Emory's Gift Read online

  To my parents, Bill and Monsie Cameron,

  who never lost faith and often had to put their money where their mouths were to prove it. Because of you, I’m me.

  contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments, Explanations, and Excuses

  Also by W. Bruce Cameron from Tom Doherty Associates

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  I THOUGHT I saw Emory today.

  He’d be pretty old for a grizzly bear: I last saw him when I was in the eighth grade, slightly more than twenty-five years ago. Male grizzlies can certainly live into their late twenties, but it’s not typical, and had I not been so excited I would have realized that the huge male I spotted clambering out of the river was simply too spry to be who I thought he was.

  Though I am a bear biologist by education and training, I’ve spent most of the past year examining dirt, of all things. Specifically, the dirt on the banks of rivers where bears congregate.

  Ursus arctos horribilis, the great grizzly, is normally reclusive and shy, but he abandons his antisocial ways to stand virtually shoulder-to-shoulder with other bears during a salmon run. Bear etiquette demands they keep their fishing grounds pristine, so when it comes time to relieve themselves they wander up on shore—hence my interest in dirt.

  My name is Charlie Hall, and I’m an expert in the proverbial question “Does a bear poop in the woods?” Yes, yes, he does; and his droppings, rich with nitrogen from salmon and seeds from all the berries he consumes of a summer, create a fecund stew along the riverbanks, leading to incredible biodiversity and trees fully 20 percent taller than their less richly endowed cousins growing farther inland. The bears hunt for grubs, turning the soil like farmers. Grizzlies, I tell anyone who will listen, are nature’s gardeners.

  The question, you see, is not what a bear does in the woods but, rather, what good does a grizzly bear do when he gets there? To those of us engaged in a desperate attempt to save the species from extinction, the answer to this question is crucial.

  My back had been complaining for about an hour when I screwed the top on the last container of soil, dumped my heavy tool belt to the ground, and stretched with a groan. It was at that moment, my hands reaching up to the sky as if in supplication, when I caught sight of a massive bear, eight hundred pounds and more than four feet tall at the shoulder. He was a male, a bear I’d never seen before, rearing up on the bank of the Clearwater River in Montana, standing in low grass. His fur was silver tipped, “grizzled,” and his head was broad. His nose was high—probably sniffing me, because the forty yards separating us was nothing to a creature whose sense of smell was nearly as sharp as a hound dog’s. The bear was on my side of the river, his face mostly turned away from me, but there was something in his profile, something in the way he stood …

  “Emory!” I shocked myself by yelling. I clumsily stood, pushing the brush away from my face. “Emory!”

  If I were to write a book on how to behave around an animal so powerful he can kill an elk with one blow, rule one would have to be: Don’t ever yell at a grizzly. Rule two would be: Don’t ever startle a grizzly. And rule three: well, if you were stupid enough to chase a grizzly bear, as I was doing, a book probably wouldn’t be of much use to you. But certainly rule three would be: Don’t ever, ever run after one.

  I’ve read that the chances of a person dying from a bear attack are about the same as a person dying from a lightning strike. I’ve always thought, though, that if you actually are hit by lightning, your odds of dying from it go up dramatically. The same might be said about the mighty grizzly, an amazing, top-of-the-food-chain predator with astoundingly sharp claws, flesh-tearing teeth, and powerful jaws. Your best chance of surviving a grizzly attack is to not have one.

  When the bear I thought might be Emory turned toward me, I saw two things immediately. First, it wasn’t Emory: the black stare from those eyes was entirely different from the warm intelligence I remembered in Emory’s gaze. Second, this bear was spooked, as stressed as bears get.

  And I, of course, was the source of his stress.

  I heard his teeth clank together like a metal gate banging shut, three quick successive bites at the air that told me this bear felt his life threatened by my approach. His life threatened. Saliva flew—when grizzly bears are about to attack, they drool, adding a menacing sheen to their long, sharp fangs. And, just before they charge, they pound the ground with their feet.

  I had a canister of bear repellent attached to my belt. My belt was maybe fifteen or twenty yards behind me, lying where I’d tossed it. I spread my arms wide, letting the bear know I was just human, nothing to be afraid of.

  “I’m sorry,” I said in a quaking voice.

  The bear slammed his front paws down on the dirt.

  I took a slow, careful step backward. A grizzly bear can run thirty-five miles an hour and can turn more adroitly than a fleeing squirrel. He was twenty-five yards from me. If I sprinted for the bear spray, I might make it halfway.

  “It’s okay,” I said reassuringly, trying to calm both of us.

  The bear showed me his teeth, snapping them together, saliva flying.

  “Please.” I took another step backward.

  The bear pounded his paws on the dirt. I inhaled carefully.

  He charged.

  Eight hundred pounds of angry tooth and claw came at me with his head low and his murderous gaze intent. Run, my inner voice screamed. It was a straightforward attack, swift and silent. Run! But I stood, holding my ground.

  “Hey,” I said tremulously, and then he was there, right there, so close I felt the blast of heat from his breath as he chuffed at me and veered away. He ran another ten feet laterally and then stopped, staring at me.

  They call it a bluff charge. Among bear experts, there’s a joke: it’s only called a bluff charge by the people who live through one. For everyone else, it’s just a charge. A bear feels threatened and he wants you to leave, so he storms at you, makes it clear that this is the one warning you’re going to receive.

  I was backing up, still talking, trying to keep the heartbeat out of my voice. “Okay, easy bear, good bear, it’s okay. It’s okay.” I didn’t look him in the eye; that’s an aggressive act.

  My fingers were trembling when I got to where I had left my belt. I unhooked the bear spray. When I looked up again, the bear had disappeared into the brush.

  Needless to say, I didn’t pursue him.

  It took more than f
ive minutes for the wash of adrenaline to dwindle, for my heart to finally stop beating at my ribs, for my fingers to regain enough strength to put my belt back on. I started gathering up my soil samples. That was it for me; I was done for the day. I felt nauseated and weak, sweat trickling from my forehead.

  If he had been Emory, I allowed myself to wonder finally, would he have reacted any differently? Did I think he would recognize me, be glad to see me?

  I sighed, a bit disgusted with myself. Was I a bear biologist because I was interested in the species or because I was on a foolish lifelong quest to catch just one more glimpse of the bear who had so completely changed my life?

  chapter

  ONE

  “WHAT do I do if I’m in the woods and I run into a cougar?” I asked, starting off with one of his favorites.

  “Cougar,” Dad responded, nodding.

  My stomach tensed. It was my favorite game, not because I really thought I’d encounter a cougar or a wolverine or any of the other animals I’d ever mentioned but because of the way it engaged my father. When we first moved from suburban Kansas City to our home both high and deep in the Selkirk Mountains of Idaho, my father lectured me all the time about how the woods were full of predators, but the gravity of his instructions had been drained away after five years without incident, so that now we just ran through the list and he repeated his warnings in what had gone from conversation to ritual. He set his fork down on his plate, gathering his thoughts. I leaned forward eagerly, as if I’d never come up with “cougar” before.

  My father wasn’t a big man. When he stood with other men he seemed to be on the shorter side of average, and his hands were small, though they worked well enough with wood to keep food on our table. Over the past two years he’d lost a few pounds and it didn’t look good on him; his neck seemed too small for his collar and his reddish brown hair was often unkempt.

  “Nobody has seen a cougar in a long time, Charlie.”

  “They’re out there, though,” I insisted. There were notices posted at the state campsite that warned hikers of mountain lions, aka cougars, aka pumas, aka panthers.

  “They are out there,” my dad agreed. “But a cougar probably isn’t going to be after you,” he said. “Most times you see a cougar, it will be running away.”

  “But if it’s not,” I insisted, my eyes pleading with him to stay in the game.

  “But if it’s not.” He nodded.

  I relaxed.

  “Well, let’s see, how much do you weigh, now? Twenty pounds? Twenty-two?”

  My father was teasing me. I made a fierce muscle, my biceps quivering in alarm as I forced it to make what meager appearance it could muster. I had blond hair like my mother and the same brown eyes as my dad. As I proudly regarded the small lump of sinew I called my biceps, I could see the nearly invisible blond hairs sticking up out of my tan skin.

  “Eighty-five,” I announced.

  Dad grinned. “You don’t weigh eighty-five pounds, Charlie.” Then the grin died, his eyes drifting toward the head of the table. There was a time when the woman who once sat there weighed a mere eighty-five pounds, when her weight was obsessively monitored and announced and analyzed, all for no ultimate good whatsoever. There was no doubt that this was what he was thinking as he looked at Mom’s empty chair.

  “Cougar,” I reminded him.

  He turned back to look at me. I still had his attention. “Well, a young cougar, one that isn’t good at hunting, he might think a bite-sized boy like you could make a tasty meal. When they first get kicked out of the den they’re hungry and wandering around, trying to find a territory they can call their own. Especially the males, they need a huge area. They don’t want to run into a person—humans used to shoot them on sight and sort of selected out the bold ones, so the only mountain lions left are descended from the timid ones. But they could be dangerous if they’re hungry enough, or if they feel threatened.”

  “So if it’s hungry…,” I prompted.

  “Okay, so if it’s hungry, the first thing is, don’t run. If you’re running, a cougar’s just a big cat. Ever see a cat jump on a string? It’s instinctive.”

  “So stand still.”

  “Right. Stand up big and tall. If you’ve got a stick nearby, hold it up over your head, but don’t throw it or point it. What you want is for that cougar to see you as a meal that’s going to cost him, put up a real fight.”

  Dad said this last with less enthusiasm, tiring of the game already.

  “Grizzly bear.” Please, Dad. Please keep playing.

  “Oh.” Dad waved his hand. “You’re not going to see a grizzly around here, Charlie. Last one seen in this part of Idaho, had to be thirty years or more ago. They’re practically extinct in the lower forty-eight.”

  “But still. If I saw one.”

  My plaintive insistence carried a lot of despair that my father could have picked up on if he’d been paying attention. I was losing him. No matter what I did, I couldn’t seem to hold his attention for more than a few minutes at a time, anymore. I could’ve danced around directly in front of him, waving my hands, crying out, “Dad, look at me! Here I am,” and he’d somehow lose sight of me.

  His gaze drifted back to the empty chair at the other end of the table.

  “Dad?” Why don’t you love me? How can I get you to love me?

  “Dad!”

  His glance seemed a bit surprised, as if he couldn’t quite remember who I was.

  “Grizzly bear? If I did see one.”

  He sighed. “Charlie.”

  “Grizzly,” I insisted.

  He looked within himself, consulting his inner encyclopedia. “Thing about a grizzly is it probably isn’t looking to eat you. If it is, you’ll know because it’ll act like it doesn’t care you’re there. It won’t look at you, it’ll pretend it’s foraging, but every time you see it, it’s gotten closer. That kind of bear you treat just like a cougar; you talk loudly at it, you back away, you get yourself a weapon, and if it attacks, you fight. Go for its eyes. Let it know that as far as unplanned meals go, you’re not worth the bother.”

  A wiser child would have quit the game right there, but I kept pressing: “What if I just run across one, by accident? One with cubs?”

  “Mother grizzly is just like a black bear. She’s defensive; she just wants to protect her cubs. You back off; you try to get as much distance as you can from those cubs without running. If she attacks you, you curl up, protect your head and neck with your arms, and play dead. Lie there until she’s long gone.”

  “What if it’s a male? Dad? What if it’s a male grizzly? What then?” A certain shrill desperation crept into my voice.

  Dad didn’t hear me. He was looking at the end of the table, seeing his wife, maybe, or maybe just seeing the hole she’d left in his life when she died. I knew he’d be unresponsive now, a shell of himself, and that he wouldn’t see me, either, not even when I got up from the table to do the dishes. It was as if I didn’t exist.

  When this happened, it felt like there were not one but three ghosts living in the house.

  He said only two more words to me that night. I was in bed, lights out, lying there as silent as the house had been since dinner. My window was open a crack, cool mountain air flowing deliciously across my body. I heard my father ease out of the chair in the living room, snapping off the light next to where he had been reading. He came down the hall and stopped in the dark rectangle of shadow that was my open door: I felt him standing there, looking at me sprawled in a blanket of moonlight. “Tomato cages,” he said.

  And then he was gone.

  “I hate you, Dad,” I murmured into my pillow, the sound too quiet for even my own ears. I didn’t hate him, of course. He was my whole world.

  Sometimes I allowed myself the horrible contemplation that maybe my father hated me. Maybe he knew what I had done. The thought made my heart pound; it could wake me up at night with the sensation of drowning in cold water.

  I didn’t have
a name for it, this thing. It was my awful secret, my awful, horrible secret. If my dad knew, if he had even a strong suspicion, it would explain how a father might come to hate his own son. Wouldn’t it? How would he ever forgive me, when I couldn’t even forgive myself? I was a bad person, though the only other human being who knew what I’d done had died a year ago last April.

  That night I heard Dad sobbing in his bedroom, a choking noise that filled me with dread and fear. He never cried in front of me, not once, but this was far from the first time I’d heard him down the hall, facing his pain alone.

  I was hurting, too. Why didn’t he come out of his bedroom and ask about me, his only child? We never talked about what was the most significant event of our lives. We came back from the funeral as if the only reason we were together was that we had shared a ride, and each went our separate way into our grief as soon as the last well-meaning neighbor departed from our home.

  It was as if Dad had an awful secret of his own, but everyone knew what it was. Mom was dead. That was the secret.

  It happened to me, too, Dad.

  It was August of 1974, and I’d just turned thirteen. I was small for my age, several pounds shy of the eighty-five I’d boasted of at dinner. Our home in northern Idaho bordered state land for miles and miles in every direction and when we’d moved there a few years prior I thought it was paradise. Mom had loved it.

  We used to have real family conversations when she was alive, not just animal games but discussions about my future, the war in Vietnam, what they were building at Dad’s shop. Now my dad would let a whole day go by without initiating a dialogue—I knew, because I’d tested it once, but it made me so heartsick that I broke the silence the next morning, babbling ceaselessly just to beat back the loneliness. That night’s final exchange had been typical.

  “Tomato cages.”

  The wire tomato cages were sitting out in the square patch of lumpy earth that used to be Mom’s garden, looking like skeletal soldiers filled with a twisted circulatory system of brown, dead plant stalks from the year before.

  One Mother’s Day long ago I’d presented Mom with flags I’d made for the tops of the cages. They were just strips of white cloth the art teacher provided, but I’d laboriously painted “Tomato” on them, seeing them in my mind as pennants snapping in the wind out in the garden, serving notice that the tomato cages were for tomatoes and not corn or potatoes or zucchini. In reality they hung limp from their wire frames, the letters illegible in the folds.