Bearwalker by Joseph Bruchac Read Free Book Online

hoping to see it.
    Instead, I arrived on the scene just in time for the camp cook’s rotund black Labrador retriever to waddle up to me and lick my face.
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    Apparently my classmates’ reaction to wild bears is par for the course. Especially after newly arriving campers see the warnings posted in every building about what to do if you see a bear. This lecture Mr. Mack is giving was originally supposed to be part of the orientation talk after dinner.
    He lifts up the magazine he’s been getting his facts from. “It says,” he reads, “that for every person killed by a black bear, 45 are killed by dogs, 249 by lightning, and 60,000 by fellow human beings.” He looks up and gives us a big insincere grin. “See. Nothing to worry about. It says that black bears are actually very shy. If you see a bear in the wild, don’t run. Just back away from it quietly, or shout and stomp your feet.” He closes the magazine and looks around at the still-worried faces of most of my classmates.
    So do I. I can’t believe it. Am I the only onewho’s not a chicken? Even Asa and his crew, who’ve always tried to make everyone think they are so fearless, were quaking in their boots at the sight of a chubby canine. Some of them would probably still have been trying to crawl under the tables if I hadn’t called out, “Hey, guys, it’s just a dog.”
    I reach down and pat Poe-boy, the dog curled up at my feet, on his broad head. Poe-boy. He’s the black Labrador that started the mass panic and now seems to have adopted me as a new friend. With the blessing of his owners. Mrs. Osgood, the woman in the flowered dress I’d seen on the porch when we arrived, had quickly figured out what was happening. She came right out to claim her dog when she heard the screams for help.
    We had struck up a conversation while I was petting her dog and the counselors were rounding up the rest of our group who had scattered like a flock of hens fleeing from a fox—taking refuge in the main hall, the bunkhouses, the latrines, and in Asa’s case, on top of the bus. I learned two things about Mrs. Osgood right away. One, that she and her husband were Indians themselves. Abenaki. The second was that punctuation meant nothingonce she started a sentence.
    â€œNice to see that you’ve taken a shine to our dog our boy Fred was like that when he was your age and your size though he is all grown up and gone away and I was just thinking of him today when I was airing out to give to the Salvation Army some of his old clothes you might have seen on the line back of our cabin where there’s just the three of us now, me and George and Poe-boy, our dog here, and I named him that because there was this one poem I always liked called ‘The Raven’ which was about a black bird and seeing as how Labradors is often raven black and the man what wrote the poem was named Poe and that Poe-boy is a male dog…”
    You get the picture.
    The only thing that stopped her flow of words was the arrival of her husband. I liked Mr. Osgood as soon as I saw him. He was as thin as his wife was round. He had that tough, weathered look that some Mohawk elders have—like he was made of sinew and leather. He wasn’t dressed in modern clothing, but wore red and black wool pants held up by suspenders and a work shirt with a similarly patterned wool coat over the top. In those clothes he lookedlike a lumberjack or an old-time guide. A little like my uncle Jules, in fact. Uncle Jules always favors clothes made of natural materials like wool and cotton. Even when they’re wet, he says, they keep you warm. Not like these new space-age fabrics.
    Mr. Osgood’s long gray hair came down to the shoulders of that old wool coat. It framed a narrow face seamed with smile lines. In his left hand he was holding a stick connected by a string to an old cast-iron frying pan he held in his right