Matt Bell - In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods

The woods, never loud, hushed now at my actions, until at last I woke to a morning where all my traps waited empty and quiet, there being nothing to catch or else nothing so dumb as to approach the bloody steel, the sure paths of stench and sign I left everywhere. Satisfied, I returned to the house once more, to cover myself again in hearth ash, and to wait for nightfall, the better dark within which I hoped to hunt the bear.

FIRST THE WHITE MOON RISING, then the newly red one, both wrongly full night after night and that night too, when beneath their rays I lifted my stiff-stitched and stinking self from off our porch, felt the pull of the trap’s chain upon my skin, and with my loudest voice I called the fingerling to duty.

Soon I arrived at the burying ground to find the floor of that clearing flipped at last, some buried bodies of beavers and badgers and wolverines dug free of their shallow plots, their gore dried or else drying. Everywhere there was the fresh mark of the bear, its footprints wide as my face, urine like acid prickling my nostrils, fallen fur crawling with fistfuls of lice—and at that sight the fingerling squirmed nervous at the back of my mouth. I pressed him back down, and also myself forward, toward the median of that boneyard, toward what meeting awaited me there: the bear rising, unfolding its limbs from their rest, all its massive size matted in the butchery of my trappings.

The fearsome beast of our first meeting was long gone, and instead there was only this new creature, lowed, submissive in posture if not in fact, its previous wound expanded, expounded upon: The bear that stood before me now stomped unsteadily on its meat-thin limbs, its fur-torn, bone-sprung body led wobblingly forward by its squared head, that skull burst through the tearing skin of face and snout. Orbital bone gleamed bright around the jaundiced eyes it was meant to protect, those spheres drooped upon distressed tendon, sleepy on frayed muscle, and my eyes roved mad too, took in all its shape, its stomping stance, its claws flexing free of its threatening paw. Its voice tore from its lungs, the sound of that roar so fierce it stumbled me even before the bear tensed its body forward, ready to lean into the angry first step of its charge—and as it roared again I heard its true voice for the first time, a speech like no other.

Despite this show of confidence, I reckoned well the seeming diminishment of the approaching bear, for hidden inside my own hackle of found fur was the same wearied lack, the same bones carved only brave enough—and then all that remained of me arrived at its test, the bear falling upon me, all hot breath and battle, and now memory again, of conflict reached:

To plan to close the distance between us by striking the first blow.

To drop the trap from my right hand, to catch its falling chain and swing it back overhead with my left.

To watch the heavy trap orbit once, then again, the only revolutions I had the strength for, all the bear’s charge allowed.

To throw my hand forward, the trap escaping my grip to slam its open sharpness into the side of the bear’s opening face, catching its growl between those quick-closing jaws of my own.

To set my feet, to dig the hard heels of my boots into the dirt—the dirt beneath the woods’ thin floor—and then, as the caught bear tried to wheel away, to begin to pull its face down to my level, to the dirt, turning the chain hand over hand, tightening it in my grip, wrapping its length around my forearm.

To hear the fingerling cry out as I dragged the bear, to feel his cheer loosen him from his hard small place, celebrating a victory yet unearned; and in that move he unbound what part of my resolve he had made, even as the bear turned back, as it charged again, as even with my trap undoing its face it closed our slim distance, intending to undo much more of me.

The bear roared, its voice constrained but never caught, and then it stood into that sound, lifting the enormous dark of its body upon its hind legs, and me with it, up from off my own thinner limbs. Its head was now three lengths above the forest floor, my trap still embedded in the crushed flesh and scraped bone of its cheek, and from the other end of the trap’s chain I was left to dangle and kick and also to support my sewn-in arm with the other, trying to reduce the pull of that deadly weight, its tearing free.

My armor came apart beneath every swipe of the bear’s claws, its uselessness made more obvious with each tugging of the bear’s trapped head, each new blow ribboning my flesh beneath. Before long my caught shoulder separated from its socket, muscle and bone pop-popping beneath my skin, and now both the bear and I were howling, our shared frustration loud enough to empty the woods, to drive every still-living thing from that burying ground.

The bear continued to stand, swung and batted and pulled against my caught chain until it damaged not just my body but its own. Inch by inch I fell, my weight dragging the trap down the bear’s muzzle, that sliding steel unbinding some rare part of its still-skinned skull, squeaking metal on bone, scratching a swath of hair from off its face as it worked itself free. My feet kicked for the relief of the ground, but despite my slow falling, the last few inches remained a gap I couldn’t yet close, and as I swung within the bear’s anger, I continued to be caught by its blows, my tattered shirts filling with more and more of my dumb blood. In my shoulder I watched some strained bone at last break through the skin, and when I nearly fainted at the sight and the spilling, then the fingerling inserted himself into the action, keeping me awake, urging my eyes again, commanding me to hang on, to somehow climb the chain with my good hand even as he moved out of my chest and into my trapped shoulder. As he stretched his length up that side of my body, I felt how he worked his own secret skill, making some new connections to bridge muscle to tendon, tendon to bone, and above it all he spun skin to contain what he had repaired, and as I realized what he had done I cried out again, all at once so sore afraid.

MY REBUILT SHOULDER HELD, ANDupon its strength I pulled myself up the chain toward the bear’s throat, where I thought to put my skinning blade to right use, but then came some cruder event, the fingerling snapping, or else something snapping in the fingerling, his cries echoing inside mine, their loudest sound escaping my mouth to be mistaken as some fiercer threat. The bear howled at my howls, tossing its head and its shoulders and me too, my body swinging in time with its movements until at last I fell free, the momentum of my bloody weight screeching bone, pulling the trap’s jaw clear of the bear’s snout, the bear’s freedom and mine bought at the cost of most of its nostril, and also a ropy skein of maggoted, loused fur torn from nose to ear.

I faced the untrammeled bear, its open roaring, and what latest bear met my looking, enormous upon its hind legs: I saw for the first time its rows of sore-pocked nipples, four across its chest exposed from thinning fur, nearly choked shut by the bone sprung through the bear’s winter coat, then the lower set, the pair almost hidden behind a furred thickness still untouched by the surrounding decay. The bear waited until it saw I had seen, and then it laid its length upon the forest floor, rolled its body back and forth across the madness of mud our tangle had made, as if the cool earth might soothe the damage I had done its face.

Or rather, not its face, but hers : She whined and whimpered in the agony of her ruined mouth, pressed it hard against the forest floor, biting and tearing at the earth, yellow teeth staining with dark dirt. How little I still knew of the bear then, despite all the other mammals I had trapped and gutted, despite all the others and parts of others I had buried, and all the dusks and dawns I had stood on the dirt side of the tree line, watching her move about the clearing of the burying ground, waiting for her to leave before I made my own approach, some leftover rabbit in my hand, and how wrong I was to believe the bear a he instead of a she—