The Bear, page 1
MORE PRAISE FOR
The Bear
“With artistry and grace … Krivak delivers a transcendent journey into a world where all living things—humans, animals, trees—coexist in magical balance, forever telling each other’s unique stories. This beautiful and elegant novel is a gem.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A moving post-apocalyptic fable for grown-ups.… Ursula K. Le Guin would approve.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Engagingly different.… Unfolds in graceful, luminous prose.”
—Library Journal (starred review)
PRAISE FOR ANDREW KRIVAK
“Some writers are good at drawing a literary curtain over reality, and then there are writers who raise the veil and lead us to see for the first time. Krivak belongs to the latter.”—National Book Award judges’ citation for The Sojourn
“[Krivak’s] sentences accrue and swell and ultimately break over a reader like water: they are that supple and bracing and shining.”—Leah Hager Cohen
“Incandescent.”—Marlon James
“A writer of rare and powerful elegance.”—Mary Doria Russell
“Destined for great things.”—Richard Russo
“[A] singular talent.”—Jesmyn Ward
“An extraordinarily elegant writer, with a deep awareness of the natural world.”—New York Times Book Review
“[Krivak] bring[s] out the vast compassion, humanity and love of his rich, fully developed characters.”—Star Tribune
PRAISE FOR The Sojourn
National Book Award Finalist
Chautauqua Prize Winner
Dayton Literary Peace Prize Winner
“A story that celebrates, in its stripped down but resonant fashion, the flow between creation and destruction we all call life.”
—Dayton Literary Peace Prize judges’ citation
“A novel of uncommon lyricism and moral ambiguity that balances the spare with the expansive.”
—Chautauqua Prize committee citation
“A gripping and harrowing war story that has the feel of a classic.”
—NPR.org “Year’s Top Book Club Picks” citation
THE BEAR
THE BEAR
Andrew Krivak
Bellevue Literary Press
NEW YORK
First published in the United States in 2020 by
Bellevue Literary Press, New York
For information, contact:
Bellevue Literary Press
90 Broad Street
Suite 2100
New York, NY 10004
www.blpress.org
© 2020 by Andrew Krivak.
This is a work of fiction. Characters, organizations, events, and places (even those that are actual) are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Krivak, Andrew, author.
Title: The bear / Andrew Krivak.
Description: First edition. | New York : Bellevue Literary Press, 2020.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018061687| ISBN 9781942658702 (trade paperback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781942658719 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS3561.R569 B43 2020 | DDC 813/.54--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018061687
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a print, online, or broadcast review.
Bellevue Literary Press would like to thank all its generous donors—individuals and foundations—for their support.
This publication is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Book design and composition by Mulberry Tree Press, Inc.
Bellevue Literary Press is committed to ecological stewardship in our book production practices, working to reduce our impact on the natural environment.
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
First Edition
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
paperback ISBN: 978-1-942658-70-2
ebook ISBN: 978-1-942658-71-9
To Cole, Blaise, and Louisa
And to Amelia
We did not guess its essence until after a long time.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Essays: Second Series
THE BEAR
THE LAST TWO WERE A GIRL AND HER FATHER who lived along the old eastern range on the side of a mountain they called the mountain that stands alone. The man had come there with a woman when they were young and built a house out of timber, stones pulled from the ground, and mortar they made with a mix of mud and sand. It was set halfway up the mountain’s slope and looked out onto a lake ringed with birch trees and blueberry bushes that ripened in summer with great bunches of fruit the girl and her father would pick as the two floated along the shore in a canoe. From a small window in front of the house—the glass a gift the woman’s parents had given to her after having received it themselves from the generation before, so precious a thing had it become as the skill for making it was lost and forgotten—the girl could see eagles catching fish in the shallows of an island that rose from the middle of the lake and hear the cries of loons in the morning while her breakfast cooked over a hearth fire.
IN WINTER THE SNOWS BEGAN NOT LONG AFTER the autumn equinox and still visited the mountain months after the spring. Storms lasted for days and weeks at a time, drifts climbing up against the house and burying paths as deep as some trees grew high. Often the man had to wade for firewood or trudge out to his toolshed at the edge of the forest with a rope tied around his waist.
But when the winds settled, the skies cleared, and the low sun shone again, the man would wrap the young girl warm and tight in a pack, walk out into the stillness of winter, and float on snowshoes made of ash limbs and rawhide down to the frozen lake, where the two would spend the day fishing for trout and perch through the ice.
Snow covered so much of the girl’s world from mountaintop to lake that for almost half the year all she could see when she looked out that window was a landscape at rest beneath a blanket of white.
AND YET NO MATTER HOW LONG WINTER LASTED, spring followed, its arrival soft and somehow surprising, like the notes of birdsong upon waking, or the tap of water slipping in a droplet from a branch to the ground. As the snow melted, black rocks, gray lichen, and brown leaf cover emerged from the once-uniform palette of the forest floor, and the thin silvery outlines of trees began to brighten with leaves of green against the groupings of hemlock and pine. Those were the days when the girl left the house in the morning with her father and studied a new world that pushed up from the dirt of the forest and emerged from the water at the edge of the lake, days in which she lay on the ground beneath a warm sun and wondered if world and time itself were like the hawk and eagle soaring above her in long arcs she knew were only part of their flight, for they must have begun and returned to someplace as of yet unseen by her, someplace as of yet unknown.
THERE WAS, THOUGH, ONE DAY AMONG ALL FOUR seasons of the year the girl loved best. The summer solstice. The longest day of the year. The day on which the man told her she had been born. And he made it a tradition to give his daughter a gift on the eve of the solstice. She didn’t remember receiving the earliest ones, but she cherished them just the same. A carved wooden bird so lifelike, it looked as though it could fly. A purse made of deer hide and sinew that was her mother’s and in which she kept colored stones found along the lake. A water cup shaped from a piece of solid oak and from which she drank. A painted turtle that walked slowly from the man’s hands as he unfolded them and which she kept for the summer as a pet, then released down by the lake in the autumn.
On the eve of the year the girl turned five, her father gave her a bowl of fresh strawberries after their supper and said, I have a special gift for you tonight.
He handed her a box made of birch skin, around which a long piece of dried grass was tied in a bow. She untied the bow and opened the box. Inside was a silver comb polished brightly and looking like nothing she had ever seen before.
She stared at the comb for a long time, until the man broke the silence.
This was your mother’s, he said. I have been waiting to give it to you. When I watched you fighting with your hair down on the lakeshore, I thought, This is the year.
She reached into the box, took out the comb, and held it as she would a thing delicate and to be revered.
I love it, she said quietly, closed her hand around the comb, then climbed into her father’s arms and hugged him.
THE GIRL HAD HEARD THE VOICE OF THE MAN IN her ear for as long as she could remember, so she never wondered if there was someone else who might have once spoken to her as well. But when she was old enough to walk beyond the house and into the woods or down to the lake, she began to notice something about the animals. There were two foxes darting in and out of the downed-log den with their skulk of pups. Two loons escorted the baby loon across the deep middle of the lake every summer. And when she saw does grazing in spring in a small meadow
The man knelt down at her bedside.
I’m not alone, he said. I have you.
I know, said the girl. I mean where did my mother go? Everywhere around me there are things you tell me were once hers. But she’s not here.
She’s here, he said. In what we remember of her.
But I don’t remember her, she said. What happened to her?
The man bowed his head and lifted it again, and he told his daughter that when he and the woman buried their parents and came to the mountain and built their house, she was all the world he knew, and he believed for a time that the two of them would live alone in this world for the rest of their days. Until she discovered she was going to have a child.
Me, said the girl.
You, said the man. But when the time came, she had to struggle a great deal to bring you into the world. And after that struggle the only thing she could do was nurse you and rest. She was strong. Strong enough to live through the summer and into the fall to give you what milk and nourishment she had to give. But, in time, I knew she would leave us for that place where the struggle to bear a child had taken her, and neither you nor I could follow. And one evening before the hunter’s moon she went to sleep and didn’t wake.
The man turned away to look into the dark for a moment, then turned back to his daughter. She sat up and reached out from underneath the blanket and took his hand in hers.
It’s all right, she said. I understand.
He smiled and said, You’re a wise girl. But there’s still much you can’t understand. So much you shouldn’t have to. Not yet.
Like what? she asked.
Well, like how even after all these years, years in which I’ve had you to think about every minute of every day, I still think of her. I still miss her and wish she were here.
The girl lay back down on the pillow.
Will I miss you one day? she asked.
One day, the man said.
The girl was quiet then and the man thought she might have fallen asleep, but she asked again into the dark, Are you sad that you have me instead?
Oh no, not for a moment! the man answered in a voice too loud for the room, and held the girl’s hand tighter. Not for one moment. You see, you are the joy I have beyond any sadness or wish that remains for what once was. Without you …
His voice trailed off and he stared down at the floor, then back at his daughter.
Without you I’d be nothing but alone, he said.
And without you I’d be alone, said the girl.
A hint of moonlight had begun to creep with the summer dusk into the house through the window, and the man could see traces of the woman in the face of the girl.
I know what we’ll do, he said. Tomorrow we’ll climb to the top of the mountain where your mother is resting. She loved the mountain. She used to say the summit looked like a bear. I want you to see it, too. Would you like that?
Yes, said the girl.
Good, the man whispered, and kissed her on the forehead a second time and tucked her in tight. Then rest well. Tomorrow we have a big climb.
The girl rolled over and huddled beneath her blanket, and before the moonlight had left the window she was asleep.
SHE WOKE AT DAWN TO THE SONGS OF A GRAY catbird and walked into the kitchen, where her father was making a breakfast of dried apple slices and mint-leaf tea.
It’s a beautiful morning, he said to his daughter. Eat and we’ll go.
The girl rubbed her eyes and sat down at the table. She had awakened several times in the night and had not slept well. She had had a dream in which she was lost somewhere between the summit of the mountain that stands alone and home. But if she was uncertain about whether she could or even wanted to make the climb that morning, she kept these thoughts to herself. The man said her mother lay in the earth on the top of a mountain, and so she would try as hard as she could to get there for her as much as for him. She ate in silence, drank her tea, and filled a gourd with water. Then she put on her thick deerskin shoes for moving over rocks and said, I’m ready.
THERE WAS A PATH. NOT WORN BUT DISCERNIBLE. The first stretch of it was no more difficult than the walk to the house from the water’s edge. As they climbed, though, the terrain became rockier, the trail steeper. By the time the sun had risen and the eastern and western shores of the lake were in full light, they had climbed with hands and feet up boulder after boulder to the midway point. There they rested on an outcropping of stone.
The girl drank water and ate a handful of hickory nuts. Her forehead was sweating and her legs ached, but there was no turning back. From what she could see from where they sat resting, the climb to the top looked harder than what she had just done.
The man wondered what was in her thoughts, and said, Your mother and I used to climb up here together every summer, but we were already grown by then. Do you know what that means?
The girl looked from the top of the mountain back at her father, and said, That I’m stronger than you.
Yes, the man said, and laughed. And I have a feeling you always will be.
He stood and shifted the contents of the pack in which he carried the things he always took when he left the house. Knife, flint and steel, bone needle and sinew line, tree nuts, and his own gourd filled with water.
We’ll rest one more time, he said, and set off up the mountain.
His daughter rose and followed.
THEY REACHED A CRAGGY LEDGE AT THE BASE OF the summit after noon, by the man’s reckoning. The air was cool, the sky cloudless and bright. A strong and steady breeze whipped the leather skins they wore at their elbows and backs and they stared at an eagle drifting on a thermal like a lone and defiant leaf in autumn. All the world they knew lay spread out at their feet. Mountainside. Forest. Lake.
The girl asked her father if they could see the house, and she followed his sight line to where he pointed out a small patch of white oak shingles on the back pitch of what was the roof, visible against the never-ending cover of green and the thin trail of smoke that rose from the fire in the hearth. Then she turned to look up at the summit, no more than twenty long strides away, its jagged rock bereft of trees and exposed to countless days and nights of sun, snow, wind, and rain. Behind it was only sky, so that in profile the shape of that summit looked to her, too, like the head of a bear staring into the blue. And off to the side, as though on a shoulder of that head, she saw a cairn of rocks, on top of which was perched a large flat stone. She could feel her sweat cool as the wind pushed against her arms and chest, looked over at her father, and pointed to the pile. He nodded and they made those last strides together.
The cairn was wide but no taller than a scrub pine. The flat stone that lay across it looked like a table, the surface smooth and empty of adornment. The girl remained standing at a distance, wondering how her father had lifted the stone and placed it there.
Go ahead, he said. You can touch it.
She walked forward and placed her hands on the marker, feeling for any words or carvings she might not have seen but might yet be present.
Is she just beneath the rocks? the girl asked over her shoulder.
No, said the man. She’s buried in the ground below. The remains of her. As far down as I could dig. I wanted nothing to disturb her.
Her hand still floated over the top of the stone.
How did you move this by yourself? she asked.
I don’t know, he said. I only remember it was an autumn day when I started, and snowing when I finished and walked back down the mountain with you.
With me?
Yes. On my back. In this same pack.
And it took you that long?
No. Things change that fast.
Tell me, she said.
So they sat down against the cairn of rocks on the side sheltered by the wind, and the man took a deep breath and told the girl that on the morning he woke and found that the woman had died in her sleep, he felt her great struggle had finally lifted and he lay next to her for a long time until he knew what it was he had to do. He took the girl from her crib, gave her water and mashed beets he had cooked the night before, put her in the pack he had made to carry her, and began to gather wood of all sizes, beginning with sticks and limbs, then branches and whole logs from trees he had found fallen in the forest. With these he made an enormous pile on the lakeshore, placing the driest and thinnest on the bottom and the logs and limbs that would make up her bier on top. He stopped only to feed the girl, and it was twilight when he was done. Then he walked back to the house and carried the body of the woman in her blanket down to the beach, placed her at the top of the heap, and set fire to it as the stars were beginning to emerge in the sky.
