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I hang up with her and dial Jamie. “It is a man! It’s a man, it’s a man!”
“Whoa there, Squirrel. Your new neighbor?”
“No, the camo ripple ghost thing on the cams. It’s totally a man. He took his—I guess camo glove off, I could clearly see a hand. Who the hell is it?! He’s a murderer! Talk to Niccolo, Jamie! Tell his Mafioso ass to come save me!” I flop back in my desk chair, out of breath and laughing at my own dramatics.
“How much Absinthe did you have this morning?” Jamie asks.
“STFU, whoreface. I mean it, there’s a man on the cams and he was out there when I was out there. Tell me that’s not creepy as hell.”
I keep Jamie on the phone for thirty minutes, running my wild theories by her, forcing her to promise she will call me first thing in the morning, telling her if I’m kidnapped, I’ll grab the bag of pistachios from my night stand and drop them in the forest like Hansel and Gretel. In other words, trying to make her laugh.
Say what you will about my dislike of Niccolo—she fell for him in the days after my accident; at one point the police tried to link the accident to his younger brother; BFF-related jealousy; yada yada whatever—but I do have one legitimate complaint: he’s a boring mofo. She spends too much time with his dreary ass, if you ask me. Right now he’s producing a movie in L.A. Since Jamie lives in Nashville, they’re only seeing each other two or three times a month, leaving more time for me and actual fun.
I review the camera footage one more time, watching up until the moment the hand, and the blur of the man’s body, disappear, sometime after he has turned around, away from me and back toward the hill behind my house.
I take the safety off the .38 I keep in my nightstand drawer, say my prayers, and fall asleep mostly untroubled, having managed to partition off my ax-murderer anxiety and any residual upset about the zoning situation—me talking and snarile-ing at the commission meeting in my pathetic attempt to arouse pity.
In dreamland, I find myself on that road, holding a gardenia petal in one hand and a cell phone in the other. I keep hearing the squeak of boots against the fresh powder. Snowflakes fall on my nose and forehead, melting on my skin. When I move, my long hair sways around my hips. When I wake up Thursday morning, I remember that: my hair was long. Down to my ass. Not in real life, but in the dream.
I Google it and read that long hair in dreamland is a sign of strength.
Even so, I grab the .38 and tuck it into the pocket of my sheepskin coat before I slip into the woods.
* * *
When I tell people I run a bear sanctuary, I almost always get one of two responses.
“You? Like—just you? Aren’t you scared of being EATEN?” Or, “OMG, what’s it like playing with those precious bears?”
The boring truth is, there is almost zero chance of being “eaten,” not just because black bears are almost never aggressive unless provoked, but also because there are lots of common sense precautions.
I don’t take food into or around the enclosure. I don’t even eat in the moments before I go in, nor do I leave my garbage cans outside. I pull up the tracking app on my phone before I unlock the enclosure’s gate, so I know exactly where each of my five bear babies is. Also, I carry bear spray. Not because I think I’ll need it, but because it’s smart. Just like carrying a small gun is smart, because of poachers and criminals of the human-hunting variety.
As for playing with the bears? No way. Caring for captive bears is all about limiting contact. While occasionally I’ll get bears like Aimee and Papa, “lifers,” I call them, a lot of my charges are only being rehabbed. They’ll be released back into the wild, and if they’re going to be successful when they are, I have to try to minimize their reliance on human intervention.
I use a computer program to determine which interventions are worthwhile and helpful. For example, five bears living in a three-hundred-acre enclosure is a lot of bears on not much land, so without some tweaks to make the small environment more nutritionally rich than “regular” nature, my bears might not thrive.
My program calibrates several dozen variables, every factor from the number of years the bears have inhabited the same acreage, to number of bears in the enclosure during each month of the total enclosure time, to number of various types of plants that yield various berries, etc.
Some of my grants require me to keep physical data on the bears, so two to three times a year, they’re sedated, and I draw blood. I analyze it for nutrition, among other things, so I can adjust their vitamins accordingly.
Five bears is my max capacity. That includes three long-term inhabitants and two transients.
Harold is the oldest and tamest—a former circus bear who would never survive outside captivity, so I enrolled him in a long-term study on osteo-health conducted by a veterinary school in Alabama. Harold is leery of top hats and petrified of whips and sequins. Which is fine, because I’d look nuts in a top hat, and considering my perma-single status, I’m not really one for whips or sequins.
My second-most-laid back bear bud is Aimee. Aimee is a dude, but his owner—a chain-jewelry-store magnate—didn’t know that when she bought him on the black market. When she called me about taking custody of Aimee, the photo she emailed featured Aimee in a purple “ear bow.” Whether Aimee could be released into the wild in some capacity isn’t clear yet. I’ve been monitoring him carefully and recording data since he came to me in February.
Brooksie is a former petting zoo captive and a lightning-fast tree climber. Like Aimee, she may be capable of living in the wild, particularly if she’s tracked and monitored. Since she’s female, releasing her would be particularly gratifying; she would likely reproduce. Until then, I’ve had to program my tracking software to give me an alert when she and Aimee are in the same area.
Fourth on my roster is Cinnamon, a three-year-old female who’s spent all but the last five months in the wild. She’s here only because her leg was badly injured in a poacher’s trap this summer. She’ll hunker down on my land when it gets cold, and next spring she’ll be tagged and released.
Last, there’s Papa Bear, my secret fave. When a family in rural Virginia found him as a cub, they called him “Boo Boo.” For years, this family caged Papa with their four Dobermans. They fed him table scraps and tried to “train” him. By the time I got a call from an Appalachia humane society last December, poor Papa Bear was dangerously thin and so unruly, he was being given sedatives.
I took him in early January, even though I knew it was a risk. The crew who brought him recommended I wear a maim-proof vest and helmet, but I just nodded and told them where to lay his tranquilized body in my isolation pen.
The isolation pen is the acre of the enclosure closest to my house and my stock shed. It’s not in play unless I choose to partition the acre off, something I only do for very ill bears or bears like Papa, who have been kept in such tight quarters that releasing them into a large space would frighten them.
Papa expected to be fed and watered regularly. He’d never had food fit for a bear. His coat was dull and thin, his body lean enough that I remember thinking that first day, as I watched him sleep, he almost looked like a tall human in a bear suit.
