from head to toe with honey.
Garcia was screeching at the top of his lungs, and now his five tormentors watched with fascination as a cloud of mosquitoes and columns of ants began to attack. Diego and Bernardo made a quick evaluation of the situation and realized that they were at a distinct disadvantage. They could not take on Carlos and his four buddies, but neither could they leave to go for help; that would be cowardly. Diego walked toward them with a smile, while just behind him, Bernardo clenched his teeth and his fists.
“What are you doing?” Diego asked, as if it weren’t obvious.
“Nothing that concerns you, moron that is, unless you want to end up like Garcia,” Carlos replied, backed by the guffaws of his gang “You’re right. It doesn’t concern me, except that I was planning to use this tub of lard to catch a bear. It’s a shame to waste good bait on ants.”
Diego said indifferently.
“Bear?” Carlos grunted.
“I’ll trade you Garcia for a bear,” Diego proposed off-handedly, as he cleaned his fingernails with a sharpened stick.
“Where are you going to get a bear?” the bully asked.
“That’s my business. I plan to bring it in alive, and wearing a hat besides. I can give it to you, if you’d like, Carlos, but to do it I will need Garcia,” Diego repeated.
The five boys consulted in whispers, as Garcia felt the trickle of icy sweat and Bernardo scratched his head, figuring that this time Diego had gone too far. The usual method for trapping the live bears they used for fighting bulls required strength, skill, and good horses.
Several expert horsemen would lasso the animal and control it by keeping the ropes taut, while another vaquero, acting as a lure, would go ahead, teasing it. That way they would jockey it into the corral, but the diversion often cost dear, because occasionally the bear, which could run faster than any horse, managed to get free and turn on whoever was closest.
“And who’s going to help you?” Carlos asked.
“Bernardo.”
“That dumb Indian?”
“Bernardo and I can do it ourselves, as long as we have Garcia as bait,” said Diego.
In two minutes’ time they had closed the deal and the tormentors had gone off. Diego and Bernardo untied Garcia and helped him wash off the honey and clean his snot-smeared face in the river.
“How are we going to get a live bear?” Bernardo asked.
“I don’t know yet, I have to think about it,” Diego answered, and his friend never doubted that he would find the solution.
The rest of the week went by in gathering the necessary tools for the hoax they were hoping to bring off. Finding a bear was the least of their worries; as many as a dozen at a time hung around the place where the steers were slaughtered, drawn by the scent of red meat, but the boys had to be careful not to engage more than one, and especially not a female with cubs. They had to find a solitary bear, but that would not be difficult, they were everywhere in the summer. Garcia declared that he was not well, and refused to leave his house for several days, but Diego and Bernardo forced him to come with them, using the convincing argument that if he didn’t, he would end up in the hands of Carlos Alcazar and the other bullies again. Joking, Diego told him that they needed him for bait, but when he saw how Garcia’s knees were knocking, he took pity and told him the details of the plan he had worked out with Bernardo. The three boys told their mothers that they were going to spend the night at the mission, where, as he did every year, Padre Mendoza was celebrating the feast of Saint John. They left very early, armed with several lassos and riding in a cart pulled by a pair of ancient mules. Garcia was dying of fright, Bernardo was deep in thought, and Diego was whistling. As soon as they had left the house behind and turned off the main road, they headed onto the Sendero de las Astillas, the “splinter path” the Indians believed was bewitched. The age of the mule team and the rough terrain forced them to a crawl, but that gave them time to read the tracks on the ground and the slash marks on the bark of the trees. They were getting near Alejandro de la Vega’s sawmill, which provided the lumber for dwellings and for repairing ships, when the braying of the terrified mules warned them that a bear was nearby. All the workers at the sawmill had gone to the fiesta, and there was no one in sight, only abandoned saws and axes and tree trunks piled near a rustic board building. They unhitched the mules and tugged them into the shed to protect them. Then Diego and Bernardo set about rigging their trap, while Garcia watched from his refuge a short distance away. He had brought an abundant supply of food, because he got hungry when he was nervous, and had been chewing on something ever since they left that morning. From his hiding place he watched his friends, who were throwing ropes over the largest branches of two trees; they laid out the lariats as they had watched the vaqueros do, and in the center arranged some branches they covered with the deerskins they wore when they went hunting with the Indians. They laid a freshly killed rabbit under the skins, along with a ball of lard soaked in the grandmother’s sleeping potion. Then they went into the shed to share Garcia’s lunch. The three conspirators were prepared to spend a couple of days, but they didn’t have to wait that long; in no time at all the same bear the mules had scented earlier came ambling up. It was a ponderous male, a quivering mass of fat and dark fur waddling from side to side with unexpected agility and grace. The boys were not deceived by the animal’s attitude of mild curiosity, they knew what it was capable of, and they prayed that the breeze would not carry their scent or that of the mules to it. If the bear charged the shed, the door would not hold. The behemoth made a couple of circuits of the area and suddenly sighted what looked like a downed deer. It rose up on its hind legs and stretched out its front paws. The boys could see it then: the whole bear, a giant several heads taller than a grown man. It roared, freezing their blood, slashed menacingly at the air, and hurled all its enormous weight upon the hide, smashing the light frame that held it. The bear was puzzled at finding itself flat on the ground, but sprang up immediately. Again it clawed at the false deer, and discovered the hidden rabbit and the lard, which it devoured in two gulps. It shredded the hide, looking for more substantial fare, and when it didn’t find anything again rose to its full height, furious. It took one step forward and tripped the ropes, activating the trap. The ropes tightened, and in the blink of an eye the bear was hanging upside down between the two trees. The boys’ celebration was shortlived, because the weight of the bear, swinging in the air, broke the branches. Frightened for their lives, Diego, Bernardo, and Garcia barricaded themselves inside the shed with the mules, looking for something to defend themselves with, while the bear, spreadeagled on the ground, was trying to kick its right hind foot free of the lasso that still bound it to one of the broken tree branches. It struggled for quite some time, getting more and more entangled and more and more infuriated; then, finding that it couldn’t get loose, it started forward, dragging the branch.
“And now?” asked Bernardo, feigning calm.
“Now we wait,” Diego replied.
When Garcia felt something warm between his legs and saw the stain spreading down his pants leg, he lost his head and started sobbing at the top of his lungs. Bernardo jumped on him and clamped his hand over his mouth, but it was too late. The bear had heard. It started toward the shed, and once there it slashed at the door, shaking the fragile construction so badly that boards fell off the roof. Inside, Diego was waiting beside the door with his whip in one hand, while Bernardo was waving a crowbar he had found in the shed. To their good fortune, the beast was dazed by its fall from the tree and hampered by the heavy branch it was dragging. After one last halfhearted feint at the door, it stumbled off toward the woods, but it didn’t get far because the branch caught in some of the logs stacked near the sawmill, stopping it short. The boys couldn’t see the bear, but for a long time they heard its frustrated roars, until they subsided into resigned sighs, and finally ceased altogether.
“And now?” Bernardo asked again.
“Now we have to get it into the cart,” Diego announced.
“Are you crazy? We can’t leave the shed!” yelled Garcia, whose pants by now were darkly stained and stinking.
“I don’t know how long it will be asleep. It’s really big, and we have to suppose that my grandmother’s sleeping potion is meant for a human. We have to work fast, because if it wakes up, our hide is cooked.”
Diego ordered.
Bernardo followed him without asking for further explanation, as he always did, but Garcia stayed behind, miserable in the muck of his own filth and moaning with what little breath he had left. Diego and Bernardo found the bear on its back a short distance from the shed, just where it had dropped after being walloped by the drug. In Diego’s plan, the animal was to have been strung up in the trees during the time it was unconscious; that way the boys could pull the cart beneath it and drop it down. Now they would have to hoist the gargantuan animal into the
