy’s question off. Jack watched in shock as the man then half shoved, half threw his son across the room. The boy landed with a thud and didn’t move.

Something moved inside Jack, though. He didn’t think, he just darted to the boy’s side, knelt down in blood, picked him up, and set him on his feet.

From across the room Jack heard, “Get the fuck out of here, boy!”

The child looked Jack full in the eye for half a second, nodded a quick thanks, then turned and ran.

Jack straightened, turned to the boy’s father and said, “OK, enough. Glen Miller sent me. I have a bear in the back of my truck. Are you gonna go get it or what?”

What you just read is fiction loosely based on a real hunting trip I took a few years ago. The image of a small boy leaving footprints of bear blood on a dirt floor burned itself into my retinas. This is the scene that inspired me to write the story. There’s more to come, but not too much more. The “real” bits are fading out now as this story morphs into spooky Halloween fun. Buckle up and get ready for more bears!

Next chapter!

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James Finn is a former Air Force intelligence analyst, long-time LGBTQ activist, an alumnus of Queer Nation and Act Up NY, an essayist occasionally published in queer news outlets, and an “agented” novelist. Send questions, comments, and story ideas to [email protected].