We talk of deviations from natural life, as if artificial life were not also natural. The smoothest curled courtier in the boudoirs of a palace has an animal nature, rude and aboriginal as a white bear, omnipotent to its own ends.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, 1836
It was the summer of 2016.
The fire chief’s tall, lean form could be seen moving among his outbuildings with hammers in his hand and nails in his teeth, reinforcing the chicken coop as he tried to match wits with the determined bear that always seemed to be watching. Though government control was seeping into every sphere of society, in Grafton at least, chicken-threatening bears were still the domain of the landowner.
“It is an affirmed right,” Babiarz said. “If some private organization wants to save the bears, they have to convince me not to shoot them. I have my guns. I have my bullets. That’s my solution.”
After their tense standoff with the AR-15, Babiarz and the bear began a cycle of coop-destruction and coop-reinforcement in which the shed was slowly rebuilt from its humble beginnings into an ever-sturdier chicken fortress.
At the same time, Babiarz waged a campaign of pain-based bear deterrence.
He loaded an electric fence with strips of bacon to zap the bear on the inside of its mouth. He installed booby traps, though he was limited by the prospect of lawsuits from trespassers who might bumble into his coop.
“There’s nothing explosive, a big boomerang coming out and chopping you, or anything like that,” he said, in the tone of a man who has made certain compromises. “But if you step through that window, there’s going to be pain.”
Outside the coop, twenty gleaming tips rose skyward from the soil. Babiarz had buried boards in the dirt, with nails sticking out to puncture the soles of the bear’s feet. One board had screws instead of nails, to do more damage. It had claw marks on it, and one of the screws was broken off.
“Yep, it went right through, but you know what? Obviously, I injured it. There was blood pouring,” the fire chief said. “There was nice red all over.”
In September, while trying to build its winter reserves of fat, the bear finally got too reckless. Babiarz caught it red-pawed, sitting on its rump like a kid at a campfire, feasting.
Just sitting right here! Babiarz thought. Right here, munching on chicken.
The chicken belonged to Babiarz. He fled from the bear, sprinted down the slope, and banged through the door of his schoolhouse home. Inside, short on breath but long on adrenaline, the man grabbed a Ruger .44 Magnum from his closet.
He had his gun. He ran back outside, joined in his skin by the ghosts of primeval hunters. His pupils shrank in the sunlight. The bear was walking uphill, toward the refuge of the tree line.
Babiarz charged toward the forest’s wild embrace. In his guts, a thousand thousand bacteria sang their secret songs. His gun was in his hand. His homestead was at his back, and he was meting out justice. He had his gun.
His fingertip hooked the cool metal of the trigger and the Magnum startled awake in his hand. A thunderclap of noise tore through the cochlea of his inner ears, breaking untold numbers of tiny hairs, changing his sound perceptions.
The shot went wide. The bear, sensing danger, continued upslope, faster now.
The man crossed the feather-strewn ground. Synapses rippled frenetic electrical patterns throughout his brain’s hidden spaces. Here, the land was wild and tamable; here, absent of paper pushers and tax collectors, he was law.
His breath came fast. Oxygen surged through his muscles. He could get off one more shot, maybe two, before the bear disappeared across the tree line. Finger on trigger, he rushed up the slope, the slope that was once a farmer’s field, once a schoolchild’s playground, once a bear’s foraging ground, once a fire’s fuel. Chemicals flooded his brain.
The primate aimed once more. He had his gun. He had his gun. He fired.
Free at last.