“How can you know for sure?”

Kay’s question hung in the air like a noose. Lee didn’t look at her and wouldn’t look at the moving boxes they packed that morning and would now have to unpack. He sat with his back against the headboard and wondered how the hell he was going to sleep.

That morning after arriving at work, Lee learned he’d lost his expected promotion over what he believed to be a lie. As was explained to Lee by the Bear Resources manager, Kip, “Bart is uniquely qualified to become the new manager, Lee. He has seen a hum’n! When he was a child he and his brother were fishing along the edge of a lake in the north and a hum’n came out of the woods with a gun and shot his brother in the belly and killed him.” No bear in the town west of the river had ever seen a hum’n, in fact no bear had seen a hum’n in many generations, and so Bart’s experience provided status and the bears offered him a management position. Lee was to continue on for a ninth season as a herd analyst, which consisted mostly of herding and milking cows. When Lee woke that morning from his three-month torpor he was so excited that he ignored the wisp coiling above the bowl of coffee and plunged his snout into the heat. He and Kay laughed and she handed him a towel and pushed forward a bowl of fresh fish, of which Lee clawed one on top which still flopped with life. While Lee went off to work, Kay packed boxes for their move from the swamp to a new brick home on the river’s edge that was reserved for herd managers. But when Lee returned home late that night, his brown hulk lumbering up over the ridge and appearing black against the dusk, the excitement had gone. Lee and Kay argued not because they were disappointed with each other, but with how things always seemed to be. Something they couldn’t name. It was as Lee sipped from a bucket of beer and rubbed his aching hump that he suggested to Kay that Bart’s story about seeing a hum’n may not be true. Kay was quiet but agreed. “Maybe I will tell this to Big Boss?” Lee suggested. She was quiet but then shook her head. Such an accusation without evidence could “cause more trouble than it’s worth”, she said, however unlikely it was that Bart had indeed ever seen a hum’n. When Lee pressed Kay, she shook her head again and said “How can you know for sure?” That ended the conversation and they went to sleep. They tried.

Bart was fat but muscular and sat on his perch at the farm wearing sunglasses and his mouth open. From far away he looked like an idiot but close up it was mean as hell. In his second day as manager Bart came down off his perch and whipped Lee across the snout for herding a cow with his mouth. “Watch Shiloh,” Bart seethed, and Lee nursed his wound while watching Shiloh pull a cow towards the barn holding the rope in his hands and walking on his hind legs. Lee nodded and went back to work.

Before going home to Kay that evening, Lee went out drinking with Shiloh. Shep’s was on the first floor of an old brick warehouse near the river bank and was where the male bears came for their daily allotment of beer, a habit common enough but one that had not previously much interested Lee. The bar crowded inside and out with its usual spring clamor and so Lee and Shiloh had to stand in a dark corner by a scuttle of fish guts. When Lee slid his bucket for his second refill it t came back empty. The bartender pointed to a sign behind the bar written in chalk. It read: NEW LIMIT, HERD ANALYSTS: 2 BUCKETS, HERD MANAGERS: 5 BUCKETS. Lee snorted and walked back over to Shiloh, who stood silently and stared blankly at an old hum’n oil painting of a forest that hung above the bathroom doorway.

“Lee tired?” Shiloh asked.

Lee snorted. He pawed the bottom of his bucket at the last beer suds when he heard laughter erupt from a red leather booth on the other side of the bar. He looked and saw Bart and some of the other managers laughing and pounding on the table. Bart took a deep breath and drank from his bucket and then burst into a gulping laugh somehow louder than the last. Hunks of fish flew from his mouth and beer froth strung along his jowl like cobwebs.

“You hear Bart saw a hum’n?” Lee said in a low voice, still looking across the room. “That his brother was killed by a hum’n?”

“Yes,” Shiloh said.

Lee tilted his jaw and scratched, bottom teeth out. “Never heard of no bear that saw a hum’n,” he said.

At his table Bart bit the head off a writhing fish and then said something to his booth and set off a new fit of laughter. Lee somehow zoomed in on it.

“Don’t think Bart’s brother was killed by no hum’n,” Lee said. “Don’t think Bart never saw a hum’n neither.”

“Yeah?” Shiloh said.

“Yeah.”

Shiloh took a deep breath and blew the foam off the top of his beer. Lee licked his teeth and yawned nervously with a jitter and felt instant regret.

“Shiloh?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know nothin’ bout Bart or his brother or any hum’ns. Forget what I jus’ said.” He started towards the exit and then turned back to Shiloh. “Don’t tell no one I said what I said.”

“Yeah.”

Shiloh stood quietly and finished his second beer.

Later that same night he told his wife Chicky what Lee had said.

The next morning while weaving baskets at church Chicky murmured offhand what Shiloh said about Bart to a handful of friends and from there the rumor spread like crabgrass. Contradiction made bears skittish and in hearing the new version of events some ate more fish and some went swimming even when they didn’t need to cool off. Jobby slipped from a quarry cliff to his death and no one could figure out why he had been out there in the first place.

It was three days after the rumor began that a young herd analyst named Cromok walked right up to Bart and asked, “Bart, is it true that your brother wasn’t really killed by a hum’n?” Bart said nothing at first but instead stepped down from his perch and removed his sunglasses, then unclipped his whip from his belt and flogged Cromok across his muzzle.

“Git back herdin’,” he said and then leaned over to spit in the dirt.

The bears west of the river learned what happened to Cromok and after that dared not speak about the rumor. Just as quickly as it spread the rumor now shriveled up and no one could figure where it had started. No one in particular cared. Lee regretted it and was happy the episode was over and decided to hunker down and do his best to be a good herd analyst. All the bears forgot about the rumor.

But not Bart.

Over the summer months Bart would watch his herd analysts while he chewed straw and spit and after some time he decided he knew who had started the rumor. Bart was meaner than hell, and for some reason the meaner-than-hell types always seemed to know exactly who wronged them. And if they were wrong, it made little difference to them.

Bart watched the bears. He spat. And he made his guess as to who started the rumor. And in this instance he was right.

By the end of summer Lee had become the farm’s top performing analyst and never used his mouth save biting at snarls of flies. On the last day of August Bart told Lee that as the farm’s top performer he had earned a trip up with him to New Hampshire to see the old land. Lee had never before received an award nor traveled anywhere outside the town west of the river and he and that night he and Kay tripped over each other in excitement packing up salted fish, crunchies, and honeyed bread for the trip.

The next morning Lee and Bart were up on the road left behind by the hum’ns which was empty save for grass growing through ruptured asphalt. Bart drove. Lee hung out the window and a gust of air stronger than an oncoming storm rippled through his fur. They passed under dangling green signs that Lee could not read and which became brighter and bigger as they approached but then vanished behind them. Bart required immense focus while driving and kept his head forward just above the wheel which he gripped like a vise. They stopped twice to charge the car at old hum’n stations that Lee knew nothing about, and another two times to fish and drink along the banks of the Connecticut River. The fish were so abundant that the river surface was churned white with flop and the two supped until they could not stand and curled up along the river’s edge under the summer stars and slept.

On the second day of the trip, Lee woke with a toasty vigor soaking in the white morning sun. He looked at little black bugs crawling atop a large rock. There was a mountain far away made blue from the atmosphere, silent from distance, and the tree he leaned up against was gray outside and yellow-white on the inside, and the brook that bubbled not too loudly but when he closed his eyes it filled his head. Bart tapped Lee on the shoulder – the moment passed – and they went back to the car to continue the trip.

After driving a few more hours north Bart parked the car along the side of the road and said, “from here we continue on foot”. The two bears walked a few miles until they came upon a cabin nestled under a canopy of sugar maple and yellow birch. The shade provided a nice respite from the heat. The cabin was very small and sat flat on the ground without a porch or even a stoop to the front door. It was a sort of barn-red, faded and peeled in spots revealing white primer. There was a single window that was frosted over by some white crud that hid what was inside. “This is where I grew up,” Bart said, and he went inside and Lee followed.

Two feet inside and Lee nearly had a heart attack. On the wall facing him was a mounted bear head, frozen angry, with big yellow teeth. Lee stood on his hind legs. He looked under and around the head to see where the rest of the bear was but all he saw was planks of old wood and a couch for hum’ns. He turned to ask Bart what is this but then decided to say nothing. Bart looked at Lee with a sort of dead expression, then he continued back through the house, dropped his bag in the kitchen, and opened the back door. “Come out here,” he shouted to Lee, who ran to follow him. 

Outside, Bart stood with his feet submerged in the water of a small pond which rested in the open forest under a thick shelf cloud which marked a coming storm. Lee walked out from the cabin and noticed the forest mirroring perfectly into the water.As he walked towards Bart he caught something beyond the gray skyline out above the treetops in the distance. Appearing through a passing cloud shimmer was an enormous wall of stone. Bart watched Lee with the same dead expression and understood that Lee saw what he had intended him to see. Anticipation tugged at the edges of his flat grin. “Lee,” Bart said, “this lake is where I grew up. It is the source of the Connecticut River, the river where we call our home. Isn’t that interesting?” Lee barely listened. He looked up at the wall, more visible as he squinted through the growing gap in the clouds. The wall was as tall as the old hum’n buildings in the city west of the river, taller even, and when Lee looked across the forest to see where the wall began or where it ended he only saw more wall. “This is where my brother died, Lee” Bart continued, “right here in this lake.” As he said it he smiled because Lee was no longer paying attention whatsoever but only looking mouth agape at the wall.

“Would you like to see it, Lee?” Bart said, loudly. “Would you like to see what is beyond the wall?”

“Yes. Yes.” Trancelike.

“Then follow me.”

They walked along the west edge of the pond and beyond into the forest and to the base of the giant wall. Only a few feet from the wall’s edge stood a row of white birch trees that towered into the sky. One tree was so large it rose above the stone wall. Bart patted the bottom of the large tree and said “Go ahead on up and take a look.” Lee dug his claws in and began to climb. Halfway up he grunted with excitement and paused to catch his breath. As he climbed further up he heard a faint murmur of voices from the other side of the wall and saw flickering lights glowing above the precipice.

Finally he was at the top of the tree and had a clear view of beyond the wall. There Lee saw what he had only seen before in pictures – hum’ns. They were walking around and carrying things and talking. His eyes fluttered with the same marvel he felt looking at stars in the night sky. The hum’ns walked amongst buildings and whirring machines the likes he had only seen in books and others he hadn’t seen anywhere. He tried counting the hum’ns but each time he got to twenty, which was about as high as he could count, he lost track. He swayed atop the tree and noticed two of the hum’ns stopped moving about and turned his way. A young’n pointed up at Lee and a bigger one standing next to her covered its mouth with its hand while a hush settled across the trees like a blanket and all one could hear was a hawk screeching in the distance as it swooped towards its lunch. They’re looking at me, Lee thought, and wondered if they felt the same lightness in their hearts. Below him, he heard Bart shouting something. He felt the tree shake and pull back a few inches from the wall. He looked down. Bart shouted something again but Lee couldn’t hear.. “What?” he said. Bart shouted up and this time Lee heard. “Looks like there’s a lot you don’t know!” He said. Lee looked all around him from his perch atop the tree and supposed this must be right. Of course it must be right. Then he heard the sharp brattle of a chainsaw and saw hum’ns down at the bottom of the tree standing near Bart. The tree wobbled and Lee wrapped his legs tight and drove his claws into the wood so deeply his skin cracked. The tree fell slowly at first and then ruptured as a crack gored the sky and Lee came to the ground under the falling tree with such force that when his skull hit the moss-covered rock it fractured into six pieces and he was dead.

###

By the time Charlotte started college up in Saguenay, the image of the bear atop the tree somehow shifted from childhood memory to childhood dream. It’s impossible to be precisely aware of when or how this occurs.

The last Thanksgiving when she told the story was at a restaurant called The Post Horn on the man-made Quarterdeck Island near where the St. Lawrence river meets the gulf. Charlotte was fifteen and drank Shirley Temples and was mostly nervous around her mother’s family, especially since her mother left, but when the turkey was served her father allowed her a glass of red wine and after a few sips she told the story of seeing the bear beyond the wall at Chartierville. Her grandmother and aunts and uncles and cousins listened with little more than polite attentiveness and when she finished they quickly forged into a new discussion on college choices for her two older cousins, Babette and Hayden. After dinner, her father took her aside in the front vestibule next to a bowl of pinwheel mints and a flickering candle. He put a hand on each of her shoulders and told her that she was a bit old to be making up stories about things beyond the wall. “Everything down there is dead,” he said and then kissed her on the head and went to get their jackets.

Years later, after receiving tenure at the University of Quebec and breaking off a long, unpleasant relationship, one day she found herself walking along the St. Lawrence river and she closed her eyes and fluttered her fingers out, feeling the warmth of the sun mixing in with the cool air radiating from the water. She stopped walking and heard ducks quacking, not some beautiful cooing in the distance but literal quacks. Charlotte giggled and opened her eyes a pinch letting sunlight stream in. She opened her eyes completely and looked at the hills on the other side of the river. She couldn’t help but laugh and out loud she whispered “Ridiculous.” She knew whatever she felt was ridiculous. Ridiculous. And yet. Spooky action at a distance, she thought, remembering something she read, and then zapped herself out of it and finished her walk.

She would call this the weaker feeling of sublime.

Years later she met a man, Thomas, who read poetry and went swimming each day. He was ten years older than her and divorced with two sons. He made her coffee in the morning in their apartment on Bizard Island and they would face down each morning upon a sun that stretched like a puddle of milk up along the Prairies River. They ate together at Euro-fusion cafes along the St. Lawrence and would relax with an extra glass of wine after dinner and talk about things that mattered to them. They listened to each other. Sometimes he he sang out from the shower and Charlotte believed he did this just to make her laugh. After a year of dating he asked Charlotte to marry him and she said yes, fulfilling what she thought was another step towards completeness, but after his youngest son left for college he changed his mind, broke off the engagement, and moved to Vancouver. Charlotte was devastated. She tried to recreate for herself the feeling of sublime but had lost it somewhere like she had lost some memories from childhood.

Life continued again.

A few months after Thomas left her, her father drove head on into a lodgepole pine while on his way to Banff for vacation. It would have been his first time there.

“Do you remember the bear?” he said from his hospital bed. Things might have been simpler for Charlotte if he had died right in the car, but there he was broken up with splinters all over his face and Dilaudid coursing through his veins. Charlotte, as a matter of course, no longer remembered the bear. The hospital room was poorly lit and seemed to swell with the gravity of the moments before death. She wiped a tear from her eye and then placed her hand on her father’s. “What bear was that, Dad?”

“The bear, atop the tree,” he said between breaths. “Just above the wall.” He closed his eyes and the gravity pulled again, oscillating with beeps of the vital sign monitor. Then he opened his eyes. “The bear said ‘what’!’ It was down in Chartierville. Do you remember?”

But Charlotte only responded by squeezing his hand because he closed his eyes again and turned away. She had no memory of what he was talking about and assumed it must be from the drugs. Bears had gone extinct a long time ago, along with just about everything else. Or so she was told.

Then her father let out his final breath.

She brought his ashes to the base of a cliff in front of an abandoned hotel at the top of Maine, just north of the wall. Here she’d gone on a few vacations with her parents, before her mother left. In hindsight – she decided it just that week – it had been the happiest time of her life. At dusk she stood on slick rocks under a sky turning purple and looked out to the sea, hugging the urn close to her chest. In her mind she replayed her father’s final words. She strained to remember back forty years to the day down in Chartierville. If that day itself had even occurred. She looked around within but saw nothing.

In the dark a wind howled along the coast, catching the ocean spray and Charlotte. She kneeled down and emptied her father into the sea. Then she stood up and folded her hands underneath her arms and looked up at the beginning of the night sky and turned her head this way and that, pivoting around what she believed to be Alpha Centauri, just like she did as a girl. She cried a bit and then let the weight of the unreachable vastness wash over her. What her father had said. How can I know anything?

###

The rock wall jutted through the blur of fog and just above Jim saw a faint outline of trees.  

He ran below deck to tell his father who sat by what used to be his mother, wrapped up in a burlap sack they found on a barge up north trapped in the ice. When Jim’s father saw the coastline his face flushed and he tripped over a rod running towards the bridge. He spun the wheel full astern and stood holding it and leaned knee stuck out toward the sky. He looked back over his shoulder and shouted, “Dump the fish! Dump all the fish!” Jim’s heart thumped and he grabbed the handles of the tub and drug it to the rear of the ship where he kicked it over with a thud. He then ran back to his father. With the ship turned away they both looked back. The spray of crashing waves against the rock floated up into the fog until they became the same and then the whole thing vanished into the ether sea. “Was that…?” Jim said. “Maine,” his father said. “We came too far south.” Jim sat on the bench just outside the bridge and took off his rain jacket, his shirt soaked with sweat. He looked at the hatch down below where he dared not go alone and then back towards the sky which was now a white nothingness and he imagined the cliff wall and beyond. He dreamt of green land and what is must be like; but all he knew was warning. His understanding was death.

After a while the chop picked up and the sky unleashed so Jim went inside the bridge and stood next to his father. Now his mind was only filled with the salty smell of his father, the storm wind, and the crest of waves splintering the black sea. Jim looked up at his father who gazed unblinkingly through the storm. Cold, he leaned against him.