T. Boyle - Budding Prospects

Then, in a succession of lightning raids, the bear consumed three quarts of motor oil, dragged a section of barbed-wire fence half a mile into the woods, punctured two more lengths of PVC pipe and knocked out the back window of the cabin to get at a case of apricot preserves (which he ate, shards of glass and all, without apparent harm). This time he’d gone too far: it was obvious that he had to be dealt with, and dealt with severely. We began to carry weapons when we made our rounds.

It was a clear, baking, Sonoran-desert sort of morning when I ambled through Julie Andrews’s Meadow (now brown as the pampas) on my way to our most remote and least propitious growing area. The plants in the meadow were rigid, verdant and strong, two and a half or three feet high already, and I stopped a minute to admire them. I had a hoe slung over my shoulder, and the.357 magnum pistol tucked in my belt. The hoe was for weeding the sorry marijuana patch we’d dubbed “Duke’s Heel,” in ironic acknowledgment of George Deukmejian, the fanatical attorney general of the state of California, who’d been known to direct paratroop assaults on isolated marijuana farms and bring in a TV crew to record them; the pistol was for the bear. If I spotted him, I would shoot him. Or at least attempt to.

As I gave the springy serrate leaves a final proprietary pat and headed off across the meadow, I thought how incongruous it all was, how primitive, how much an atavism to go gunning for bear in an age when we couldn’t even recognize true dirt. From childhood I’d been taught to revere wildlife, to raise my voice against the multinational corporations, corrupt shepherds, reactionary presidents and robber barons who would strip, rape and pollute the land. I’d sat through ecology classes in high school, turned out for Save the Whale rallies and Tree People boosters and fired off letters to congressmen protesting offshore-drilling amendments. I deplored the slaughter of the bison and passenger pigeon alike, recoiled from the venality of those who draped themselves in ocelot or wore boots fashioned from the belly of the gavial. Who wouldn’t? But then it was easy to take a moral stance while munching an avocado-and-sprout sandwich in a carpeted apartment in New York or San Francisco. Now I was on the other side of the fence, now I was confronting nature at the root rather than lying back and reading about it. And at root, nature was dirty, anarchic, undisciplined, an enemy to progress and the American dream. Incongruous though it may have seemed, and though I was subscriber to the principles of the Sierra Club and a member of the Coyote Protective Society, I ambled across that field fingering the pistol and ready — no, seething — to kill.

Duke’s Heel consisted of forty stunted plants concealed beneath the canopy of two rugged old serpentine oaks. We’d planted here without much hope, breaking a crust of hardpan to dig the holes for the late-sprouters and withered backup plants Dowst had managed to tease into existence. I was planning to hack out the weeds, water and fertilize the plants, and check the deer fencing. But when I descended the back slope of the meadow, I saw immediately that something was wrong. For one thing, the fence was down, and as I drew closer I saw that an entire section of chicken wire had been accordioned, balled up as if under the pressure of some immense crushing weight. For another — and this was a shock — the ground was barren. Where before there had been the sweet succulent green of the struggling plants, now there was only dirt, yellow-brown and naked. I threw the hoe aside, drew the gun from my belt and ran headlong down the hill.

After the glare of the sun on the open field, the shade beneath the trees was disorienting, and I drew up short, breathing hard, my eyes raking the shadows. A bear, I thought, and the thought was numbing: I’m going to shoot a bear. No rabbit, no squirrel, no soft-eyed defenseless doe: a bear. Tooth, sinew and muscle, four hundred pounds of raging hirsute flesh, claws the size of fingers, jaws that could deracinate limbs and pulverize bone. Standing there in the penumbra of the tree, blinking back panic and squinting till my eyes began to tear, I suddenly recalled a story I’d read as a boy in True or Outdoor Life or some such place: a grizzly had attacked an Aleut guide and raked his face off— eyes, nose, lips, teeth — and the Indian had crawled twenty miles with his hamburger features and panicked an entire village. Then he died.

My hand quaked as I held the gun out before me. It was quiet, the only sound a distant hum of insects and the chock-chock-chock of some hidden bird. Aside from a scattering of leaves, there was no trace of the plantlings we’d put in the ground here — every last one had been uprooted. I looked closer and recognized the now familiar paddlelike tracks in the dirt. And then, with a start, I realized that I was not alone in the clearing beneath the trees.

For some seconds I’d been filtering out a steady and distinctive background noise — a low wheezing ripple and snort of air, an asthmatic sound, like the hiss of a vacuum cleaner with the slightest obstruction in the wand. Now the sound began to register, and I traced it to a tangle of branch and weed at the far perimeter of the growing area, no more than thirty feet away. In that moment I experienced a revelation that slammed at my knees and swabbed my throat dry: the bear was in that tangle. Not only was he in there, but he was asleep, and what I’d been hearing was the steady sibilant rise and fall of his snores. But why, I asked myself, would this canny night-raider leave himself wide open to the hurts of the world, laid out like a wino at the very scene of the crime — and in broad daylight?

The answer came like a fanfare: he was stoned, that’s why. Obliterated, wasted, kayoed, down for the count, his great bruin’s belly swollen with the remains of forty pot plants. I listened to his breathing, deep and restful, insuck and outflap: yes, the bear was in there all right, sleeping off a monumental high, snoring as contentedly as if he’d just toddled off to his den for a long winter’s nap.

This was it, I thought, this was my chance. I could empty the magazine and fling myself into the highest branches of the tree before he knew what hit him. I scrutinized the welter of leaves with the intensity of a hit man, probing for a target. There, that was the cracked black sole of his foot, wasn’t it? Yes! And there, buried in the vegetation, the immense mottled hulk of him, like a heap of moldy carpet someone had scraped from the floor of a flooded basement. I steadied the pistol with my left hand, as Vogelsang had demonstrated, and took aim.

A big bloated second ticked by, the bear snoring, my finger clutching the trigger as if it were my pass to the realms of glory. I remembered the scoutmaster, the bull’s-eye target perforated with.22 holes, Vogelsang and the shotgun. But this was not the shotgun, this was the pistol, and its use required skill and concentration. What if I missed? Or merely wounded him? And if I killed him, then what? Would I bury him? Skin him and eat him? Leave him for the maggots? I lowered the gun. You’d have to be heartless, a degenerate blood-crazed butcher, to shoot a sleeping bear. There he lay in all his splendor, denizen of slope and glade, hibernator, bee-keeper, omnivore, symbol of the wild and born free: who was I to take his life? Perhaps I could simply fire in the air and scare him off. But that left open the possibility that instead I’d scare him into springing up and removing my face. I thought of slinking away, going for Gesh and Phil and the shotgun, sharing the danger and the terrible responsibility both. But no. There was no time for that. The bear was raiding our crops, destroying everything we’d worked and planned for, threatening the very success of the project itself. I raised the gun. Kill! a voice shrieked in my ear. Kill!