and the Elephant Society was panning only to express its identity.
Stan and I had been panning many times with my father when we were boys so today was nothing new for us and knowing there was no chance of finding anything in this impoverished riverbed made it a pointless exercise for me. But I stayed at it, squatting there beside my father, swirling dirt and water around in a circle, because this quiet crouching together, this time that did not need too many words, was the closest we could get to each other.
Stan gave up after ten minutes and sat with his bare feet in the shallows of the river. His pan held nothing but water and he tilted it in a slow rhythm, side to side, so that its unbroken surface caught the light and threw it back across his face in a bright pulse. He was dazzling himself with the reflection and behind his glasses his eyes were unfocused and wide.
Behind us, Bill Prentice now had a girl at the end of her teens with him on the bike. She wore a tight T-shirt and a short tartan tennis skirt which flapped back over tanned thighs.
Twenty minutes later my father stopped panning and stood up. The movement snapped Stan out of his daydream.
“Can me and Johnny go exploring in the woods?”
“If John wants to; it’s too dangerous by yourself.”
Stan and I walked away from the river, back through the picnic area toward the bordering forest. The quad bike stood riderless and quiet now beneath a tree. On the other side of the grassed area my father lay down on the rug and tented a paperback novel over his face. One or two of the families were packing up to go home.
A number of narrow trails led away from the recreation area. Stan and I took the first one we came to.
“Here we go, Johnny. Lock and load.”
“Lock and load?”
“Danger lurks everywhere.”
“Really?”
Stan made a face like I was an idiot. “It’s TV, Johnny. Boy, I wish I had a costume.”
Almost immediately the forest closed about us. Stan leapt around on the trail like he was on a special forces mission. When he stopped to catch his breath I asked him what he’d meant by “power” when he’d hugged the tree earlier that afternoon.
He shrugged. “Just power.”
“Yeah, but electrical power, gas turbine power, what?”
“It’s everywhere, Johnny. It’s behind things. We can’t reach through to it, but it’s there and it comes across, like it’s just on the other side of everything we can see.”
“How’d you come up with that?”
“When I drowned. When I woke up I just knew it.”
We followed the trail for about ten minutes. It sloped gradually down into a gully then turned to the right behind an outcrop of rock. Beyond this it continued along the bed of the gully and lost itself in thickening trees that looked gloomy and vaguely threatening. What held my attention, though, as we made the turn, was not the sinister nature of the trees, but Bill Prentice’s naked buttocks, luminous in the middle of the trail about twenty yards further along. Crouched in front of him, her face hidden by his ass, was the slim girl in the tartan skirt.
Stan gave a short gasp of amazement and quickly clamped his hand over his mouth. The obvious course of action was to turn around before they realized we were there and go quietly back the way we’d come. I was just starting to do this when Stan jerked my arm sharply and pointed to the opposite slope of the gully where a black bear was padding its way between the trees. It wasn’t a large animal, about three and a half feet from foot to shoulder, but out there in the woods with no bars to keep it at a distance and make it cute it was an extraordinarily frightening sight.
The bear had seen Bill and the girl and was moving slowly down the slope toward them. For a moment Stan and I did nothing, frozen in a crazy moment where it was impossible to tell what the right thing to do was. Should we yell a warning and risk spooking the bear into attacking? Or should we stay quiet and hope it turned back into the forest?
The girl solved the dilemma for us. The black shape lolling through the trees must have tweaked her peripheral vision because she jerked her head away from Bill’s crotch and shrieked like she was in a horror movie. Bill jumped backwards, grabbing at his pants, looking wildly about for what he must have thought was the arrival of some angry parent. When he saw Stan and me he seemed puzzled, as though he couldn’t match the severity of the girl’s reaction to our presence. By then she was on her feet and racing up the trail. As she passed me she twisted her head over her shoulder and screamed one word, “Bear!”
Bill saw the animal then. He backed into a hollow of trees at the side of the trail and grabbed a fallen branch, holding it out in front of him like some sort of leafy broom. The bear was ten yards away from him now and had only a small patch of ground and the trail to cross. I started picking up rocks to use as ammunition. Stan stared at the bear as if he was trying to calculate its weight.
When I straightened again the bear had come to a stop in front of Bill just a few feet beyond the reach of his branch. Bill’s face was drained of color but he did not look weak standing there with his puny weapon. He hadn’t crumbled.
The bear wrinkled its snout and sniffed the air, moving its head through a swinging half-circle. It sat back on its haunches and raised its front paws.
The first rock I threw hit it on its flank, the second bounced off its shoulder. The animal stretched its neck forward and made a hoarse braying noise, then fell forward on all fours again. I could see the canine teeth of its lower jaw. Bill shouted at me, “Stop! You’re pissing it off.”
“It looks pretty pissed off already.”
“We gotta scare it away, not make it so mad it attacks. Get a branch. Three of us should be too much for it.”
Stan and I found a couple of long sticks at the side of the trail. For a moment I stood wondering if it was really such a good idea to go charging at an angry bear, but Stan didn’t hesitate. As soon as he had his weapon he went careening down the hill screaming and yelling and waving his arms about, 200 pounds of stout heart and soft flesh and greased-back black hair. With him on his way I had no choice but to follow.
The bear half turned to meet us, but Stan did not stop. He ran to within five feet of the animal and stood his ground, whipping his stick wildly about and shouting “Git!” and “Yah!” and “Go away, bear!” The bear, faced now with an enemy on two fronts, swung back and forth, rocking on the large pads of its forefeet, baying its anger at this sudden outnumbering. Bill, seeing the animal’s attention was split, stepped out of his hollow and began yelling and thrashing his branch about as wildly as Stan.
For a moment I thought the bear might pick one of us to attack out of sheer frustration, but after swiping once or twice at the leaves flicking in front of its face, it turned abruptly and bounded off a few paces. It stopped once to look back at us over its shoulder, then loped away into the trees and disappeared up the far side of the gully.
Bill dropped his branch and without a word stepped forward and hugged both of us.
“Well, that was something.”
Stan made a face of exaggerated horror. “I thought you were a goner, Bill.”
“If it hadn’t been for you guys, I would have been for sure.”
The three of us headed back along the trail, sharing a kind of survivor camaraderie, rehashing the event and commenting how lucky we all were to have escaped unhurt.
At one point Bill clapped us both on the back. “Well, I guess you know what answer I’m going to give you on the warehouse.”
Stan yelped. “Really, Bill, do you mean it? Really?”
“How could I say no to a fellow bear fighter?”
Stan looked suddenly serious. “I won’t be able to work at the garden center anymore once our business gets going.”
“You just stay on as long as it’s convenient.”
Stan was anxious to tell my father about his adventure and ran on ahead. After he’d gone Bill said he’d have some lease papers for the warehouse drawn up and that he’d give us a discount on the market rate.
“And the, er, thing with Nicola, that girl, we can be discreet?”
“It’s none of my business what you do. I’ll tell Stan not to say anything.”
