I'm With the Bears Read Free

Sierra’s biological mother and so free to take on the role of her advocate in all disputes, tiffs, misunderstandings, misrepresentations and adventures gone wrong: “Give the kid a break, Ty.” And then, in a whisper so soft it’s like a feather floating down out of the night, “Sure it is, honey, that’s a spotted owl if ever I heard one.”
    Tierwater keeps walking, the damp working odor of the nighttime woods in his nostrils, the taste of it on his tongue—mold transposed to another element, mold ascendant—but he’s furious suddenly. He doesn’t like this. He doesn’t like it at all. He knows it’s necessary, knows the woods are being raped and the world stripped right on down to the last twig and that somebody’s got to save it, but still he doesn’t like it. His voice, cracking with the strain, leaps out ahead of him: “Keep it down, will you? We’re supposed to be stealthy here—this is illegal, what we’re doing, remember? Christ, you’d think we were on a nature walk or something, And here’s where the woodpecker lives, and here the giant forest fern .”
    A chastened silence, into which the crickets pour all their Orthopteran angst, but it can’t hold. One more voice enters the mix, an itch of the larynx emanating from the vacancy to his right. This is Teo, Teo Van Sparks, a.k.a. Liverhead. Eight years ago he was standing out on Rodeo Drive, in front of Sterling’s Fur Emporium, with a slab of calf’s liver sutured to his shaved head. He’d let the liver get ripe—three or four days or so, flies like a crown of thorns, maggots beginning to trail down his nose—and then he’d tear it off his head and lay it at the feet of a silvery old crone in chinchilla or a starlet parading through the door in white fox. Next day he’d be back again, with a fresh slab of meat. Now he’s a voice on the EF! circuit ( Eco-Agitator , that’s what his card says), thirty-one years old, a weightlifter with the biceps, triceps, lats and abs to prove it, and there isn’t anything about the natural world he doesn’t know. At least not that he’ll admit. “Sorry, kids,” he says, “but by most estimates they’re down to less than five hundred breeding pairs in the whole range, from BC down to the Southern Sierra, so I doubt—”
    â€œFewer,” Andrea corrects, in her pedantic mode. She’s in charge here tonight, and she’s going to rein them all in, right on down to the finer points of English grammar and usage. If it was just a question of giving out instructions in a methodical, dispassionate voice, that would be one thing—but she’s so supercilious, so self-satisfied, cocky, bossy. He’s not sure he can take it. Not tonight.
    â€œFewer, right. So what I’m saying is, more likely it’s your screech or flammulated or even your great gray. Of course, we’d have to hear its call to be sure. The spotted’s a high-pitched hoot, usually in groups of fours or threes, very fast, crescendoing.”
    â€œCall, why don’t you,” Sierra whispers, and the silence of the night is no silence at all but the screaming backdrop to some imminent and catastrophic surprise. “So you can make it call back. Then we’ll know, right?”
    Is it his imagination, or can he feel the earth slipping out from under him? He’s blind, totally blind, his shoulders hunched in anticipation of the first furtive blow, his breath coming hard, his heart hammering at the walls of its cage. And the others? They’re moving down the road in a horizontal line like tourists on a pier, noisy and ambling, heedless. “And while we’re at it,” he says, and he’s surprised by his own voice, the vehemence of it, “I just want to know one thing from you, Andrea—did you remember the diapers? Or is this going to be another in a long line