Shapeshifters

I AM NOT SCARED OF HEIGHTS. I am not scared of snakes or spiders or the dark. I don’t think I’m scared of death, though, maybe of dying. I have never been scared of bears, quite the opposite, actually.

When I was in pre-school, my parents let me roam our little farm, where I spent most of my time beneath a stand of shagbark hickory trees with a family of bears. Not the black bears indigenous to Maine, but a visionary species, endemic only to that thicket of my young mind. I called them ‘thranka bears', though I’m not sure why. 

They were shaped and sized like black bears, but their pelts shone in every color of the boundless prism of childhood. As I got older, I became cognisant that they were my creation and that real bears were nothing at all like them, but I couldn’t ever seem to cut some last thread of imagined kinship to the earthly Ursus, even knowing it was only a yarn I had spun. I’m self-conscious about spending too much time in this hall of mirrors where we make bears into something more than bears, but I’m in good company, and I can’t find the door. 

I am scared of people, though—always have been. I was a ‘hide-behind-mom’s-leg’ kind of kid, and the instinct persists. The small town that I grew up in was a Jeckle and Hyde sort of place, once named ‘the best town in the nation to raise kids’ but even with this being true, under its belly, it was nicknamed “Body Dump U.S.A.” Killers from all down the eastern seaboard would make the scenic trip north and seemed to instinctively feel that Exit 3 was good and far enough, and they’d find a wood lot off a dirt road to dump their bodies. 

This added an element of macabre uneasiness to the otherwise idyllic pastime of searching for shed antlers or salamanders that likely contributed to my avoidance of people ‘from away’ and of people in general. I’ve lived long enough now to know that most people are good, but I’ve also lived long enough to have had my body and spirit brutalized by a handful of the bad—blowing the ember of theoretical fear into a real, burning flame that runs the engine of my racing heart. I skitter through most days, a wide-eyed hare. 

There was a bear, black and coming at me like the mountain had cleaved an onyx boulder and hurled it. I was dumbstruck by happiness.

Living in Maine, I know that the bigness and power of bears, our landscape’s largest predator, deserve a rational caution, and I give them that. The inventive nature of human violence, however, our cunning, is what seizes the prey mind, not with caution, but terror. If I’m being chased by a mountain lion, I’ll know exactly what I’m running from and what that cat will do if it catches me. If I’m being chased by a human, the mind reaches. Sometimes the worst part is wondering, “Why?” The only species here that I’ve ever truly feared is my own—encouraging my delusion of alliance with animals and my driving desire to be near them. 

This all to explain the otherwise inexplicable joy I felt when a black bear charged me on the mountain. I was doing a botanical inventory for a landowner on 500 acres encompassing three small mountains in western Maine. I had a late lunch on one of the peaks and made a slow descent down the steep, southeast slope, blue with mature beech trees—the ground blanketed in the heaviest beech nut mast I’d seen in years. I heard what I thought were deer about a hundred yards downhill, and I wanted to see them.

The leaf duff was deep and slippery, and I was risking my ankles, so I dropped into a dry streambed where I could step quietly and safely on the rocks. The stream had cut a channel as deep as I am tall—the whole of me now below ground as I stalked, and my scent was dragged straight downhill inside the streambed. I was undetectable, and I made a mental note to seek out this scenario whenever possible while hunting. 

I came across a serviceberry tree rooted in the streambed and stopped to add it to my list of plants and mark its waypoint. To take a photo and get the whole thing in frame, I backed up the sidewall of the channel, my head and shoulders now above ground. When I lowered my phone from in front of my face, there was a bear, black and coming at me like the mountain had cleaved an onyx boulder and hurled it. I was dumbstruck by happiness. 

Foolish timing, I know. Luckily, rational caution stepped up as the bear devoured the last ten feet between us and made me yell, “Hey!” in the way I scold my dog. He slammed the brakes, skidded to the edge of the streambank, plowing a spray of papery leaves into my face and galloped uphill, leaving me alone, save for a trail of his heavy, mammalian cologne swirling around me and a gang of blue jays, jeering from the stands. 

It all happened so stunningly fast that it might not have registered on any clock—an example of why I don’t put much stock in the import of time. Most of us live our whole lives entirely consumed with the pursuit or avoidance of things that are over almost as soon as they begin. I mean, look at death, the orgasm, dinner—all just a flash in the pan. But what else do we ever really care about? 

The bear charged and was gone. It was fast but seismically alterative. It flushed my adrenals with a geyser and restored them to pristine function—clearing decades of plaque from enigmatic fears and a steady drip of abstract, modern anxieties. I was cleansed by this clear and reasonable fear. I was carried off the mountain by adrenaline, yes, but also the levity of knowing my place on earth and being squarely in it. I’m sure this is not what Seamus Heaney meant when he advised, ‘Walk on air, against your better judgment,’ but it came to mind.

But who knows, maybe these are just the contortions of every killer’s mind that let us keep killing, lest we return to being prey. 

It is difficult to imagine a bear as prey, but I saw it the next week on the same mountain. Walking an old skid road through balsam brush, a yearling bear passed by my colleague and me at alarmingly close range. Looking dogged and unconcerned with our presence, he moved in a pin-straight line as if compelled by a magnet. I soon realized it was a magnet, upside down, in the form of hounds, and then a hunter pushing him from behind. I recognized the bear’s single-mindedness then as prey movement, and I recognized him as a shapeshifter, just like me. 

He was probably a predator that morning, but who we are is sometimes entirely dependent on who is walking toward us and if they make us feel big or small. After about 25 years of identifying as prey, I began hunting, and something I was not expecting happened—for the first time in my life, I wasn’t scared. If I were hooked to a polygraph and asked what my favorite part of hunting is, as much as I’d want it to be something else, it might just be that I get to not be scared of people for a while. When I slip out of my prey skin and sling my .30-30, a fist-sized portion of my brain gets to relax after being clenched the rest of the year. 

Since the bear charged, I don’t mind as much when animals run away from me. I get it. Violence itself takes on infinite shapes, most of them I cannot understand, but this killing to eat, I am trying to. I hope only that I don’t steal all of the peace from the mind of my prey while it’s living, and that when they see me, they might run, but there is order, never the awful chaos of wondering “Why?” That doesn’t seem all bad to me, but who knows, maybe these are just the contortions of every killer’s mind that let us keep killing, lest we return to being prey. 

Last night, standing at the counter, slicing matsutake mushrooms, I wondered, if I hadn’t yelled, would the bear have killed me? Would it have made as much sense to him as to me—just the age-old transfer of flesh? Would he have eaten me? Would he have worked through me like he would an ant’s nest with his sticky mouth? Would he have had a favorite part of me? Would his omniscient nose know everything, then? That I loved him before I feared him and then even loved the fear he gave? That I saw all his shapes? 

I wondered, as I slid the mushrooms into a pan of shimmering-hot bear fat to sear, how could I blame him? What could be more frightening than turning around in your own home to find someone standing behind you? Someone that looks almost like you, but just off. I washed my face before bed. Standing at the window, looking for movement in the moonlit yard, I saw a reflection of a woman and wondered what could be scarier than me.