After two hours of velvet tundra dotted with ponds like scattered mirrors, the pilot turned to us and shouted over the engine, “You want to see a bear?”
Up front, Jeff raised his camera, resting the lens against the curved Plexiglas window. I spotted her then, on the riverbank, loping over the mud flat toward a long fringe of ruffling grass.
We dove, dropped out of the sky like a roller coaster car, a faint metallic noise grinding in the plane as the bear grew large outside my window, rising on her back legs, a gash of red clutched in her mouth. Her cub broke from the grass, running to her, and I thought she might actually swat the plane as we swung low around them. The engine pitched higher, louder, through the curve as we circled up and away, zooming out on her silent roar, a bloody salmon arching and flopping on the ground between her paws.
We leveled off over the river, breathless, shaking our heads. I tapped Jeff’s shoulder, but he was still hunched over his camera, looking out the window through the viewfinder. I threaded my finger through one of his dark curls and tugged. He peered at me through the gap between his seat and the door.
I shouted, “Wasn’t that amazing?”
He nodded and sort of shook his head at the same time like, “Yes,” and “I can hardly believe it.”
“Did you get something?” I asked.
He squinted, tilting his head at me, and so I pointed at his camera raised my voice again, “Did you get a PICTURE?”
He shrugged and turned away, and I wasn’t sure if that meant no, he didn’t get anything, or if it meant he just couldn’t hear me over the engine.
It was hard to talk in the plane.
* * *
We flew in over a rise where the land below thinned away to long curve of black beach. Within it, a patchwork of boxy buildings nestled beside the sea. The pilot set the plane down, bumping the length of the dirt airstrip just outside of town.
Our cabin had a good-sized kitchen with a simple wooden countertop, Formica table and a freestanding gas stove. A refrigerator hummed against one wall; a boxy television with a prostrate antenna and numbered knobs rested on a nightstand in the corner. There were two identical bedrooms, each with a high square window, a platform bed, and three shelves for storage. Everything was made of the same unpainted plywood, put together by a carpenter who apparently decided sanding was an unnecessarily fussy component of furniture construction. The plywood beds were a little bigger than sleeping-bag size, edged like cookie sheets with slices of foam fitted inside.
I tried to remember the last time Jeff and I slept apart. He had moved out of our shared apartment at the beginning of the school year, but he still showed up every night to sleep in my bed. I had asked him move back in, told him I could use the help with the rent, but he said he wasn’t ready.
These beds were impossible, though. Unless we made a pallet on the kitchen floor we’d have to sleep in separate rooms. Well, good, I thought. I spread my sleeping bag out over the foam. He was planning to use the money from this job to fund a trip to South America in the fall. I wanted us to go together, but it was something he needed to do alone, he said. He’d maxed out his credit card buying photography equipment for this trip, claimed he wanted to shoot pictures for a travel article—never mind that he’d never been outside the U.S., didn’t speak Spanish and had never written an article of any kind. He was “following a dream.”
He stopped in the hallway outside my door, his camera loose in one hand. He asked me, “You want to take a look around?”
Outside, heavy clouds cast a dull wash over the multicolored houses. A web of sandy tracks led up the hillside where a loose-boned dog with matted fur trotted across the road, pausing to sniff in our direction before moving on. We walked over the low dune separating the village from the beach, our feet slipping in the fine sand. I stopped at the shoreline, dug my hands in my pockets, felt the cold wind lift my hair.
I heard the hollow snapping of Jeff’s camera behind me, and imagined how I might look—my windswept profile pale against the blackboard sea, dark islands hulking off shore. Someday people might see this picture over our fireplace and I would say, “Oh, that’s the summer we spent in Alaska.” I looked over my shoulder, posing for the next shot of me smiling, maybe, but Jeff was taking pictures of driftwood stacked on the sand. He moved up the beach and stopped, raised his camera to his eye and shot something on the ground. He waved me over.
Bear tracks traced away in a curving line along the alders. A bear, walking right where we were standing, recently enough that tracks remained in the sand.
“Should we go back?” I said. The beach was deserted. “Maybe we shouldn’t be out here.”
“They’re not fresh.” He squatted and motioned with his finger around the edge of the print, the part where the oval toes formed an arch over the pad.
“It’s sand,” I said. “How can you tell?”
“They’re worn, see? Probably been here since last night.”
“And when exactly did you become a bear track expert?”
He dug in his hip pack and pulled out an enormously long lens. “Let’s follow them.” He lifted his eyebrows, a smile playing about his lips, and jerked his head in the direction of the trail.
“Honey,” I said, “we just got here. Maybe we should get the lay of the land before we take off tracking a bear.”
“Come on, Kris.” He reached for my hand. “We’ll talk loud. You can sing.”
“No.” I planted my feet in the sand, letting him tug my arm. “I’m going back.”
“All right, then.” He dropped my hand and turned away. “I’ll be there later.”
What could I do, really, but follow him? We didn’t see any bears. I ended up wishing I hadn’t made such a big deal. I didn’t really want to see a bear—but, if we had, at least then he would’ve known I had been right.
* * *
We came to this village near the end of the Alaskan Peninsula to teach in a summer swimming program. Two weeks per village, five villages, ten weeks. The pay was excellent: we made $400 a week, plus free housing, and a food stipend that we tried to conserve by fishing for salmon. The native corporation that hired us was flush with land-use royalties, and they used some of that money to send health services out to the bush. In a culture where water serves as highway, workplace and grocery store, drowning was a serious village health problem. Alaska is soaking wet with rivers, lakes, and miles of coastline—but no one learns to swim because the water temperature rarely rises out of the 50s. So, in addition to the visiting doctors and dentists, each village got visiting swimming instructors, like us, one summer every three or four years.
That night I crawled into my sleeping bag with my journal, trying to make a record of the day: the plane, the village, the tracks on the beach. I lay there, pen poised, my mind stumbling from one thought to another. I doodled a border around the edge of the page, colored in the name of the village, wrote in the date. I was thinking about Jeff, but I was tired of writing about him. It was almost midnight, and still twilight. In summer, the Alaskan sun rises and sets for hours each day, slowly tracing the horizon. I tried to read, hoping Jeff might come in before I fell asleep, but the next morning I woke up alone, ink on my cheek and my book wedged under my face. Already it was light again.
* * *
I’d met Jeff two years before at a 7-11. I had just transferred to the university after two years of community college in my hometown; I didn’t know a soul. I was headed back to my apartment after buying some books on campus when I saw that Dr. Pepper was on sale at 7-11. Jeff stood next to the stacks of soda, his head cocked towards a speaker in the corner of the store, listening. He had dark curls and dimples I could see as he mouthed the words to the music. There was something about him that made me smile.
“You like the Pixies?” he said.
“They rock,” I said.
He was on his way to a swimming hole with his buddies outside in the car. He said I should meet them there, tried to explain to me where it was, where I should park and how to get in, but I cut him off and said if it was all the same to him, could he just give me a ride?
So I piled into his battered Corolla with all his buddies, and when we got to the swimming hole I waited while they unloaded the trunk, pulling out a cooler, towels and lawn chairs and setting them down behind the car. Jeff leaned inside, reaching for something deep in the back. His legs were lean and dark right down to his feet, dust from the dirt parking lot settling on his sandaled toes. Then, he yelled something—like a curse—and stumbled backwards, away from the car. A writhing shape tumbled through the air. I saw him trying not to smile because I had been watching him. I stood completely still, letting what he’d thrown land at my feet with a soft plop. I leaned over and picked it up: a rubber snake. I tossed it back to him and looked him in the eye; his dimples creased his cheeks.
“You’ll have to do better than that to scare me,” I told him.
* * *
We were supposed to start classroom water safety at ten, but ten was early for the children. Families stayed up late through the long hours of summer daylight, getting their fill of picnics and sunshine before winter. They trickled in, and by eleven, we had about a dozen rumpled kids, ranging in age from preschooler to teenager. They were bleary-eyed, yawning, shy. When we went around the room to learn their names they spoke so softly it was hard to hear them. We cracked jokes; they smiled at the floor, or at each other, but none of them laughed.
Before we broke for lunch Jeff told them we’d meet back at one-thirty to go swimming. “Do any of you guys know a good place we can swim that’s not too far from here?”
Some of the kids nodded.
“Yeah?” Jeff said, “Where?”
No one spoke. Jeff singled out Tony, the oldest boy in the room. He was maybe 15, sitting on the floor, legs straight out in front of him, leaning back against the wall. “Could you show us where to go?” Jeff asked him.
Tony tilted his head and squinted, like maybe he could see the way. “I could,” he said.
“Great. Can we all walk there?”
Tony smiled. “You can.”
We set off for the lake around two, the sky deep and bright above us, with fewer kids than we had that morning. I was surprised because I thought the swimming would be a bigger attraction than the lessons at the cabin. Tony didn’t show, but the kids that did come led us out a sandy road behind the village. Before long the sand gave way to a wide green track, a grass mat woven by four-wheel motorbikes. Just about every village family had at least one ATV. They referred to these as “Hondas,” regardless of who made them.
We walked for almost an hour through tall grass past rolling waves of wildflowers, two mountains looming in the distance. The smaller one, its hard granite face scraped in soft salmon shades, dropped right off into the ocean. Its sister was larger, more inland and lush green, streaked with earth and rock. When we reached the lake we found our missing pupils, their Hondas parked haphazardly off the path. Surrounded by low alders, clear blue water stretched away from a sandy bank to a high bluff about fifty yards off.
Jeff dropped his pack. “I’ll build a fire,” he said, and enlisted the kids to gather wood. As the woodpile grew, he pulled paper from his bag, crushed it between his hands, smashed it into the dirt and stacked a tiny pyramid of kindling on top of it.
Tony emerged on the other side of the lake, pushing through a gap in the alders. He crossed to our camp and dropped a couple of pieces of driftwood onto the woodpile. Jeff pulled out a lighter—the long kind you might use to light a barbeque grill—and poked it under his kindling. After about ten minutes and two trips to his backpack for more paper, he still hadn’t managed to light the kindling. Conversations died away as the children watched him, giggling behind their hands. Tony sat with the older girls, arms loose around his knees. He saw me watching him, and looked away.
“Does anyone have any more paper?” Jeff said. “What do you think, Kris? We could go ahead without it.”
“Are you kidding?” I said. I imagined climbing out of sub-60° water with nothing but my towel to warm up. “We’ll freeze. Plus, the mosquitoes.”
“Well, the wood’s too green,” he said, “What do you want me to do?”
“Maybe you could use dry wood.”
“Maybe you should build the fire,” he said. He backed away, waving his palm like I was invited to the ball.
I picked up the lighter and knelt down in front of his sticks. “Hey, Tony,” I said, “could you help me out with this?”
Tony took the lighter from my hand and laid it aside. Squatting, he snatched around the sand at the dry grass scattered there, then flattened Jeff’s pyre and stuffed the grass underneath. He lay down on the sand, shielding the fire with the length of his body, and pulled a box of matches from his jacket. Within minutes, thin smoke was rising, the fire popping, gaining strength. I thought Jeff might be mad, but when I looked over he was behind his camera, clicking away. Tony looked out over the lake, offering a thoughtful profile for the camera.
* * *
After he threw the snake at me, we went absolutely crazy over each other. It was the first time for both us—falling in love and feeling brave enough to call it that. He stayed at my apartment every night the first week we were together. We skipped classes, spent hours in bed. On Sunday, he asked me if I thought he should go home for the night and I said, sure, he could, but if he wanted to stay, and I wanted him there, why go home? Why not make our own rules? A couple weeks later he said sayonara to his roommates and moved in with me.
He took me home to meet his mother over Thanksgiving, and she let us sleep together in his bedroom. It made me nervous. I didn’t want to make her angry, or have her think less of me.
“Are you sure she doesn’t care?” I asked him again while we were making love on the floor next to his bed. We were nose-to-nose, our foreheads pressed together.
He looked hard at me then, our eyes inches apart, and he said, “God, you’re beautiful. Someday, I’m going to marry you.”
That was when I got pregnant.
I don’t know that it was that particular time—we did it every day—but I know it was that week because when we went to visit his mom I forgot my pills. I was supposed to start a new pack that weekend, and when we got to his mom’s house I realized I didn’t have them. No big deal, I thought, I’d just start them the following Sunday, when we got back. It sounds stupid now, but at the time I didn’t even mention it to Jeff, and we went right on like we had been, fucking like bunnies.
We found out around Christmas. I didn’t really want to have a baby, but it was Jeff. Our love was powerful, I thought, and getting pregnant just proved it. We were like those kids in fairy tales that get hold of magic they don’t understand; we had conjured something more than we could handle.
I both wanted and didn’t want an abortion. I think I hoped he would talk me out of it. We each made a list, “Pro” and “Con,” so we could figure out how we felt, and decide what to do. His list turned out to be pretty one-sided: “too young,” “can’t travel,” “no money,” etcetera. I don’t even remember what he listed as “pros,” something about our baby being good-looking, I think, and maybe something about an abortion being hard on me.
At the clinic, I cried. I knew it was for the best, but I cried anyway. I cried so much that they pulled us out of the waiting room to talk to a counselor. She had a dirty-blonde ponytail and pink cheeks—she didn’t look much older than I was. She kept calling it “the procedure.” She offered me a Kleenex and wanted to know, was I really okay with this?
“I just—can’t think of a good reason to do it. I—I’m afraid that if I have an abortion it’s going to tear us apart.” I looked at Jeff. He held my hand, rubbing my knuckles, studying my hand as if it might reveal some answer he was looking for.
“Have you thought,” she said, squinting at me in what she must have thought was a sincere expression, “That nine months of pregnancy and a baby might do the same?”
* * *
I dropped my pack and sat down facing the river, a wide green darkness ambling parallel to the shore before joining the sea, hemmed in by a barren sandbar on the far side. The river cut through the sand, leaving a crumbling bank about 15 feet above the water, sloping steeply to the current. Upstream, where the river turned inland, I saw clusters of people, thin smoke trailing from campfires like a row of dingy kites.
We’d fallen into a routine: a short lesson at the cabin in the morning, swimming at the lake after lunch, then back out again to fish or explore in the hours before nightfall. Jeff hadn’t caught any fish yet, but he insisted on doing the fishing himself, and it was his fishing pole. And even though it seemed the entire village fished at the mouth of the Kametalook River, every day Jeff dragged me somewhere else, hiking up trails I was sure were used mostly by bears, looking for a “good spot”—and carrying more photo equipment than fishing gear.
We’d fought about it. We’d skimped on food because we planned to fish. Everything we had to eat we’d brought in with us, and I was getting sick of oatmeal and spaghetti. So that day I went to the Kametalook alone, thinking maybe someone would let me borrow a pole, or share a picnic, or something.
I sat down and pulled my journal out of my bag as one, two, three kids ran close past me, straight for the riverbank. I just had time to register the back of Tony’s canvas jacket when they reached the drop-off, jumped up and out, and disappeared from sight. I knew they couldn’t have gone in the water, but I got up anyway and peered over the edge. Tony lay flat on his back in the sloping sand, his head tilted backwards to see me. He waved.
“You bring a picnic?” he called.
“I have some crackers.” I pulled them from my pocket, held them out for him to see. He climbed up and took them, tore the package with his teeth and spit a bit of cellophane into the wind. He motioned to the river. “Crackers are not a picnic. You should fish.”
“I don’t have a pole.”
“You can use mine.” He reached inside his jacket and pulled out a short stick of driftwood, wound with twine.
“That’s your fishing pole?”
He nodded.
The twine pricked my fingers as I turned it over in my hands. He had a good-sized treble hook—about the size of a chicken egg—tied to the free end.
He said, “Let’s go fishing.”
He led me up the riverbank to a spot near the campfires, hurled the hook out into the current and paced upstream, yanking it through the water with the full weight of his arm, then winding up the slack. He did this over and over—yanking and winding until the hook came ashore. On the third try he snagged a salmon and reeled it in, whipping the twine around the stick to maintain the tension in the line. He landed it, a great slick fish as long as my arm, flopping wildly in the sand. Tony took a knife out of his pocket and gutted it in a few quick movements, flung the guts into the river.
“Oh, yes,” he said, “We’re going to enjoy our life today.”
He cut slender green sticks from the alders and threaded them with slices of salmon, showed me how to cook them over the fire, letting the skin-side blacken until the deep red flesh turned tender pink. I peeled chunks of fish off the crispy skin with my fingers, closing my eyes and humming as I chewed.
“Can I ask you a personal question?” he said.
I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, rubbed the fish oil into my jeans and said, sure, he could.
“How old are you?”
I laughed. “That’s your personal question?”
He glanced at me over the flames, smoke billowing between us, and I stopped laughing. “I’m twenty-one,” I said. “Twenty-two in November. What about you?”
He poked the fire, stirred the coals then blew on the tip of the slender stick until the end glowed red. “Nineteen.”
“Nineteen?” I swallowed my surprise, suddenly saw his face clearly: his square-boned jaw, his confident gaze.
“You think I am too old for swimming lessons?” he asked.
“Oh, no. No. Everyone should learn to swim.”
I knew that the commercial fishing season was the main source of income for village families, and most boys his age were gone for the summer. “Did your family want you to go fishing?” I asked.
“No,” he said. He stood and kicked sand onto the fire, reached down and offered me his hand. “I have to go help my grandfather now. You need a ride back?”
I took his hand; he helped me to my feet. His palm was rough and warm, and I felt each of my fingers sliding the length of his as we let go.
Jeff came back to the cabin while I was in the kitchen, boiling water for tea. He stuck his head through the doorway, his cheeks and nose pink from the wind, his eyes bright. He said, “Hey, come outside for a minute?”
I came to the door where he stood posing just off the wooden pallets that formed our front stoop, holding a pair of trout high in one hand, his fishing pole tall by his side in the other.
“Nice, huh?” Jeff handed me his camera. “Here, it’s all set up. Take my picture before I fry these babies up for dinner. Take a couple.” He was glowing.
Something up the road caught Jeff’s eye. “Tony!” he yelled, loud enough to startle me. He raised his catch higher. “Check it out, man: my first fish in Alaska.”
Tony walked over, a small plastic butter tub in one hand. He looked over Jeff’s fish, handed the container to me. “My sister picked them,” he said.
I shook the tub and lifted the lid, saw soft purple beads staining a white paper towel.
“She said to tell you she’s going berry-picking again on Sunday, if you want to come.”
“I wish I could,” I said. “But we’re leaving Sunday.”
“Sunday?” He frowned. “Well. Maybe Saturday.”
Jeff broke in. “Yeah, it feels like we just got here.”
“Do you want to come in?” I said to Tony. “I was making tea.”
He smiled and shook his head, took a few steps back from the door. He lifted his chin at Jeff. “Next time,” he said, “you catch a salmon.”
Jeff fried his trout and ate most of it himself, enjoyed it enough that he didn’t seem to notice I wasn’t eating. He talked about the rocks he photographed while he was out, said it was too bad I didn’t go with him, because then I could have seen them, too—maybe he would take me tomorrow.
“Hey, are you okay?” he said. “You’re kind of quiet.”
“Am I?” I said. “I think I’m tired. Maybe I’ll go read for a while.”
He followed me to my room, caught me around the waist and pulled me close to him. “I caught a fish for you today,” he said, using a baby voice we hadn’t used with each other in weeks. He nibbled my ear and whispered, “Your man’s a fisher-man.”
“Hmm,” I said, as he moved me toward the bed, lay me back on my sleeping bag. I almost told him about Tony then, just to spoil the moment. But then he was kissing me, his body sweet and familiar, his lips tasting faintly of oil and trout. Afterwards, he stayed, fitted against my back, his breath damp on my neck. My shoulder ached, pressed into the plywood through the foam; the splintered board around the edge of the bed kept me from bending my knees the way I like to when I sleep. When he finally got up to go to his own room, I was dismayed by my own relief.
* * *
Tony hadn’t come to the lake with us since the first day, had never gotten in the water for a lesson. He finally showed up a few days before we left, and caught my eye as I led a two of my smallest swimmers out of the lake to the fireside. The day was blue and sunny, the water cold enough to make the tops of my feet ache each time I waded in. Jeff and I wore wetsuits, but the children didn’t. The younger ones were able to stand the cold for a few minutes at a time, but some of the older kids, swimming in t-shirts and shorts, managed to stay in the water long enough to actually learn something. I stood as close to the fire as I could get, clutching my towel around my shoulders. Tony sat on a low rise nearby.
I asked him, “You ready to swim?”
He kept his eyes on the lake, but I thought I saw the corners of his mouth lift a bit.
“Yes?”
“You’ll show me how,” he said, not a question. He took off his jacket, his shoes, and his jeans, revealing a pair of worn gym shorts underneath. He left his t-shirt on, mincing across the pebbles in the shallows, hissing air between his teeth until the water reached his knees. He looked back, then launched himself flat over the surface, splashing full length—came up gasping, his shirt clinging to his shoulders, outlining the contours of his arms, his chest. I tossed my towel over a bush and went out, cold rising in my body like liquid in a bottle. He stood in front of me, arms crossed, shoulders tight.
“Alright,” I said. “Do you know how to blow bubbles?”
He shook his head.
“Every time you put your face in the water, you blow bubbles—you exhale. Like this.” I buried my face in the water and demonstrated, sending a new chill jigging down my spine. “Try it.”
He flopped into the water and sank below the surface, sputtering bubbles. I moved closer, touched his elbow to slow him down. “Good, good,” I said. “Now this time try to blow all the air out when you go under. That way, when you come up, there’s nothing left but breathing in.”
I felt Jeff watching us as he waded past, making his way to the bank after finishing up a lesson. I hadn’t told him yet that Tony was older than we’d thought. Tony went under again; this time, he stayed longer before he was up, breathing hard. He shook his head, spraying me with drops, his hair separating into shiny black spikes.
“Better.” I stood beside him, looking up into his face. “Try it again,” I said. “See if you can stay on top of the water this time. Relax. Just float and exhale. Do you mind if I help you a little?”
He shook his head and I placed my hand on his chest, eased him down to the surface of the water, his body trembling under his shirt, his weight substantial as I balanced him on my palm. As he relaxed, I let my hand drift away, and he floated there, bubbles boiling around his head.
He stood up, shivering, his lips tinged with purple. I said, “You think that’s enough for now?”
“One more lesson,” he said.
* * *
I stood in front of the refrigerator, one hand on the door, Tony’s butter tub of blueberries in my free hand. Two bruised wet pebbles rolled in the bottom. “You ate all my blueberries?” I said.
Jeff was at the kitchen table, fiddling with his equipment. “I didn’t eat them all.”
“You left me two. Thanks.”
“They weren’t your blueberries,” he said, rubbing the glass on one of his lenses with a square of cloth, placing the lens carefully into his bag.
My jaw tightened. “Tony brought them to me.”
“He didn’t bring them to you. He brought them to us. And there weren’t that many, anyway.”
I imagined upending the table, scattering his crap in pieces around him just to watch his expression change. “Do you ever think of anyone besides yourself?” I asked him.
“Look.” He fitted a lens to his camera, lifted it to his eye and adjusted it. “It’s our last day here and I’m going out to shoot. I’m not going to stand here and fight with you about a bunch of stupid blueberries.”
“You don’t have a clue,” I told him, “what a jackass you are.”
“Jesus, Kristin, they’re blueberries. What—?”
“You think everything’s for you!” I was practically shouting. I stared him down, waited for him to say something—to fight back, maybe.
He shouldered his bag, shook his head slightly. “Whatever,” he said, his mouth tight.
I grabbed my jacket from the kitchen chair and walked out in front of him, letting the door slam on its crappy hinges behind me. He wouldn’t follow me, I knew. When I reached the shoreline I looked up the beach, away from the Kametalook. There was an outcropping of rocks in the distance, and without actually deciding to go there, I headed for them.
I made my way along the beach, slogging through the sand. The rocks were farther away than I thought, and it took me a couple of hours to get to them. Finally, they loomed in front of me, sliced and stacked like something built, so large they had grass growing on top of them, birds living there. There was an enormous opening straight through the middle, maybe ten feet high and fifteen feet across. I climbed inside and sat down, drew my knees up under my chin. There was graffiti inside: “Denise + Thomas 4-ever,” some random curse words, and faded scrawls I couldn’t read.
I knew I had to start back soon. I imagined briefly that I would stay there, sit inside that rock until Jeff came looking for me. Or maybe a bear would attack me out here alone. Maybe if I died—or at least got badly hurt—Jeff would realize how much he took for granted.
I heard the high hum of an ATV and climbed down out of the rock. The sound grew louder until two red Hondas burst out of the grass, onto the sand. I waved.
Tony and a stocky old man roared up, stopping a few feet away. The old man, in an oversized down jacket and a cap, did not smile, but his face, brown and wrinkled as a slice of dried apple, was friendly.
“Hello,” I said, glad to see Tony, tucking my head at the old man. “Are you guys out picnicking?”
“Checking nets,” Tony said.
The old man spoke to Tony in Yupik, pointed at the boulders.
Tony turned to me. “Where is Jeff?”
“I don’t know. At the cabin, I guess.”
He nodded. “I will give you a ride back to the village.”
“Oh, no,” I shook my head. “I’m fine—you guys go on—I can walk.”
The old man spoke again, more sharply this time, chopping his hand at the grass, waving his arm at the beach. He got off his Honda and came over to Tony’s and unstrapped the cooler. I wasn’t sure what was happening—whether I should wait, or walk away. The old man looked at me then, and said, “You go back now. Bears are out. You should not be here without a pistol.”
Tony stepped close to me, lowered his voice. “My grandfather expects that you will do what he says.” He exchanged a few words with his grandfather, who nodded one time, then climbed back on his Honda. He started it up, smiled a gap-toothed smile and lifted his hand to wave as he pulled away.
Tony glanced at the space on the seat behind him. “Come on. I will show you something.”
He flicked his wrist and we surged onto a track away from the beach, inland and north of the village. The sun was low, flat summer daylight finally giving way to evening. We passed fiery fields of flowers, cut through corridors of tall grass, whipping by, blotting out everything but the wide, wide sky above. I leaned into the space behind him, holding onto the rack behind me for balance. He smelled of woodsmoke and seawater; I resisted the urge to rest my cheek against the rough fabric of his coat, to close my eyes and breathe him in.
We turned onto a narrow path and began to climb, up and up, turning sharply, switching back and forth. I let go of the rack and took hold of Tony, felt the muscles over his hipbones shifting as he wrenched the handlebars left, then right. I closed my eyes, feeling the vibration of the motor, the cool air slipping under my jacket, his body moving beneath my hands. We burst over the ridge, and there below us, the village in the bottom of a wide bowl of coastal flatland. I could see my cabin, and the rocks I had hiked to, and far away in the other direction, the two mountains above the mouth of the Kametalook. Tony cut the engine, and I slid off the Honda into quiet so sudden and complete, it was a moment before I heard the wind, riffling through leaves and grass.
I walked a few yards down the hill and sat down, a hillside balcony box in an enormous amphitheater. Tony pointed down near the rocks where he had picked me up. “Look.”
I had only seen bears framed inside my television, on the other side of a concrete pit at the city zoo, or most recently, from the safety of an airplane cabin. But there it was, digging in the hillside behind the rocks where I had been not fifteen minutes before. I said, “I guess it’s a good thing you gave me a ride.”
“The beach is their highway.” He sat down, grabbed a fistful of grass and tugged on it. “I didn’t want to come to swimming lessons,” he said. “But I am glad I did.”
“Me, too.”
He plucked blades of long grass out of the ground, one by one. “My brother drowned last summer,” he said.
“God, I—I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay.” He began weaving the grass into some kind of rope. “I think that he would have liked you. I think he would have come to the lake if you were there.”
“You think so?”
“You are pretty.”
“And a fantastic teacher.”
He smiled, offered the woven grass to me, a fat green cord curving gently over his fingertips. I held out my wrist and he tied it on. I fingered the bracelet, afraid to look up at him. He dropped my hand and stood up suddenly. “Jeff,” he said.
For a moment I didn’t get it—the moment had passed before I was sure what I wanted to do—I looked up at him, standing over me now, his arm extended. “Jeff,” he said again. My eyes followed his outstretched arm down to the beach.
I don’t remember the ride down. We dropped behind the ridge and lost sight of the bear almost immediately. The trail leveled as we got closer and we slowed down—in my fear, the bear materialized around every turn, all claws and teeth and power. I saw my parents framed in their front door back home; men in suits explaining to them how I died. A postcard in the Dillingham grocery store: a hunter’s face, one eye, dark and fierce, the other cloudy, a jagged scar running through it from his hairline to his cheekbone—like his head had been broken apart then slapped back together by clumsy child. The description on the back of the card said simply, “Bear Attack.”
When we made the beach, Jeff stood with his tripod maybe fifty yards from the rocks. The bear was not in sight. Jeff spun around as we roared up, his eyebrows a gash of black, his hand smacking the air, waving us away.
“He’s trying to get a picture.” I said, although Tony could see as well as I could what Jeff was doing. We rolled right up close to him as he shushed us, slicing his hand across his neck, meaning: cut the engine.
He stepped away from the camera and stage-whispered, “There’s a bear in the grass by the rocks over there. I got a couple shots off when it stood up, but I’m hoping it’ll come down to the beach if we’re quiet.” He held the cable release in one hand, fondling the button with his thumb.
“You cannot stay on the beach with a bear.” I felt Tony’s shoulders tense, saw his fingers tighten on the twist grip.
“It’s okay, really,” Jeff said, his eyes shining. “It’s far enough—”
The bear emerged onto the sand through a gap in the grass, much closer now. She rose up, paws hanging loose at her sides, her muzzle tracing tiny patterns in the air. Jeff released the shutter, click-click-click, and Tony jumped up onto the Honda seat, waving his arms and yelling. I sat absolutely still on the bike, afraid to move, afraid to get off and wave my arms, afraid to be left behind.
The bear dropped to all fours, swaying her head from side to side and snapping at the air, long strands of saliva dancing like puppet-strings beneath her jaws. Click-click-click went the shutter. She charged.
We’d seen a bear film before leaving for the villages. The main thing I remembered was that you were supposed to cover up your neck and never—ever—run. A grizzly bear can claw right through your ribcage and crack your skull like a walnut. It wasn’t so academic, really, but this was what I understood about the bear as she ran at us, shoulders rippling, head down, growing larger and closer like an image in a silent film. Jeff was out in front of us as she toppled his tripod, sent it tumbling across the beach. She wheeled and charged again, her rank musty smell filling my nose, the hairs of her coat separated into dirty little clumps. She stopped a little ways in front of us, turned broadside, huffing and walking stiff-legged in some sort of display. Her walk said: Get the hell off my beach. She moved off back into the grass.
Tony dropped back onto the seat. “Let’s go,” he said. Jeff took one step, then looked back across the beach at his camera. It had landed a few yards away against a piece of driftwood, wedged in sand, the tripod legs flailing against the sky. He stopped. Tony’s eyes flicked from Jeff to the grass, then he cranked the handlebars hard, turned the bike in a tight circle back towards the village. I sat astride behind him, my palms flat on my thighs. I called to Jeff, and held out my hand. He wouldn’t look at me—just said, “I need to get my camera.”
I closed my eyes, heard the singing wind, the whispering grass, felt Tony breathing next to me. “No,” Tony said. “Not now.” Tony revved the engine, easing forward. I opened my eyes when Jeff took my hand, striding a couple steps with us before he jumped on. He sat next to me on the bench seat, facing backwards. He let go of my hand, his eyes fixed on the beach behind us, the camera growing smaller as we picked up speed. Me, I looked ahead, the sand blurring under my feet, my heart unraveling like a ball of string.
