We counted bears – as if all we wanted
Were more bears. Yellowstone
Folded us into its robe, its tepees
Of mountain and conifer.
Mislaid Red Indian Mickey Mouse America
Pointered us from campground to campground –
We were two of many. And it was as novel-astonishing
To you as to me. Paradise, we saw,
Was where wild bears ate from the hands of children.
Were these real wild bears? We saw Daddies
Supporting their babies piggyback on dark bears
In a dancing ring of guffaws and cameras.
The bears were in on the all-American family,
Originals of those board cut-out bears,
Uncle Bruins in Disneyland overalls,
Who warned against forest fires. Bears waited –
Welcoming committees – at every parking,
Lifting their teddybear ears and quizzing buttons
At the car windows. Twenty, we counted.
Thirty. Forty. Fifty. Once
As I opened the car door at a café
A bear that just happened to be passing
Shouldered it shut.
Everywhere people were entertaining
Bears and bears were entertaining people.
We roamed, soon at home in the marvellous abundance.
Eagles were laid on too. We leaned at a rail
And looked down onto floating black flecks
That turned out to be eagles – we were swept
Into the general exclamatory joy
By somebody’s binoculars. I stared
Down through the spread fingers of an eagle
Into a drop that still scares me to remember.
But it all refused to be translated.
The Camp Ranger notices seemed perfunctory,
Make-believe. Through coy nicknames magma
Bubbled its colours, belched its labouring sighs –
Prehistory was still at boiling point,
Smoking round us.
Each evening
Bears raided the campgrounds. Camera stars,
They performed at the sunken trash-bins. Delight –
Every few days a whole new class of campers
Squealing for fearless close-ups before
The warnings sank in.
Somehow that night
The warnings had sunk in. You were nervous.
It had been a day of worsening nerves.
We had driven just too far. The gas
Had got too low and the evening too late.
Your spirits as usual had gone right down with
The fuel-gauge to the bottom, and bobbed there –
You saw us in a vision, a headline,
Devoured in the night-woods. One curve in the road
Became dreadful – nearly impassable.
A giant elk detached itself abruptly
From the conifer black, wheeled its rigging
Right above the bonnet and vanished, like a sign
From some place of omens. We reached our tent
In the dusk of campfires.
Three cold fried trout
Were surplus from breakfast. But
It was too late to sit up under the stars
Sipping and eating – ‘The bears!’ The bears were coming!
With a racket of clatter-pans, and a yelling
From the far end of the campground – ‘Bears! Bears!’ –
You panicked into the tent and pleaded.
I saw a big brown bear and a smaller, darker,
Romping like big rubber toys,
Bouncing along, like jolly inflatables
Among the tents and tables. Awesome, fluid,
Unpredictable, dodging swiftness! And cries.
The whole campground was jumpy – a cacophony
Of bangings and shouts urging the bears
On and away elsewhere – anywhere away
Pestering somebody else. I locked everything
Into the car. Each thing carefully checked.
One thing I missed.
Did we sleep?
The campground slept. The bears had been scared off,
To other campgrounds. How safe we felt
In our green breathing walls! Hidden breathers,
Safe and chrysalis in our sleeping bags,
Trusting each moment to elide into another
As quiet as itself. Vast, bristling darkness
Of America. Under my pillow –
Drastic resource for a drastic emergency –
I kept the hatchet, purposefully sharpened.
What time was it? A rending crash – too close –
Had me head up and alert, listening,
As if I watched what made it. Then more rendings
Of real awful damage going on,
Still being done – and you were awake too,
Listening beside me. I got up
And peered through the tent’s window mesh into moonlight.
Everything clear, black-shadowed. The car
Five paces away, looked natural enough.
Then more rippings inside it, and it shook,
And I saw the dark blockage, a black mass
Filling the far rear window. ‘Those damned bears!
One’s getting into the car.’
A few shock-shouts,
I thought, a close-up assault of human abuse,
And the bear would be off. I’d take my hatchet
Just in case. I got out my hatchet,
Pitifully unimaginative.
I was remembering those amiable bears.
That’s how it happens. Your terrors
Were more intelligent, with their vision –
And I was not so sure. Then for an hour
He was unpacking the car, unpuzzling our bags,
Raking and thumping. I imagined
Every scrap of fabric ripped from the springs.
It sounded like a demolition. We lay
Decoding every variety of sound
As he battered and squelched, crunched and scraped
With still intervals of meditation.
I got up again. In first faint light
I made him out wrestling our steel freezer
Between his paws. ‘It’s the big brown one.’ We’d heard
He was the nasty one. Again we lay quiet,
Letting him do what he wanted.
And at last
A new sound – the caress, ushering closer,
The lullaby reveille of a cruising engine:
The Camp Ranger’s car, doing the dawn rounds.
The bear heard it. And we had the joy –
Of hearing his claw-bunches hurry-scuffle
To the secret side of our tent. He was actually there,
Hiding beside our tent! His breathing,
Heavy after the night’s gourmandizing,
Rasped close to the canvas – only inches
From your face that, big-eyed, stared at me
Staring at you.
The car cruised easily away
Into the forest and lake silence. The bear
Faded from his place, as the tent walls paled.
Loons on the glassed lake shook off their nightmares.
The day came.
A ghoul had left us,
Leaving our freezer buckled open, our fish
Vanished from their stains, every orange
Sucked flat, our pancake mix
Dabbled over yards of dust, everything
Edible gone, in a scatter of wrappers
And burst cartons. And the off rear window of the car
Wrenched out – a star of shatter splayed
From a single talon’s leverage hold,
A single claw forced into the hair-breadth odour
Had ripped the whole sheet out. He’d leaned in
And on claw hooks lifted out our larder.
He’d left matted hairs. I glued them in my Shakespeare.
I felt slightly dazed – a strange pride
To have been so chosen and ego-raked
By the deliberations of that beast.
But you came back from the wash-house
With your last-night’s panic double-boosted
Some doppelgänger,
That very night, at the next campground,
Had come out of his tent to shoo off a bear
With a torch and a few shouts. He’d learned –
Briefly, in what flash of reckoning
He’d been allowed – what I had hardly guessed:
A bear’s talons, which by human flesh
Can be considered steel, braced on tendons
Of steel hawser, are on the end of an arm
That can weigh sixty, seventy, eighty pounds
Moving at 90 m.p.h.
Your terror had the mathematics perfect.
You had met a woman in the wash-house
Who’d driven terrified from that other campground.
And you just knew, it was that very same bear.
Having murdered a man, he’d romped through the woods
To rob us.
That was our fifty-ninth bear. I saw, well enough,
The peril that see-saws opposite
A curious impulse – what slight flicker
In a beast’s brain electrifies tonnage
And turns life to paper. I did not see
What flicker in yours, what need later
Transformed our dud scenario into a fiction –
Or what self-salvation
Squeezed the possible blood out of it
Through your typewriter ribbon.
At that time
I had not understood
How the death hurtling to and fro
Inside your head, had to alight somewhere
And again somewhere, and had to be kept moving,
Temporarily somewhere.