Bearskin Read online

  “What’re you doing way back here?” Rice asked, a fake Turpin County twang in his voice. The accent had been coming to him unbidden whenever he talked to locals.

  “Pickin’ mushrooms.” The man tapped a canvas satchel hanging from his belt. “Chanterelles, ’seng, bilberry.”

  “Did you know this is private property?”

  The man shook his head and said something Rice couldn’t understand.

  “What’s that?”

  He repeated himself exactly, but Rice caught it this time: “Din pick none hyar.” His drawl was beyond anything Rice had heard in the county—he swallowed his consonants, the syllables rich with inflection but hard to group into words.

  “You got those mushrooms up in the national forest and then walked all the way down here for a drink of water?”

  The man only looked at him. Like he didn’t understand how Rice’s statement could work as a question.

  “Trouble is,” Rice began, “there’s those ‘Posted’ signs up at the gate, about five miles back, I know you saw ’em.”

  “They’s somethin’ to show ye.” The man turned at the waist and jerked his head back the way he had come, back up the mountain. “Sup thar.”

  “What is it?”

  “Y’orta see’t y’self.”

  Rice huffed through his nose. He still had to deal with those bees today, and clean out the cabin. He had a schedule. The porch rail creaked as he leaned forward to peer up at the weather. Above the mountain, a handful of cumulus humilis clouds hung lifeless and inert as god’s laundry, refusing to develop into storms or to even provide much shade. It would be a hot hike to see this thing on the mountain, which could turn out to be the face of Jesus on a lichen-covered boulder, an albino rattlesnake, a single-engine plane crash. Maybe a group of compadres waiting in ambush over the ridge. The beer he’d brought out for his guest stood sweating on the railing, and after a moment’s hesitation Rice went ahead and opened it for himself. He took a long pull and held the cold can against a bee-sting lump on his forehead.

  “’S your place, ain’t it?” The mushroom picker swept his arm in an arc that included the old hewn-log lodge with its massive stone chimney, the clapboard tractor shed, the freshly gutted summer cabin, the big meadow.

  “No. I’m the caretaker.”

  A clamor started in the forest, and a red-tailed hawk shot out over the tall grass on stiff wings, heckled by a gang of crows diving and dipping. When they reached the lodge, the crows all flared and scattered back into the trees, leaving the hawk to glide downhill. The mushroom picker had turned to watch, but now he stared up at Rice with those eyes like pale stones, standing in the heat without seeming to notice it.

  “I don’t think you’re real,” Rice said, but the man didn’t reply. The crickets ticking in the grass made a pervasive sound that could have been coming from the air itself.

  Two

  By the fourth switchback Rice had fallen behind, his legs heavy, his breathing ragged. Sweat soaked his eyebrows and dripped into his eyes. The fire road was rough and overgrown with yellow pine saplings smelling of turpentine in the heat, their sharp needles pricking his skin. He caught a glimpse of the mushroom picker far ahead, waiting where he knew he’d be skylined, showing himself. Then he vanished again.

  At the crest of the ridge, the road turned one last time and ran northward along the spine of the mountain. No sign of the mushroom picker. Rice stopped to catch his breath, arms akimbo, cooling in the faint breeze that rose out of the deep canyon to the west. A mile farther down, sheer limestone cliffs fell away to a broad creek bottom, the sanctum sanctorum of the Turk Mountain Preserve, a thousand acres of primary forest passed over by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century loggers and protected by the Traver family ever since. On the far side lay Serrett Mountain hazy and plump, and after that the wild Appalachians went on and on, folded blue-green ridges one after the other all the way to the horizon.

  The road wasn’t as steep from here and he thought he should be able to catch up. He shook his head. With the beer and Benadryl he was too loopy for a hike up the mountain, and this was probably a fool’s errand anyway, but after a moment he turned and started jogging.

  Halfway to the mountain’s peak he stopped again, high on the exposed spine of the ridge where the oak and pine forest was stunted and the road more open, unshaded, paved with shards of broken purple sandstone that slipped and rolled under his boots. The air smelled of hot rock. Fence lizards skittered into dry leaves. His throat felt raw and was so dry it threatened to close up every time he swallowed. Should’ve brought that canteen. He hadn’t seen the mushroom picker for nearly an hour and he thought the guy might’ve changed his mind and drifted off into the forest.

  Suddenly dizzy, he bent over with his hands on his knees, watching sweat drip from his nose and chin onto the sandstone, darkening it from purple to blue-black.

  “She ain’t far now.”

  He stood too quickly, almost blacking out. The man hunkered on the side of the road not twenty feet away.

  She?

  Before Rice could ask, the mushroom picker walked due west into the thicket, following no trail Rice could see. They pushed downslope through oak saplings and scaly-barked rhododendron tangled with mountain laurel tugging at their thighs, cat’s-claw vines pricking their shins.

  Vultures flushed from a grove of big yellow pines. The man walked to the base of one of the trees and dropped to one knee as in supplication beside something lying in the pine needles, blocking Rice’s view. Rice slowed, more cautious now and not sure why. Noisy, twirling swarms of bluebottle and greenbottle flies smacked like BBs into his legs. The rich, coppery smell was vaguely familiar—blood and viscera, sun-warm meat.

  The mushroom picker rose and stepped away from a headless body lying on its side. At first Rice thought it was a woman. His breath caught and his skin tingled even as he recognized what it was.

  “Done skint this’n,” the mushroom picker said. “Ah seen more’n a dozen. Some’s skint. Most times he don’t take nothin’ but they hands and they galls.” He began to pace back and forth under the tree, muttering to himself. The creature was skinned naked, its muscles red and wrinkled where the fascia had started to dry. The abdomen had been slit, and the vultures had pulled out pale, ropy loops of intestine. All four limbs ended in polished white condyles at the wrist and ankle joints. Rice stared, struck by the human resemblance. After a few moments he felt able to speak.

  “It’s a bear?”

  The man started, as if he had forgotten about Rice.

  “’S’bar.” He spoke through his teeth, his voice strange, lower and harsher than before. He seemed angry. “She-bar.”

  He kept his head lowered, mumbling gibberish, and he wouldn’t meet Rice’s eyes. He hunched his shoulders against the weight of his pack and shifted from foot to foot, stepping forward, then back, almost dancing, his movements jerky and powerful. Rice backed away. He was about to ask the man if he was all right when he turned and ducked and vanished into the rhododendron hell.

  Three

  A warm shower fell on the forest as Rice made his way down the mountain, just enough rain to make the already muggy air intolerable when the sun came back out. This was his first summer in the Virginia mountains, and he found the humidity surreal and enervating. The air was palpable, buzzing with insects, and day or night the slightest breeze carried some fragrance: wet grass, honeysuckle, putrefaction.

  Walking down was easier than climbing up, but his boots landed hard on the rocky trail and his strides were long and rubbery, every step a gamble on shaky knees and weak thighs. He recognized the lightheadedness that followed mild trauma. Explanations were available: the bee stings, beer and Benadryl, mild heat exhaustion, dehydration, too little sleep, too much time alone. A combination of all those things, for sure, plus something else.

  She-bar, the mushroom picker had said: a wild female American black bear, Ursus americanus. Killed illegally on the preserve, bizarrely mutilat
ed, and left for the scavengers. Disturbing enough, though it was the momentary apparition of a murdered woman that had recalled images buried in the far reaches of his imagination. He was putting those things away again now as he hiked down the fire road, but the shock lingered. The dead bear had reminded him that what he had fled could still come here. He’d grown to imagine the Turk Mountain Preserve as the perfect refuge for him and for all the other creatures who resided there, a romantic idea indeed for a half-trained biologist. That sense of security, always fragile, had now vanished as surely and completely as the mushroom picker himself. Rice had tried to follow the man, and he was not an incompetent tracker, but after a hundred yards it was as if he had dissolved into the air.

  A shrill, clattering call burst from the forest nearby. He stopped to watch, thinking pileated woodpecker, but the bird didn’t appear. He knew most of the bird species now. His first log entries from back in March and April said things like big-ass black woodpecker w/red crest. While he watched, a fresh breeze brushed against the big tulip trees, red oaks, sugar maples. Heavy branches rose and fell in slow motion, and a million leaves twisted on their stems, showing silver underneath. The forest was eerily animate, a gigantic green beast dreaming, its skin twitching and rippling. Not quite threatening, but powerful. Watchful.

  For a moment he imagined the forest was angry, disappointed, that this intrusion by the bear poachers was his responsibility. He felt some of the mushroom picker’s outrage at what he seemed to regard as a murder. But he pushed those thoughts away. Recently he’d noticed in himself a slant toward excessive anthropomorphism. It was something he worked to keep in check.

  Still, even if he focused only on the facts, he surely had new troubles. The rupture of his inviolate refuge, a sudden sense of encroachment and vulnerability. Potential law enforcement implications. And there was the affront to his professionalism as caretaker: at least one bear, and probably others, had been poached on his watch. It demanded a response.

  Ever since he’d moved to Virginia, Rice had engaged in a nearly religious practice of keeping himself to himself, employing a human analogue to the behavioral strategies of certain prey species: drab coloring, quiet habits, never leaving cover, avoiding conflict. A change in strategy would be risky in a number of ways, not the least of which was the danger of unleashing his own tendency to push things further than he ought to. He wouldn’t call the law—that would expose him far too blatantly—but he also knew he couldn’t sit back and wait for more intrusions. Turpin County harbored an active and outspoken tribe of bear hunters, and the few he’d encountered had been openly hostile toward him. Unfortunately, he couldn’t think of anyplace else to start.

  At the lodge, he changed out of his sweaty clothes and, hiding his pistol as usual in a slit he’d cut in the passenger seat of his truck, started the engine and began the long drive down the mountain.

  Four

  Rice spun the round, padded seats of the old bar stools as he walked past, all of them tottering and squeaking in the near silence, one by one coming to a stop as he sat at the end of the bar. A game show flickered on a mute television perched above the register. An elderly couple, the only other patrons, sat immobile as mannequins at a table by the front window. The simple neon sign that gave the place its name wasn’t turned on yet: Beer & Eat.

  He waved to the bartender, a broadly built woman probably in her thirties. Her dirty-blond ponytail was tied back with a dark blue ribbon and the sewn script on her blue work shirt said “Karla.” He wondered if the shirt was supposed to be ironic. Might not even be her name. She walked over and Rice ordered a Rolling Rock, but she hesitated, staring, like she was deciding whether to serve him. He remembered the bees and reached up to feel the lumps on his cheeks, his forehead. He leaned forward to peer at himself in the dark mirror behind the bar.

  “Bee stings,” he said, settling back on his stool, shrugging. “Got into a hive today.”

  “Why’d you come in here?”

  He smiled and spread his hands palm-down on the cool wood of the bar top. He had been in the Beer & Eat only once before, back in the spring.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  She shook her head and walked to the cooler, stopping to draw once on the cigarette she’d left lit in an ashtray on the cash register. The statewide ban on smoking in restaurants apparently had no effect in the town of Wanless. On the television, an advertisement showed a shiny black SUV with its lights on, swinging fast around the curves on a cliffside highway in California. Smoke rose from the ashtray in a thin stream and curled and dispersed in front of the picture. Karla pushed the bottle toward Rice without looking at him and retreated to stand behind the register. She pointed a remote at the TV and turned up the sound. He tilted the beer and drank about half of it at once.

  He’d been warned when he took the job, but the occasional flash of local hostility still surprised him. As the caretaker of the Turk Mountain Preserve, he represented wealthy outsiders and a preservation ethic that seemed nonsensical and elitist to the locals. The hostility apparently was bad enough it had driven his predecessor to leave the job. Sara Birkeland—he knew her name from the caretaker’s logbooks and the junk mail that still came to the mailbox—was a real biologist, a postdoc herpetologist at Virginia Tech who was doing field research on a rare species of skink Rice had never heard of. She had moved back to Blacksburg, gone for several months by the time he arrived, but he’d lived with her lingering citrus scent in the bedroom, her handwriting in the field logs, long blond strands in the dust balls he swept out from under the furniture. He knew from her notes in the log that she had a particular and unscientific fondness for chickadees; he knew what kind of detergent and soap and toothpaste she used. She’d started showing up in his dreams, a faceless, petite blond stalking around inside the lodge, refusing to speak to him. For months she’d been the nearest thing he’d had to a human companion.

  He squinted at his reflection in the bar mirror again. In this light his eyes were hooded, dark. He looked a little bit like a crazy person.

  After several tries he got Karla’s attention and ordered another beer. When it disappeared he ordered one more, with a glass of water. Mildly stupefied, he was content to watch television for a while. He knew most of the answers to the trivia questions until they got to current pop culture, where he failed miserably. Six months at the preserve, he thought, and I’m an ignorant backwoods hermit. A bee-stung Rip Van Winkle.

  After six, sawmill workers started drifting into the bar in groups of three and four, ordering food and pitchers of beer. It was Friday and the place filled up fast, the air smelling now of sawdust and turpentine, creosote and sweat, the Wanless sawmill. Three young women stepped through the door with exaggerated bravado and descended on a table as though they’d rehearsed outside, gathering their nerve. They were dressed for the dance hall up in Clifford—tight jeans, cowboy boots, sculpted hairdos. The tall one with red hair stared hard at Rice, but when he grinned she turned away.

  The kitchen in the back was bustling now, and greasy-smelling steam puffed through the swinging door each time the waitress went in or out. Rice ordered a hamburger and leaned back against the bar to watch the people in the room, middle-aged men in jeans, heavy boots, work shirts. Most had full beards or tough-guy goatees. They were dirty and tired, and they talked quietly in their small groups. The sharp clack of a break announced a pool game in the back room. Nashville country music drawled from an antique CD jukebox. He hated top forty, but this was the old stuff.

  On the TV, a young woman in a tight beige suit pointed to a map of Virginia and West Virginia: “Weekend Weather.” It would be clear and hot, more of the same, the drought dragging into its ninth week despite a few scattered thunderstorms. Most of the faces nearby had turned toward the television: men with gardens to water, maybe some skinny cattle to worry about, a meager second cutting of hay on the ground. Fishing trips to the reservoir over the weekend. They were regular folks with regular lives. No
one was hunting them. Rice wondered how their days went, what they talked about at home over the kitchen table on Sunday morning. He permitted himself a flash of envy. He might as well be a separate species for all the day-to-day concerns he shared with these good people.

  He slid off the stool and found the restroom, which smelled of the usual disinfectant and deodorizer, ammonia of old piss. Slurs and accusations on the walls. Suzy is a whore. Johnny D. is a queer. All with numbers to call. He reached to flush and there, printed in pencil on the wall next to the handle: Will buy bear galls, paws Also jinsang. He memorized the phone number.

  When he returned to the bar, his hamburger had arrived and two men were sitting on stools nearby. Rice nodded and said “Evenin’” to the closer one, a gigantic lummox with a shaved head and bushy red beard. He ignored Rice and conversed with Karla about the long week, the hot weather. His voice was absurdly high-pitched for such a big man, almost a falsetto. The jukebox played a song about someone sitting in a bar listening to a jukebox. Halfway through his hamburger, Rice turned again to the giant sitting next to him.

  “Y’all do any bear hunting around here?”

  He swiveled around in no hurry, aimed his face at Rice like a satellite dish. Rice took this as a no.

  “You know anybody who does? I’m looking to try, but I don’t know much about it.”