WHEN IT CAME LOOKING for me I was in the hollow stump by Turtle Creek at the spot where the deep pool was hidden by low hanging bushes, where the fishing was the very best and only my brother and I figured we knew of it. Now, in spring, the stump blossomed purple and yellow violets so profusely that it became something holy and worth pondering. Come fall, the stump was flagrantly, shamefully red in a coat of dying leaves from the surrounding trees. This was my stump, where I stored my few illicit treasures: the lipstick my mother smuggled home for me in a bag of rice; the scrap of red velvet that Bertha Moses tucked in my pocket as she left the house on the day of my fifteenth birthday; the violet perfume I received as my gift at the Christmas pageant the year before; and the bottle of clear nail polish my father threw into the manure pile after he caught me using it behind the house, the bottle I had salvaged, washed, and spirited away.

I was in there, hiding, my knees up to my nose, listening to the sound of it rushing, crashing through the bush, coming for me. A cobweb stretched over my face, an ant roamed over the valleys in my skirt, spiders invaded my hair, and an itch started on my nose and traveled to my arm, but I stayed still. I closed my eyes and willed it away, and after a while the sound of crashing did move off. It became nothing but wind playing tricks on me, a deer I scared up with my own fear.

I waited, listening, until my leg cramped up, then climbed from the stump and wiped off my skirt. The weight of my body had pushed the perfume bottle and lipstick into the earth. I brushed off the scrap of velvet, smoothed it across my face, and rubbed it down the inside of my bare leg. I imagined I was touched that way, by a city man — no farmer’s hands were like velvet — a man who worked in an office with clean papers, whose polished heels clicked along the pavement, and whose hands never dug into manure.

I opened the bottle of violets and sniffed them, took off my rubber boots and socks and touched a little perfume to the cracked soles of my feet where my father wouldn’t have a chance to smell anything sweet after I’d done with chores. I rolled up my sleeves and applied a blush of red lipstick to the inside crook of my arm, then kissed those secret lips. I leaned against the stump with my skirt hiked up and my bare legs open like a whore and wished for nylons and red shoes, a pretty dress for dancing. Once the weather warmed up I went around barelegged most of the time. Now, with the war on, silk, like all good things, was rationed and wouldn’t be wasted on a girl my age. Nylons were expensive and hard to get. Even my mother didn’t own a pair of nylons. I looked out over the creek at the sun shining off the sprouting leaves and breathed in the too sweet scent of my feet. The perfume had gone a little bad, maybe, from all that time in the stump, but it was my perfume on my feet and my father didn’t know a thing about it. After a while I hid away my little bottles and the red velvet as soft as a city man’s skin, washed the perfume from my hands in the water, and followed the creek home.

Turtle Creek was a shallow, fast-moving stream, except for the pool at the hollow stump, and was filled with large smooth stones that I could skip across without getting my feet wet. Where it wound through our property, the stream was overhung with hemlock, alder, and pussy willow, and framed with watercress and forget-me-not. Violets and wild strawberries were slow-moving scavengers licking up everything dead along the creek shore: fallen trees, the mess of dead leaves turning to dirt, and the heap that, the summer before, had been a dead squirrel possessed by squirming white maggots.

I heard it again in the bush, where the path split from the creek and headed back to the farm. I held my breath and listened. It could be anything: a man like the ones my mother’s friend Mrs. Bell warned of, who would catch a girl in the bush and do unspeakable things to her. Or a bear gone crazy, like the bear that had killed Sarah Kemp just that week, or like the one that attacked our sheep camp in June of the year before.

It was after that bear attack that my father sold the sheep and went into dairy cows. We had spent the late spring and much of the summer living out of a tent on Adams Plateau or Queest Mountain, herding sheep from one grazing area to the next. We all slept together — my mother, father, Daniel, and myself — in a big stiff canvas tent, on bedrolls of canvas over balsam fir boughs. The tent, our clothes, and our hair were fragrant with balsam for the whole summer. The night the grizzly attacked our camp, the dogs woke us, and we left the tent together as a continuous black shadow. We were already dressed because on the mountain we slept in the clothes we spent our days in. Each of us, except my mother, had a gun in hand. It was a clear night with a quarter moon that reflected off the backs of the sheep.

The sheep were running. In their midst a great bear rose up on its hind legs, roaring and swatting. The sheepdogs were on him, but the bear paid them little mind. As my father aimed his rifle and tried to call back the dogs, the grizzly wrapped his huge jaws around the head of a full-grown ewe and shook her from side to side as a coyote shakes his prey. My father fired, and fired again, missing both times. The grizzly dropped the ewe and charged, first at the dogs and then at us.

“Oh Jesus,” said my father. “Get down! Get down!”

My mother and father and Dan flung themselves to the ground, but I lost my head and ran back towards the tent and the great black shape chased me, snuffing and rank. I tripped and fell. My brother and father fired in the air, afraid of aiming in the dark and hitting me, but out of panic I aimed from the ground, where I had fallen, and fired at the bear. It was foolish because the little rifle I had would only annoy a monster that size. Yet I know I hit the bear because he howled, horribly, and ran off into the bush behind the tent, pursued by the dogs.

My father was the first to reach me. He fell to his knees beside me and took my shoulders up in his arms and all but shook me in panic. “You all right?” he said. “You all right?”

“I got him,” I said.

“Sure you got him,” he said.

My father left me to my mother’s care and called off the dogs and told Dan and me to stay put with Mum and to keep a sharp eye out. He marched through the white ghosts in the bedding ground and into black.

Dan and I fiddled with our guns as we waited, turning and aiming at every rustle we heard in the bush.

“That was stupid,” said Dan. “We would have had it.”

“I got it,” I said. “I know I did.”

“With that gun, all it’s got is a scratch.”

“Well, if I had a better rifle, that bear would be dead.”

“You can’t hit nothing.”

“Enough,” said my mother. “Stay sharp.”

One shot sounded that made us all stand taller. Then my father came back the way he’d left, across the bedding grounds behind the tent, a black shadow against all those white sheep. My mother lifted the lantern to him. He was shaking and covered in bits of undergrowth and had strange clawlike scratches down each side of his face. Against the darkness his eyes looked big and crazy before he held his hand up against the light.

My mother lowered the lantern. “John, what’s happened?” she said.

My father didn’t acknowledge her, didn’t answer. He stumbled around in front of the tent for a time, and I watched him at it, growing scared. Dan took him by the arm and tried to get him to sit down on a stump, but he pulled away.

“Did you get him?” Dan said.

“I don’t know,” said my father. “So dark. Something came after me. I shot it. I think I shot it.”

We watched for the grizzly all that night, but he didn’t return. The next day Dan and my father tracked the bear’s trail of blood for three miles to a patch of thick bush before giving up. There were too many stories of bears ambushing hunters for them to push farther. We never found the body of the bear, but then we never would. Bears bury their dead, just as they bury their kill.

The grizzly attack on our camp shook us all. My mother wouldn’t let us out of her sight. My brother woke shouting. My father went silent and moody and sat around the camp with his gun over his knees eating whole legs of lamb, whole pots of stew, at a time. We watched him eat, amazed. A week after the grizzly attack, my father drove his entire flock of Corriedales to Salmon Arm, loaded them on a freight for Vancouver, and sold the dogs to a sheep trader named Currie. A month later my father went back to Currie and bought a handful of knotheaded, fence-breaking, black-faced Suffolk from him because he couldn’t think well of himself without sheep and because they were going for next to nothing. When he bought ten Jersey cows from Ferguson to begin his dairy, he put an end to those glorious summers we spent wandering the mountains and began, wholeheartedly, his career of unhappiness.

I was fourteen last summer when the bear attacked, and so a lifetime of those summers on Adam’s Plateau, Hunter’s Range, and Queest had firmly fixed the need in my body to wander. Although I now hiked only within the hilly range that encompassed Turtle Valley, and though I now took my gun almost every time I left the house, I still had reason to fear, even here, by Turtle Creek. Sarah Kemp, who’d been killed by a bear that week, was a girl my age. I’d be going to her funeral in a day. So it was that with every rustle in the undergrowth my body tensed, with every crack in the bush I listened. But this time, this time, the sound of something following became a shushing through the grass, my fear at play. I let out my breath and kept on my way, back home.

The sky over the farm was ablaze with birds. Seagulls and crows jabbered and cawed over the barn, the manure pile, the stack of lumber and fence posts, and the heap of rocks that marked the graves of the homesteaders’ children. Starlings chattered on the poplar that grew through the front end of my father’s old Ford truck. Barn swallows darted between the handful of ewes in the orchard pasture that bordered on the Swede’s property, and over the lake of violet flax past the house. They looped up and formed a circle in the sky for an instant, before diving down for insects between the bodies of the sheep. Swallows zoomed over the heads of my father, my brother, and our hired men, Dennis and Filthy Billy, as they coiled alfalfa hay into haycocks, by hand, with pitchforks. The starlings in the poplar flew up in a great breath, then landed on the roof of the house, enraging the rooster into crowing, and sending the little black lizards that lived around the yard scuttling into hiding. The chatter of birds was deafening, and because of them, I knew we had guests.