Archibald Samuel - Arvida

Monsieur Roberge was at just that point when he’d met Billy. He’d not killed for years and went to his camp just to fish and prepare the hunting grounds for his sons. He set up salt licks and dug mud holes and scattered apples and at day’s end called deer and moose. He took animal photos. He never told anyone, but he sometimes got close enough to the moose to touch them.

One night their garbage can, which they kept outside with a heavy stone on the lid, was overturned and the plastic bag inside was torn open and the contents were scattered all about. To reassure Madame Roberge, Monsieur Roberge blamed it on racoons and their legendary cleverness but he began to check the surroundings looking for clues. The ground was dry and there were no tracks and by the time he saw them the shed had been smashed into and the refrigerator door torn off and what remained of the provisions and plastic wrappings and chicken bones and shattered Mason jars was spread everywhere around the house and you couldn’t hold racoons responsible for that. On his satellite phone he called a game warden he knew and asked his advice. The warden said:

“If there’s a bear that’s fallen in love with your garbage you’d best kill it. He’ll never get tired of visiting you and one fine day he’ll come when your wife is all alone picking mushrooms or your grandchildren are there for the weekend and you know as well as I do how something like that can end up.”

Monsieur Roberge had heard about relocating bears. The agents captured a bear in a trap and went to free it at the ends of the earth.

“But you’re already at the ends of the earth. Where will we put it, your bear? You do that for bears that get near urban spaces or rural communities. We could try it with your bear but that would just pass the problem on to another hunter.”

Monsieur Roberge said he understood and he hung up.

The next day he hung from the branches of trees, in every direction, rags impregnated with vanilla extract, and he laid out bait by distributing pails of stale doughnuts and rotten fruit and bacon grease here and there on the property. Then he sat in an old bus seat on his steps and cleaned and loaded his rifle and waited, calm and motionless. An hour passed and then two and then three and in the middle of the fourth hour, at dusk, the bear came out of the woods about thirty metres from the house. It had smelled him but it had also smelled the pail of bait sitting in front of it and it hesitated. The bear looked both ways in the clearing like a child crossing the street. When it turned its head the other way Monsieur Roberge, who had killed nothing and taken aim at nothing for years, shouldered the gun and buried a hundred-and-eighty-grain bullet in its vital parts, tearing in two the bear’s big heart. The bear took ten steps. For the first five it seemed normal and just frightened by the explosion. At the sixth it seemed to be running on ice. At the tenth its legs gave way beneath it as if its four kneecaps had dislocated at the same time. It had come near enough to the house for Monsieur Roberge to see a laborious breath swell its flank. He reloaded and heard the ejected cartridge bounce off the wooden porch. Madame Roberge, who didn’t like to see animals killed, had stayed inside the house. From behind the screen she asked:

“Is it over?”

“Yes. Please bring me my knives.”

He went down the steps with his rifle in his hands. The bear was no longer breathing. He circled the body and thrust the gun’s barrel into the bear’s glassy eye. It was then that he heard the little growls and saw the small animal come out of the woods at the exact spot from which its mother had emerged. Instinctively Monsieur Roberge took off the rifle’s safety catch even though he already knew that he’d never have the heart to kill it.

His wife arrived a few minutes later with the knives. She approached cautiously and asked her husband, whose back was turned:

“Is he dead?”

“She’s dead,” he said, turning around with the animal in his arms.

The cub whimpered and nibbled and sucked the ends of his fingers as if they were nipples. It didn’t really hurt.

“What’s that?”

“That is my bear.”

The girls asked dozens of questions when they got home.

“How did they feed it?

“The Roberges had an old golden retriever, Jackie. She nursed and weaned Billy like a pup.”

“Really?”

“I swear.”

“Is he tame?”

“About as tame as a bear can be.”

“Are we going to go back to see him?”

“Yes my babies, but you mustn’t mention it to anyone. Monsieur Roberge doesn’t have the right to keep a bear.”

But of course word spread after a few years and Billy had reached an age where nothing, not his cage nor his chain, could hold him, and the warden put Monsieur Roberge’s back up against the wall, offering to relocate the bear. Twice they’d tried and twice the bear had found his way back. The first time he’d ransacked the Gauthiers’ garbage and the second time he’d killed and eaten the Langlois’ dog. Ten days earlier they’d tried a third time and had transported it a great distance and that’s why their father had insisted on driving them. He sensed that it would be back soon.

That morning they kept on asking questions as if this conversation was an extension of the other and as if not two seconds had passed in the two years that separated them from the first day they’d met Billy.

“What did they do with him?”

“They led him far into the forest, so far that he’ll never find his way back, and he’ll stay there.”

“Do you think it will work?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“It’s hard to explain.”

“What will they do if he comes back?”

“Nothing. They’ll put him back in his cage and try again.”

“You’re lying, papa.”

He smiled and stopped the truck in front of the cadet camp’s sentry box. The guard, a zealous redhead with a bad case of acne, inspected them as if they were potential terrorists. Their father looked at Lucie on the passenger seat and looked at the adolescent in the back seat and then his gaze came to rest somewhere between the two.

“It’s hard to understand, but Billy’s no longer afraid of men, and an animal that’s lost its fear of men is a dangerous animal. If Billy comes back Monsieur Roberge will have to kill him.”

The mess was located in a log building with the kitchens at the back separated from the cafeteria by a stainless steel counter and a line of hot plates. The girls served from behind and the cadets passed in front in single file before going to sit at one of the twenty tables arranged in two rows. There were a hundred and thirty cadets and twenty or so instructors to feed morning, noon and night, and they were five in the kitchen plus the caretaker who sometimes lent a hand. There were the adolescent, Lucie, the manager Madame Rosie, and her two daughters. The younger, Cynthia, was eighteen and she was normal, but the older, Monique, was thirty-eight and she was retarded. Between the two Madame Rosie had had four sons who’d all left home, something Cynthia dreamed of doing one day, while Monique never strayed far without fear and trembling.

Monique couldn’t do all the work like the others but she was good at repetitive tasks and her mother even let her cut vegetables with a knife as long as she kept up her pace because when she did so she was not likely to hurt herself. Madame Rosie knit little wool shawls and cardigans that she left hanging on a nail beside the cold room, and insisted that anyone who went with her into the refrigerator or the freezer put one on.

“Go into the cold like that in the middle of summer and you come out with a runny nose!”

But sometimes she herself cheated, just draping a bit of wool over her shoulders before making a quick visit.