It was a beautiful day when Shawn Clay walked into the office. In fact, it was the first truly pleasant day of the summer, having, till then, been a mostly drab affair. Judging by the haggard look on his face, Clay’s mood had not yet caught up with the weather. “Any more sightings?” he called into the park office without looking to see if anyone could answer him back.
“Yeah, some hikers came in a little shaken a few minutes after I opened,” answered Ursula. Some people liked to joke about how fitting it was for a woman named Ursula to be working as a ranger at Bear Trail park, but she hated those people almost as much as she did her overly coincidental name. “Sounded like it was B-17 again.”
“B-17? You know, up until this last month he was always an average bear; he never cared to be around people much. I wonder what’s gotten into him?”
Ursula frowned at the numbers on her screen. Clay was a man given to worry, so she didn’t want to bring this to his attention yet, but not only had overall bear sightings increased 300% in the last month, but they were virtually all either unknown bears or almost certainly B-17. They hated having to put an animal down, but if this were to continue, their options were limited. Clay collapsed in his chair, wondering to himself if those two hunters from last month had had anything to do with it. They had come to the station, rambling and screaming about the perfect bear, and from he had been told when checking in on them had hardly stopped since. The story had caused some local commotion, but had been mostly forgotten already. “The perfect bear...” he muttered softly.
“Don’t start in on that nonsense again,” hastily spoke Ursula. “Bluejay’s wild stories never haunted you before and I don’t want you turning superstitious on me.” Bluejay was one of the few local Native Americans left, and he was also Clay’s best friend. Though Bluejay was not given to superstitions himself, his grandfather had been something of a historian and folklore collector and had prided himself on distilling nearly all of the old legends and stories into Bluejay from a young age. One of these stories concerned the perfect bear, or, more accurately translated, the all-bear, and his pact with humans to leave them be if they were to do likewise with him. The story had stuck with Clay due to the bear sightings and the boredom that comes with being a park ranger during a rainy season. Ursula continued her interruption of his meditations: “Did you get all the picnic areas ready? It looks like we’ll finally have some today.”
“It wasn’t tough. The storms hadn’t done much but drop a branch or two, no real damage. It’ll be a great day for people.”
The rest of the morning passed without incident. Neatly at 11, several families began to arrive, colorful tablecloths and blankets aplenty, making their way to one of several designated areas in the park for a nice afternoon lunch. However, almost as rapidly as they had shown up, people started running back to the station, panic in their eyes. The complaint was universally the same: as soon as they’d set up, a bear came out of the woods right at them. Knowing this time B-17 had crossed the line, Ursula and Shawn told the people to go wait in their cars or go home, after they had collected their information, and that they’d make sure to get any abandoned possessions back to them. Leaving Ursula to deal with the panicked picnickers, Clay surreptitiously grabbed a shotgun and walked out to the picnic areas. What he saw their caused a knot to grow in his stomach, knowing he wasn’t dealing with your average bear here. Picking up his walkie-talkie to contact Ursula, he viewed the scene before him: every single picnic basket was gone.
No comments:
Post a Comment