Bear Sightings: Epilogue
Five Years Later
Dear friends, thank you so much for reading Bear Sightings. I’m sorry that I haven’t been consistent about posting chapters. But the fact that you’ve taken the time to read my words means a ton to me.
This is the epilogue. Please feel free to ask in the comments or DM or in an email if you are confused or have any questions or comments or suggestions. I know the story is a bit complex (even I have gotten lost in it a few times). Thanks again.
They lived in a little house deep in the woods, under the shadows of giant pines. The house was new and fragrant, yet rustic, and at night sometimes you could hear it groaning and creaking and settling into the ground. Outside were the night sounds of crickets and locusts and a chorus of bullfrogs from a stagnant pond hidden in the woods nearby.
Leah was awake, looking at the cover of Bear Lore. Her copy had just arrived in the mail. On the back cover was a picture of Earl Bradford in profile, looking out contemplatively over a vast forest.
According to the author’s bio on the dust jacket, Earl had spent a year in the Appalachians studying the oral history of the American Black Bears, and a year in Montana studying the Grizzlies, and two years sailing around the world, gathering the stories of polar bears, Eurasian bears, pandas, and South American bears, not necessarily in that order. The front cover of the book was a continuation of the forest on the back: deep and green and full of light and shadows. As Leah looked more closely, she could see, as if in camouflage, silhouettes of bears peeking out from behind trees, or walking hand-in-hand on distant paths. In the left upper center of the front cover, discreetly tucked behind spreading branches, was the light from a tiny cottage window.
Leah opened the book. On the first page was a dedication:
“Dedicated to the memory of my mother, Erma, who died in captivity. RIP.”
Then, a foreword:
“I am a black bear who is brown. My friend is a brown bear who is black. A distant cousin of mine–a black bear–happens to be white. People call her Polar Bear, and she hates this. Not that “polar bear” is a pejorative; but one wants to be understood and called by one's right name.
“There is so much that people don't know about bears. Did you know, for instance, that all grizzlies are brown bears, but that not all brown bears are grizzlies?
“And what about pandas? Are they even bears at all?
“What is life like for the bears on the Russian steppes? How about the forests of Denmark? Or the jungles of Asia? The forests of the world are teeming with the oral histories of bears. This book is my attempt to collect these stories and write them down.
“Included is the story of my own family: My father, who always wore an Alpine hat, long maintained that we came from Europe, many generations ago. I always wondered, how could this be? We are of the American Black Bear species, and, to this day, Black Bears have been found nowhere in the world but the North American continent. Where, then, do these family stories come from?
“With much genealogical digging and a little DNA testing, I have uncovered the truth of my own ancestry. My story, and the stories of my family, and the stories of many other bears living in forests around the world, are contained herein.”
Leah turned the page, and there was a table of contents with a list of chapter titles:
The North American Black Bear
The Brown Bear
The Grizzly Bear
The Polar Bear
The Asiatic Black Bear
The Andean Bear
The Panda Bear
The Sloth Bear
The Sun Bear
The Koala (non) Bear
All About Teddy Bears
On Bear Hugs
One American Black Bear Who Is Brown (my story)
Bears in Captivity
Spirit Bears and Bear Spirits
Bear Hunting
Bears and Taxidermy
Bears in Art and Literature
All about Hibernation Dreams
Looking Ahead: Bears and AI
Leah flipped through the pages of the book, gently and respectfully. Then she put the book down: amid the white noise machine and the tinkling of a mobile coming from the baby monitor on her nightstand, she thought she heard whimpering.
Her husband, Randall–truck driver-turned-lumberjack–was downstairs. He had fallen asleep on the couch in front of the TV. Her mother, Louella, was sleeping in a bedroom down the hall. Aunt Melba was in the dining room, working on a 5000 piece jigsaw puzzle of Santa Claus and a bunch of elves in a toy factory. Leah’s daughters, five-year-old Aurora and six-month-old Maybelle, were both asleep in their pink-and-yellow Sleeping Beauty-themed bedroom.
The whimpering in the baby monitor turned to a cry.
Leah set the book down on her nightstand and sighed. She would begin reading Bear Lore in the morning over a cup of Folgers, while her little girls played with their stuffed animals in the sunny living room. She got up and stuffed her feet into a pair of shoes and put a jacket over her pajamas. She walked softly down the hall to the baby’s room, picked her up, and wrapped her in a blanket.
She found herself thinking of the curvy roads that ran up Juniper Mountain as she walked downstairs. She found herself thinking of the bear as she buckled Maybelle into her car seat.
She thought of driving up Juniper Mountain the way she had with Aurora, several years before. But they had moved and built their house further down into the valley, and the mountain was too far away, even for a nighttime drive.
“Taking baby for a drive,” she told Melba.
Melba looked at her in a knowing sort of way.
“Follow the river to Bearchase Lane,” Melba said. “You might see an old friend.”
Leah stared at Melba for a moment. Melba looked back down at her jigsaw puzzle.
Leah walked outside, secured the baby in the vehicle, and stared up at the moon from the window of the minivan: it was a thin, brilliant crescent. She backed out of her driveway–-watching the reverse camera for deer–- and followed the curves of Myrtle River, dark and deep beyond the trees. The river took a sharp turn, and the road followed; on the other side, she saw the fluorescent white letters of a green street sign as her headlights flashed on it: the sign said “Bearchase Lane,” and it was a narrow road that ran beneath a canopy of trees into a neighborhood of full of sleepy houses.
Leah slowed down and turned and crept slowly down the dark street–and the moon followed her and illuminated a dark shape that ran alongside her. She stopped the van and threw it into park. The figure stood up; she could see the whites of its eyes. It turned down an alley and began to run again. She drove beside the figure, slowly, till it came to a sidewalk with a street lamp shining on it. Then the figure stopped, stood up, and waved. She could see his white smile–friendly and terrifying–under the lamp.
It was Earl.
She parked on the side of the road.
Then she and Maybelle got out of the vehicle and followed Earl down a sidewalk to a little white cottage, lit up and twinkling in the dark trees.
This has surely been an engaging tale! It wove alot of pieces and colorful characters. I never could expect the next turn; you kept us intrigued! Thank you for sharing with us, Jessamyn.