The Bear (pt. 4)

She forgot about the two men from the cafe before she made it to the parking area at the north end of the trail. Her pack had been meticulously prepared the night before, but she went through it one last time anyway.

Dad had definitely not taught her that. He was even-Steven in having everything he needed or missing some vital component to a trip. It seemed to always work out though and she swore he Intentionally “forgot” items to challenge himself or show off for the girls or their mom. “Hey, I have to show you I’m worth keeping around, right,” he would say.

“Remembering things would keep you around as well,” their mom would reply with her familiar lack of mirth.

“Oh, well. At least the girls will be ready for the apocalypse,” he’d return with his easy, tension-breaking smile.

On her twenty-first birthday, she had called and asked him to take her on an overnight hike at the last moment after a boyfriend had broken up with her the day before. The boy had spent weeks telling her there would be a big surprise weekend of events and she had built up anticipation that wasn’t warranted by his past actions, so the quick phone call ending things had surprised her mostly in her inability to see it coming.

Dad picked her up from her off-campus apartment and loaded her pack in the back. When she got into the cab, he handed her a cup of coffee loaded with sugar and cream like she had drunk it when she was thirteen at the diners he stopped at on all of their trips, just a kid taking in the sweetness with a tiny bit of coffee splashed on top of the milk. After working at a serious shop her second year of school, she had started taking it black and she almost spit out the first sip of the proffered concoction, but the memories of those cups shared with him flooded  into her and a warmth spread down her body and she drained it before they reached tenth avenue.  The drive was quiet all the way to the trail and she wanted him to be goofy and dumb to distract her, but he stayed mostly quiet, thinking he was giving her space she needed while his heart ached to say anything that would comfort her.

It was a three-hour drive and they bypassed the cafe so they could get into the woods before the early spring sun could get too low for them to navigate by its light. The quietness continued and her desire to talk about it waned as they walked under the canopy of conifers, their boots crunching the detritus that had accumulated over the winter. He walked ahead of her and she wondered what he was thinking. “Probably about some trip he’s trying to convince Mom to go on,” she thought. He was always pushing trips and events on their mother, but she was content to stay around town and go on walks with him in the woods as long as she was able to get back to the house to sleep in her own bed that night. 

Mom had grown up hard in a lot of ways and her daughters didn’t begrudge her comforts, especially when their Dad was such a “yes man” when it came to their requests for adventure. They could barely get the words out of their mouth before he was planning whatever they were asking; camping, concerts, kayaking, city or country. It didn't matter to him as long as he was on the move. Mom came grudgingly on some of the trips, but they were best when it was just him as he wasn’t running interference between the girls and their mother and could concentrate on them.

This was definitely not a trip she would have come on, so the two of them set up camp in a familiar spot about five miles in. After pitching tents and collecting firewood, Dad pulled a bottle of wine out of his pack. “Happy, birthday, baby,” he said with one hand still rummaging.

“Forget something,’ she asked.

“Well, crap. I thought I put the corkscrew in here. Oh, well, I can handle this.” he said as he took off one of his boots and stuck the bottle in the heel and re-tied the laces tightly around it. 

She watched as he began to beat the sole of the boot against a tree while holding onto the neck of the bottle. He started gingerly, but began to hit it a little harder as he gained confidence in the maneuver. She experienced a moment of being impressed as the cork started to rise from the neck, but before she could say, “Nice job, Dad,” he cursed and his hands dropped, holding his arms extended with his hips back as he tried to avoid the trickle of wine falling to the ground near his one socked, one shoed feet as the last whack against the tree had cracked the bottle.

The grin that had been created in his success turned to a scowl as wine leaked from around the tongue. “Oh, well,” he said in quick recovery and deftly pulled the bottle from the boot, spilling a lot less than she expected. “No need to waste it all and turned the shoe up, taking a drink of the wine. She gagged a little at the sight but couldn’t help but laugh when he lowered the boot and said, “Not bad. Might be a little musky, though. Must’ve been a bad barrel.”

The cork was still in the bottle so he kept it inverted and asked her to get a coffee filter from his pack (those he remembered!) so he could strain some into her cup, sieving out any stray glass. It was enough to almost fill her Hydorflask, which she poured into their camp cups and they sat and sipped and finally talked about the reason for her last minute call.

Now, she planned to hike in and stop at the same spot they had been almost fifteen years before with the plan to  raise a glass to him. Then, she planned on raising the glass until the bottle was empty. The corkscrew he had forgotten on that trip was in the side pocket of her pack. She pulled it out and turned it over in her hands, the wood handle worn from years of use. When she left her parents’ house after three weeks with Mom, post funeral, she had taken it from the drawer in the kitchen where it had sat for her entire life when it wasn’t being used. She hadn’t asked her mother and she knew it would be missed, but that didn’t matter for now. Seeing it mixed in with all the other kitchen implements had moved something in and she grabbed it reflexively, sliding it into her pocket.

She zipped everything up and shouldered her pack, hitting the lock button on her key fob three times to make sure it was really locked. She turned to the path to the trailhead and saw the bear just past the tree-line, sitting placidly, its eyes softly observing her. She froze and the bear paused for a beat and then turned to the woods. Her eyes followed the brush as it moved and shifted. The bear wasn’t completely silent, but she had to strain to hear it.

The movement stopped and the sound faded away completely and, after a moment, her breath returned to normal. She looked down and saw the goosebumps on her arm again and that made her remember the feeling the men at the cafe had elicited. The bear hadn’t made her feel unsafe as they had, though. It had looked almost gentle, like a big dog out for a gallivant in the woods before heading home and lying by a fire. Seeing the bear brought an adrenaline rush and another memory, one of the last trip she and Dad had taken out here, when they’d seen a bear in the middle of the trail. It had to mean something, didn’t it? She smiled at herself for trying to assign a pattern to the randomness of the universe. Dad had been good at disabusing that with a “Don’t be superstitious, girls. It’s bad luck. It was one of his many Dad jokes and one she had repeated often to the eye-rolling of her friends at school and beyond.

She shifted the pack high and tightened the strap across her chest and said, “I ain’t superstitious, ”n her best Willie Dixon impersonation and headed down the trail, the bear and the men out of her mind.