Touching Spirit Bear (13 page)

T
O BE INVISIBLE
he had to clear his mind. That was the secret. Cole stared up into the darkness. In the cold pond, his mind became almost trancelike. The fish and the beaver had come close until he thought of hurting them. The day he touched the Spirit Bear he had been near death and had completely given up trying to be in control. Being invisible had nothing to do with being seen. Being invisible meant not being sensed or felt.

This discovery excited Cole and set him to thinking. If animals existed in a world of instincts and senses beyond the conscious thoughts of the mind, what happened to people in their frantic worlds of noise and hectic rushing? How much of the world did people miss because they were not calm enough, empty enough, to experience it? Cole’s thoughts raced as he stared up at the black ceiling of the small cabin. He couldn’t wait until morning.

When dawn finally arrived, he hiked to the opening of the bay instead of going to the pond. He made no special preparation except to wear a heavy sweater and rain slicker. The persistent drizzle and cold had become a daily part of his life here on the island. As he walked, he focused on the patterns around him.

The lapping waves came as regularly as deep breaths, the light drizzle roughed the water’s surface, clouds hung low as fog, and thousands of smooth worn rocks lined the timeless shoreline like a ghost highway that disappeared into the mist. Cole felt a part of the patterns as he meandered along the shore.

When he reached the point, he picked a natural saddle between two rocks and sat down. He focused his gaze on a small white rock near the water’s edge and breathed in deeply. To see the Spirit Bear, he needed to clear his mind and become invisible, not to the world but to himself.

He left his hood down to let his head and senses remain exposed to the air. The cool drizzle soaked his hair, and soon droplets of water dripped off his forehead onto his cheeks. When he closed his eyes, the droplets felt warm on his face. At first they felt like his own tears of anger and fear. Then he breathed more deeply, feeling
the rhythm of the world around him, an endless rhythm where time disappeared. As the past, present, and future became one, the droplets on Cole’s cheeks dripped to the ground, melting into the landscape to which they belonged.

When he opened his eyes once again, it was as if he were waking from a deep sleep. Far down the shoreline, where the rocks disappeared into the folding mist, a white object had appeared. At the place where things visible faded into not-being, there stood the Spirit Bear, as clear as if it were standing only feet away. The bear gazed patiently.

As Cole stared back with the same patience, all time, even the present, ceased to exist. He no longer thought of himself as Cole Matthews, a juvenile delinquent from Minneapolis, Minnesota. Instead he was part of the landscape, without a beginning or end. Rain dripped off the rocks that lined the shore the same way it dripped from his forehead and flowed down across his cheeks and lips. It blurred his vision, and he blinked.

The Spirit Bear disappeared.

Because Cole and the bear belonged to the same landscape now, Cole still felt the bear inside. He closed his eyes, still remembering.

When Cole next opened his eyes, he had no idea how much time had passed. He crawled
stiffly to his feet and picked his way back along the shoreline toward camp.

That night Cole built a bigger than usual outdoor fire. He cooked his supper ceremoniously. With delicate pinches, he added spices to the boiling water. Then carefully he broke in spaghetti noodles. He heated sauce, stirring with deliberate strokes. When he ate, he savored every bite as if it were the last he would ever eat. When Cole finished eating, he washed dishes and carefully folded the at.óow, which he had used as a tablecloth.

Edwin had said that every day and every meal was to be savored, but tonight was extra special in Cole’s mind. Today he had discovered how to be invisible, and now he was ready for the dance of anger. Carefully he stoked the fire once more and sat down to wait for both the flames and his feelings to come alive.

When the fire blazed high, Cole stood. Suddenly a frightening scream escaped his throat. As the sound melted away down the shoreline and into the trees, he began to dance. Spinning and weaving, he crossed the clearing to a solitary tree near the cabin. The tree was a tall cedar with only sparse scrub branches down low. Cole crouched before the solid trunk and doubled his fists menacingly. The tree defied him. That was
why he had attacked the Spirit Bear. Its proud existence challenged him.

“Get out of my way,” Cole ordered, swinging his fist as if to hit the tree. Again and again he warned the tree to move out of his way. When it remained, he lunged forward, swinging his fists within inches of the trunk. “Get out of my way!” he shouted. “I’m warning you!” When still the tree didn’t move, Cole grabbed at the lower branches, all the while cursing and muttering angry threats.

The branches broke.

Cole continued his dance. He spun and lunged at imaginary enemies in the dark, yelling at the rocks and the sky and at the water, “Get away! Don’t mess with me!”

Already his dance had lasted longer than any of his dances in the past, but Cole was far from done. The whole world was challenging him, and the dance grew more violent. Cursing wildly, he turned back to the flames and gave the burning chunks of wood a hard kick. Flames and hot ashes exploded into the dark. He kicked again and again, and soon the camp was a bed of glowing embers.

Cole stalked among the smoldering ashes. Grunting with effort and rage, he pretended to throw his spear, then fell to the ground and
clutched his hip and arm. He grimaced as he relived the bear attack and the hatred he had once felt for the Spirit Bear. Twisting on the ground, he relived the pain, the cold, and the loneliness.

He continued his dance on the ground. As he writhed slowly on his back near the coals, his heart pounded a steady beat like a distant drum. He felt the storm that had killed the sparrows. He saw again the jagged white flash of lightning and heard again the crash of the huge tree that almost ended his life.

Still Cole continued. Standing, he walked to the shoreline and picked up a big rock. The rock became his ancestor rock as he walked in circles. Then, with an exaggerated motion, he heaved the rock into the water. When waves from the splash reached shore, he called into the darkness, “I’m sorry!” He screamed louder, “Please forgive me! I didn’t mean to hurt Peter!”

The only answer Cole heard was the breeze pushing through the treetops.

Tears came to Cole’s eyes and flowed down his cheeks. For several minutes, he let the tears flow, but he knew the dance must continue. Moving back to the fire, he spun among the dying embers on the ground with a graceful motion, gently kicking the larger coals back together. One by one he returned the scattered
chunks to the fire pit, each piece becoming a part of his dance and a part of his healing.

The mound of embers and charred wood glowed brighter until a single solitary flame licked up, followed soon by another. Cole hugged his arms tightly to his chest and kept dancing. By the time the fire burned brightly again, sweat beaded his forehead and rolled down his cheeks with his tears. He was powerless to stop crying. His tears continued as if from some huge, bottomless lake.

Now Cole had danced half the night, but still a defiant flicker of anger remained inside him. He wanted to throw up that anger like bad food and be rid of it forever. He turned to face the tree he had threatened earlier. Again he lunged toward the tree, only this time he let his fists strike the trunk. With each lunge, he struck the tree harder, ignoring the pain.

Fists swollen and bleeding, Cole stopped suddenly. He caught his breath, feeling an overwhelming shame. In the middle of the night, he sank to his knees at the base of the tall cedar, his body shaking with sobs. “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!” he whispered.

At that moment, words he had never been able to speak before welled up inside him. “I forgive you,” he cried loudly. “I forgive you.” Then,
his energy totally spent, Cole collapsed to the ground. Now his dance was over.

The glowing embers cast faint shadows into the surrounding night, and under the trees, a large set of eyes reflected the light, staring patiently out of the darkness.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
Cole went to the totem to carve his anger dance. He stared at the blank space at the bottom of the pole. What figure or shape would express what he had learned during the dance? He knew one thing. Nobody ever woke up in the morning and chose to be angry. That meant that if he remained angry, something outside him controlled him.

Cole didn’t like the idea of being under the control of anybody or anything. So what could he carve to show he was sorry and that he had learned to forgive? What could he carve to show the healing that had taken place and the understanding he felt? Cole left the space untouched and returned to the cabin.

“I danced the dance of anger,” Cole announced during Edwin’s next visit.

Edwin glanced at him. “What did you learn?”

“To forgive,” Cole said. “Being angry is
giving someone else control of my feelings so they own me. Forgiving gives me control again.”

“And what did you carve in the totem to show forgiveness?”

“Nothing yet,” Cole murmured. “There’s still something missing. It isn’t enough to be sorry and forgive. Somehow I have to figure out a way to help Peter. Until then, I’ll never be able to carve anything in the blank space. That’s what I had to discover before I could heal, wasn’t it?”

Edwin smiled slightly and nodded. “How to help Peter heal is something that will haunt you and stay in your thoughts like a sliver under your skin. The harm you did to him will fester and pain you all of your life unless you’re able to make up for it.”

“And what if I can’t help Peter?” Cole asked, worried.

“Then you need to help someone else.”

“Is that why you and Garvey have helped me so much?”

Edwin nodded, then turned and walked toward the boat. Cole could tell he was struggling to contain his emotions.

As the short North Country summer passed, Edwin’s visits grew less frequent. When he did come to the island, he spoke little, as if something
was bothering him. He stayed only long enough to unload supplies, pick up Cole’s school assignments, and look at the totem. Each visit, the totem had a new carving, but Edwin always seemed to focus on the blank space at the bottom of the pole, although he made no comment.

By the end of summer Cole had carved a seal’s head, a sparrow in a nest, and a raven. There were dozens of the huge black birds hanging out in the trees around camp, cawing for handouts at mealtime. Cole also carved a jagged bolt of lightning and a big raindrop after dancing a storm dance.

By September, the salmon began working their way upstream to spawn. Each day, during his soak, Cole watched them. He could see them leaping high out of the water, trying to make their way up through the gushing gorge of water above the pond. When the salmon run finished several weeks later, Cole danced their dance and carved their figure into his totem.

During late summer and early fall, Cole had spotted the Spirit Bear every few days as it wandered along the shore outside the bay or drank from the stream near the pond. But gradually, as winter gained a grip on the island, the sightings ended and the fresh tracks disappeared. Cole knew that the Spirit Bear had found a cave
somewhere or dug out a hollow under a fallen tree to hibernate.

Cole stubbornly kept visiting the pond for his morning soak even though the water numbed him in minutes. Because of the bitter winds that winter brought, Cole spent more and more time holed up inside the warm cabin. Sometimes the winds blew so hard, the draft through the cabin blew out his lantern. He stuffed paper, cloth, moss, tinfoil, and anything else he could find into the cracks. Every two hours he got up during the night to stoke the fire. Nights when he failed to get up, he paid the price by having to start a new fire from scratch while he shivered in his underwear.

Carving on the totem became almost impossible. The icy cold stiffened Cole’s joints and made his fingers numb and awkward. Several times he cut himself prying his knife against the slippery wood. He also quit trying to collect firewood. Now whole weeks passed without any letup of the rain. Everything became soggy, and Cole was glad he had cut and stacked a huge woodpile.

The last thing Cole gave up was carrying the ancestor rock and soaking in the pond. Walking over the frosty rocks along the streambed became too treacherous. Even when he hiked near the
tree line, icy winds pierced his jacket and left him chilled.

Winter’s daily routine settled into splitting firewood, carrying water from the stream, cooking, reading, and doing schoolwork. Any fishing now was strictly for food, not sport. Cole kept track of time with an old calendar he found in the supplies. Each night before going to bed, he took a pencil and marked off that day. When he turned the page to a new month, he treated himself to a candy bar. Edwin never brought many candy bars with the supplies.

Being confined allowed Cole more time for schoolwork, but also more time to think about being alone. Some nights he cried himself to sleep from loneliness. He couldn’t help it. The silence became overpowering, and he longed to hear another human voice. He noticed his own voice getting hoarse and higher pitched from lack of use. If only Edwin would visit more often. The Tlingit elder’s quiet presence was better than the endless hours alone.

During the long nights, Cole thought a lot about Garvey, about his mom, and about his dad. Had his father changed at all? And what about Peter? Cole still could not think of a way to help him. Edwin had said during his last visit that Peter was growing more bitter and depressed, hardly
talking to anyone, even his parents.

Without the daily soaks and carving the totem, Cole found it harder to end each day with his mind clear and still. Sometimes anger crept back. It was as if it waited for him to blow out the lantern each night. Then Cole felt a growing resentment that he was being forced to endure this lonely existence. At these times, he imagined reaching up and touching the Spirit Bear. But he feared what would happen when he returned to Minneapolis and there was no ancestor rock, no soaking pond, and no totem. Would he still be able to find the Spirit Bear?

With his activities strictly limited by winter’s harsh winds and bitter cold, Cole noticed his body falling into new natural rhythms. He found himself moving about at a deliberate pace, without rushing. He slept when he was tired and ate only when he was hungry.

Christmas came uneventfully. Cole hiked the shoreline a few days early and found a little scrubby pine tree barely three feet tall growing against the trunk of a larger tree. Figuring the big tree would eventually destroy the small deformed pine anyway, Cole chose it for his Christmas tree. He made tree ornaments out of aluminum foil.

On Christmas Eve, Cole sat alone in front of
his twisted little tree as the wind outside moaned through the treetops. Did anyone anywhere miss him at this moment? He went to bed early that night, not knowing the answer to that question.

The next time Edwin visited, Cole said to him, “Christmas was really lonely. I felt like the whole world had forgotten about me.”

“Don’t drown in self-pity,” Edwin said. “You have more than most people. There’s a whole box of your mom’s letters waiting for you back in Drake. She knows you can’t have mail, but she still writes every couple of days anyway.”

“How is Peter doing?”

“He’s grown more depressed. He no longer wants to get out of bed, and they have him on heavy medication.”

After Edwin left, Cole couldn’t stop thinking about Peter. He tried to ignore his thoughts by reading from a stack of books not part of his schoolwork. Getting lost in the stories helped him to forget, but only for a while. Some days he read all day and late into the night.

By the end of February, Cole had finished the last book in the stack and asked Edwin for more. Another few months and it would be time to leave the island. Still the space at the bottom of his
totem remained empty. He had to figure out what to carve there before he left the island. At night, dreams of the empty space began taunting him.

One day near the end of March, Edwin stopped by for one of his visits. A cold drenching rain had been falling all day. When Edwin stepped from the skiff, Cole could tell that something was wrong. Edwin mumbled a halfhearted greeting as he pulled his boat safely up on the rocks. He silently picked up and carried a box of supplies toward the cabin.

Cole picked up the other box from the skiff and followed. Inside the cabin, he heated water while they dried off. Edwin sat beside the window and waited until he was almost finished sipping a cup of hot chocolate before he turned to Cole. “I got a call from Garvey yesterday,” he said.

“How is Garvey?” Cole asked excitedly.

“He said that last week Peter tried to commit suicide.”

“Suicide!” Cole caught his breath. “Why?”

“If someone is treated as if his life is worthless, he begins to believe it.”

“But his life isn’t worthless,” Cole protested.

Edwin stood, and with one motion opened the door and flung the last of his hot chocolate outside.

“I never told him he was worthless,” Cole argued.

“Smashing his head on a sidewalk is a funny way of telling Peter he’s valuable.”

“That was a mistake,” Cole pleaded.

Edwin picked up his raincoat and headed into the pouring rain. “Hell of a mistake,” he called back, pulling on his coat as he strode toward his boat.

Wearing only a T-shirt, Cole ran after Edwin. “I’ve said I’m sorry!” he shouted.

Edwin stopped in his tracks, and turned so suddenly, Cole nearly ran into him. “That doesn’t help Peter.” He turned and continued toward his boat.

“What more can I do?” Cole pleaded.

Edwin kept walking, ignoring the rain and cold. “I’m not sure anything can help now.” When he crawled into the boat, he gave the starter rope a sharp pull and the engine roared to life.

“There is one way to help him,” Cole blurted, but his voice was drowned out as Edwin revved the engine to steer the boat out away from the rocks. “You’re not listening!” Cole screamed across the water. “I can help him!”

Edwin gunned the engine and angled out of the bay, refusing to look back.

As Cole watched the boat disappear into the
rain, he picked up a strand of kelp off the shore and gave it a hard fling. Maybe Edwin was right and nothing could help Peter. But maybe if Peter came to the island, he would see how much things could change. Peter was probably terrified; that was exactly why he needed this place. He could visit the pond. He could carry the ancestor rock and carve his own totem. He could dance, and maybe even see the Spirit Bear himself. Most important, Cole could prove to Peter this island held no monsters.

Long after Cole returned to the cabin and stoked the barrel stove, he kept thinking about Peter. How had Peter tried to commit suicide? And what if he had succeeded? Cole shuddered. If only Edwin hadn’t left in such a hurry. Now it would probably be several more weeks before he came back with more supplies. By then it might be too late for Peter.

Cole knew that the idea of Peter coming to the island was nothing more than a desperate thought. No parents in their right minds would ever allow their son to come here alone, and certainly not to stay with Cole. Not after what had happened. Even with someone like Edwin or Garvey around, Peter himself would never agree to come.

Cole crawled into bed but tossed fitfully. He
remembered his own close brush with death and how terrified he’d been. It haunted him to think that Peter had tried to end his life on purpose. How scared must someone be to actually go searching for death?

Cole awoke well before sunrise. He dressed and went outside to go to the bathroom. The sky was unusually clear and filled with stars, and a warm breeze rustled the trees. Cole guessed that dawn was no more than an hour away. After returning inside, he stoked the fire, then pulled on his rubber boots and his rain slicker. It was months since he had last visited the pond. He knew the icy water would shock his skin like an electric fence, but this morning he needed desperately to calm his troubled thoughts. He had fallen asleep thinking of Peter, and he had awakened thinking of Peter.

Cole picked his way carefully in the dark. Life on the island had become a peaceful and almost boring routine that he understood well. Until yesterday, anyway. Now Cole trudged along in a confused daze.

Reaching the pond, he stripped in the darkness, then waded in without hesitation. The icy water stung his skin like fire. He tried to relax, but the cold quickly drove him to the shore. This water would kill him if he stayed in it long. There
hadn’t even been time to breathe deeply and clear his mind.

By the time Cole dressed and carried the ancestor rock, the sun had peeked above the trees. Then he heard an unexpected noise: the unmistakable buzz of Edwin’s outboard engine floated over the trees. Cole took off at a dead run down the slope. What was Edwin doing back so soon? Cole scrambled and slipped along the edge of the stream toward camp. Dark shadows from the trees fell across his path and made the going treacherous. Several times he slipped on icy rocks and sprawled flat in the shallow water.

Cole arrived in camp breathing hard. He found Edwin inside the cabin, waiting calmly by the window. “What are you doing here?” Cole stammered, his teeth chattering. Water dripped from his wet clothes onto the bare plywood floor.

“What did you do, go swimming with your clothes on?” Edwin asked.

“I heard your engine, so I ran back from the pond. I slipped some. What are you doing here?”

“Get some dry clothes on,” Edwin said.

While Cole changed, Edwin sat gazing out the window, his thoughts far beyond the bay and the island. Finally Cole sat down on the edge of the bed. “Why are you here?” he asked.

Edwin picked at the rough edge of the table
with his thick chipped thumbnail. “Peter tried again last night to commit suicide. His parents are desperate.” Edwin placed both hands flat on the table. “Yesterday, when I left here, you said that you could help Peter. And you hollered after me that I wasn’t listening. Well, now I’m listening. Tell me what you meant.”