We’re hunting in honeyed light, moving inside a circle of mountains where Pre-Cambrian valleys eat into each other under the caves and treed ridges. “You think a cougar killed it?” asks Neon. “Maybe we’ll see a cougar. Let’s go back and get my camera.”
We’ve been walking the eastern slopes and whale-shaped foothills of Beauty Creek; Neon and an ex-player from the Calgary Flames fan out ahead of me while I study their ears, while I think about Waitress X’s slow voice and the low sound of my father’s voice, for I have just learned my father’s liver is cancerous, a tumour laid like a butterfly over three of four sections. There’s no telling how long he has, how long our family has. It’ll be like a grin with one tooth gone. We stumble onto an elk, dead under a cliff. Parts are missing. If a cougar did it, Neon definitely wants his zoom lens, wants a good shot of the cat. This light is perfect, he says, so we walk back down to the red 4 × 4 to grab Neon’s Russian camera, then climb once more uphill to the kill, our rifles loaded just in case.
Weird noises rise now in the pretty alpine meadow: yellow wildflowers, scarlet rosehips, a butter-coloured grizzly feeding on the elk’s hindquarters, snapping out bits and shaking its head. Grizzlies are trouble if you disturb them at a kill. We back up pronto as the grizzly rears on dark legs, making more strange noises, jaw doing something I’ve never seen before, its flat nose up sniffing for us.
And then it charges, galloping faster than I’ve seen any creature run, a cross between a horse and a wild dog at full bore, crazy grace and a hump of muscle like a ball.
We cannot get away and start alternating shots. Metal hits it. I shoot, Neon shoots, going for the chest, trying to break down the shoulders. The other guy shoots, our guns noisy, echoing as percussion. Off the stunted pines, the cliff, a black powder smell sharp up my nose.
I don’t bother with the grizzly’s head, its skull is too thick; I keep my shots low. The bear’s tiny eyes seem half crossed, teeth snapping.
Shots hit the ragged fur like ink, bloodspots blooming deep in the thick fall coat, but the grizzly won’t go down, it wants to get at us. I shoot, he shoots; gun butt killing my shoulder, the bear still charging with these weird canine noises, big obvious holes in it but charging, and I’m thinking now of five claws mauling my eyes, my vulnerable liver, yellow teeth clamping my skull like a soft apple.
We blast away; this part seems to go on forever. One of the grizzly’s legs is clearly ruined but it’s still charging. And then the bear staggers and slumps on its huge face, slides, then tumbles downhill right past us and it’s over, dark gums and scarred ears stopping a couple yards beyond the toe of my boot.
My ears ring, I’m deaf and stunned. The grizzly’s ears remind me of a cat’s; they’re chewed up at the edges. The bear stinks and its face seems two feet across. Its curving incisors, the colour of a daylight moon, are long, long as my fingers.
In these sesame golden mountains where our blonde grizzly lies twitching, Marilyn Monroe once asked my father to take a snapshot of her and Joe DiMaggio. Jolting Joe and Marilyn were sitting on a railing, looking at Mt. Edith Cavell and Honeymoon Lake. This is before Jolting Joe’s temper, before he hired the detective to follow her. There is a gap between his front teeth. There are peaks and satellite peaks, older rocks thrust over new.
“That prick wouldn’t drop,” Neon says, “shot that prick six times, prick didn’t know it was dead.” The sky comes back in focus, birds return to their flowers’ tiny hearts and organs.
Neon keeps talking, pacing, calling the grizzly names. Everything I do seems at the wrong shutter speed, and the bear is shrinking into autumn’s earth and yellowed grass, sienna spruce needles and synclinal rock. One shot in my chamber, none in Neon’s rifle. If we’d been one yard closer it would have hit us, eaten us. It didn’t know it was dead. It misunderstood.
I have that sense of adrenaline and admiration and failure you feel after a fight with someone you like, someone you find had a bum hand or shoulder. I feel obscene. I have to sit on the ground while Neon takes dozens of pictures, a photo opportunity, the Russian camera’s antique motor growling like a nest of wasps. I believe polar bears’ livers are poisonous; I wonder if it’s the same with grizzly livers? Who will get the scarred coat? The paws? Sometimes you find a dead bear and that’s all that’s chopped off: the hands and feet. A delicacy for some.
Marilyn Monroe was filming River of No Return between Jasper and Banff. In the movie she plays a saloon singer with red shoes and a fall in her hair. Joe hates Hollywood, with good reason. Robert Mitchum is in the picture. It’s a bad movie: Otto Preminger must have owed someone.
I caught it once on Siesta Cinema on Channel 3, back when there were only two channels. I remember she posed dramatically on a raft as it swept down a seething river and those pesky natives tore at her blouse. She disliked these kinds of scripts but the crew adored her. Did they use a double on the distant shots? Fake scenery? Is this what would drive her to dye her hair the colour of honey? To make it so much fake scenery? The press was not allowed near her. My father was the only person who didn’t know who the blonde woman was. They were parked in a viewpoint west of the highway, little more than a dirt track in the 1950s. My father stood tall and polite in a white cotton suitcoat, a relic of Oxford and the war years in Ceylon with the Royal Navy.
“Would you be so kind ... ?” Marilyn asks, not finishing her sentence.
My mother does not approve; Joe and Marilyn are not yet married and though there is a pretense of separate hotels, my mother believes Joe is sneaking over to Marilyn’s room at Becker’s Bungalows or Jasper Park Lodge. There are stories of wild parties and fights and evictions, of sour jealousy and injury and shooting delays.
My mother’s bible says for women to adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety; not with braided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array. The river is braided: on its gravel bed it separates and rejoins, separates and rejoins, over and over as the river moves toward the railroad yards of Jasper, and the Arctic Ocean.
My father took two pictures and put the small camera back in Marilyn’s hand. Don’t you know who that was, they said, don’t you know? It didn’t matter to him who they were. They were just people. Joe and Marilyn looked childishly happy, teeth evident. A scarf over her hair, dark glasses in her hand. The earth is fairly new, the future bright and harmless as mountains, sordid affairs banished, behind us. I wonder now if my father ever had an affair; did he ever have his Waitress X? My father converted from Church of England to Catholicism to marry my mother, a war bride, to start a family. Back then everyone would go see the bears feed at the dump. They built bleachers. The bears open and close their mouths. Late in the day the light is perfect, like reddish oxide and down-folded quartzite. Marilyn Monroe talks to my father, sleeps with Joe DiMaggio, and makes her bad movie.
Late in the day you park your huge American car on the tender alpine plants and climb into the bleachers set up by the park rangers. My father drove a tiny Ford Prefect. All of us took our places. All of us, Marilyn Monroe, my father, me, two years old and asleep, will dwell in this light forever. Barbiturates and detectives, carcinomas and my motorcycle crash wait in different rooms down the hall. Like the grizzly I will shoot in these mountains, we don’t know yet that we’re dead. The bears file in like a vaudeville troupe. All the men wear charcoal hats. My father never wears a hat.
The bears put on a show by simply showing up and eating our garbage, like sin eaters; Joe and Marilyn put on a show, smiling like shy honeymooners, just ordinary folks. The crowd eats it up. A man approaches with a Brownie box camera but he doesn’t want Marilyn; he wants a bear. His blond child has honey placed on his palm, a sweet photo opportunity. Just in case there’s trouble he has a pistol tucked in his baggy wool pants. You’re not supposed to have a gun in the park. The bears work their jaws peacefully, hunched in a private circle like a family playing Scrabble. When they are born they weigh half a pound. The father pushes his child. Go on, the father says, go on. Then the bears turn.