Yes, we must be kind to them. The best way of being kind to bears is not to be very close to them.
I don't think there are any bears very close to us right now.
And Zeb thought, Maybe a bear has smelled me, and maybe it is coming right now, because it is hungry, it is starving, and it wants to eat me. And I will have to fight the bear, and all I have is this quite small knife, and this stick that can make holes in things. And I will have to win the fight, and kill the bear, and then I will have to eat it.
The bear will come into the story quite soon.
Yes, Zeb will win the fight. Zeb always wins the fight. Because that's what happens.
Yes, he knew Oryx would be sad. Zeb felt sorry for the bear. He didn't want to hurt it. But he didn't want to be eaten by it. You don't want to be eaten by a bear, do you? Neither do I.
Because bears can't eat only leaves. Because it would make them sick.
Anyway, if Zeb didn't eat the bear he would have died, and then he wouldn't be here with us right now. And that would be a sad thing too, wouldn't it?
If you don't stop crying I can't go on with the story.
The Fur Trade
There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.
In the story of Zeb and the bear, Toby has left out the dead man, whose name was Chuck. He, too, was lost among the pools and moss and mountains and bears. He, too, did not know the way out. It's unfair to deny him a mention, erase him from time, but putting him into the story would cause more knots and tangles than Toby is prepared to deal with. For instance, she doesn't yet know how this dead man wormed his way into the story in the first place.
"Too bad the fucker died," says Zeb. "I'd have twisted it out of him."
"It?"
"Who hired him. What they wanted. Where he would have taken me."
"Died is a euphemism, I take it. He didn't have a heart attack," says Toby.
"Don't be harsh. You know what I mean."
Zeb was lost. He sat down under a tree.
Or not lost completely. He did have a rough idea of where he was: he was somewhere on the Mackenzie Mountain Barrens, hundreds of miles from anywhere with fast food. And not under a tree, more like beside, and not a tree exactly, more like a shrub; though not bushy, more like spindly. A spindly kind of spruce. He noticed the details of the trunk, the small
dead underbranches, the grey lichen on it, frilly and intricate and see-through, like whores' underpants.
"What do you know about whore's underpants?" says Toby.
"More than you want me to," says Zeb. "So. When you focus on details like that - close up, really clear, totally useless - you know you're in shock."
The AOH 'thopter was still smouldering. Lucky he got clear before it burst, or before the blimp component did, and thank shit the digital release on the seatbelts had still been working: otherwise he'd have been dead.
Chuck was lying belly down on the tundra, his head at a sick angle, peering over his own shoulder one-eighty degrees, like an owl. Not looking at Zeb, though. Looking up at the sky. No angels there, or none had showed up yet.
Blood was coming from somewhere on the top of Zeb's head, he could feel the warmth trickling down. Scalp wound. Not dangerous, but they bleed a lot. Your head's the most shallow part of you, his sociopath of a father had been in the habit of saying. Except for your brain. And your soul, supposing you've been blessed with one, which I doubt. The Rev had been a big cheerleader for souls, in addition to which he thought he was the boss of them.
Now Zeb found himself wondering if Chuck had a soul, and if it was still hovering over his body like a feeble smell. "Chuck, you stupid fuck," Zeb said out loud. If he'd been given a brief to kidnap himself on behalf of the brainscrapers, he'd have done a way better job of it than Chuck had, the fuckwit.
Too bad Chuck was dead, in a way - he must've had some good sides to him, maybe he liked puppies - but now there was one less asshole in the world, and wasn't that a plus? A checkmark in the column of the forces of light. Or darkness, depending on who was doing the double-entry moral accounting.
Though Chuck hadn't been an ordinary asshole; not grouchy, not aggressive, not like Zeb himself on his asshole setting. Too much the other way. Too friendly, too eager to be on message, man is obsolete, dooming ourselves to extinction, restore the balance of nature and babble babble, he overdid it so much that he sounded preposterous, and in an outfit like Bearlift, with its full quota of preposterous green-hued furfuckers, that took some effort.
They weren't all furfuckers, however: some claimed to be along for the challenge. Adventurous, devil-may-care, no strings on me, tattoo-upholstered, with greasy ponytails like bikers in old movies - boundary-pushing muscle-flexers, boot soles a little too hot for ordinary strolling. That was how Zeb had positioned himself: bulked up on natural steroids, do what had to be done, could take the pace, wings on the ankles, needed the money, liked the shadowy rimlands where nobody official could stick their tentacles into your back pocket, within which the contents of other people's hacked bank accounts might be bashfully lurking.
The card-carrying furfuckers looked down their narrow green true-believer noses at Zeb and his edgy like, but they didn't push that my-shit-don't-stink agenda too hard. They needed the manpower because not everyone on the planet thought it was a great idea to aero/orno/helithopter numerous dumpsterloads of rancid biotrash around the far north so a bunch of mangy Ursidae could gobble it free of charge.