Emory’s Gift by W. Bruce Cameron Read Free Book Online

it when it was important. My father’s company made furniture parts out of wood, and I could hear banging and drilling and cutting going on while the woman who had answered went to go find him.
    “Hello?”
    “Dad, it’s Charlie. You said I should call you when I woke up,” I said in a rush, so he wouldn’t get mad at me.
    “How are you feeling?”
    “Not bad. I’m okay. I’m fine. I feel good,” I said, adjusting the story when it occurred to me that anything less than a glowing report of health might result in me being ordered to stay inside. “I’m all better.”
    “Probably just something you ate, then,” my dad speculated.
    “Yes, I guess. I mean, I like the food here at home.” As far as I was concerned, we never needed to go anywhere for dinner again.
    There was a silence on the line. Someone hammered something. A circular saw shrilly ripped into a board.
    “Okay, well, you stay close to the house. Call me if you feel sick again,” he said.
    “Okay.”
    There was another silence, this one so deep it felt like it was pulling me like quicksand into the phone. Why couldn’t my dad just talk to me sometimes? Ask me about something, tell me something, give me something besides instructions?
    “Okay then,” my dad said, hanging up.
    I pulled a big aluminum pan out of the game freezer and lifted up the tinfoil to see what I’d found. It looked like one of many hamburger casseroles. I could see cheese and noodles and maybe some canned peppers. We would never eat it, and my dad would never miss it. I marched down the path into the canyon holding the casserole like a waiter headed for the table.
    I sat by the creek all afternoon, occasionally poking at the casserole with a stick to check on the progress it was making toward a thaw. There was no sign of the bear.
    The next day I brought down a cooked chicken that was badly freezer burned. The casserole pan from the day before had been crumpled and ripped, but as I examined it I couldn’t be sure what kind of animal had eaten the contents. Some of the scrape marks looked too sharp and tiny for a bear and probably were the result of a fox having a meal, but whether the fox was cleaning up after a grizzly had had supper or had hogged the whole thing I just couldn’t be sure.
    The chicken vanished: not even bones were left the next morning. I reluctantly left another casserole. “Bear!” I yelled into the woods. A tinny echo bounced back at me and then the trees whistled with the warm breeze, but other than that, there was no reaction.
    “I’m not coming tomorrow!” I shouted.
    Nothing.
    “I’ll be back in a few days. You’d better come out if you want food!” I threatened.
    It’s easy for me as an adult to wonder what the heck I thought I was doing. This was a grizzly, not a stray cat. But I wasn’t the first person in the world to want to provide food to a bear: it had only been a few years since the country’s animal experts had closed the dumps in Yellowstone that had for decades served up free food to the grizzlies. The park service had even built bleachers so people could sit and watch the bears eat garbage!
    I make these excuses to myself now because as a bear biologist I know just how wrongheaded my impulse was. But still, had I known where it would all lead would I have stopped trying to feed the bear? I simply can’t answer that.
    What I can say, though, is that as incredible as it sounds, the remarkable encounter with the bear actually faded in importance for me over the next several days, shoved out of the way by a casual reminder at our junior-lifesaving class.
    “Don’t forget next week, you don’t have to come in your bathing suits,” Kay told us. “We’ll be doing artificial resuscitation.” Her dark eyes blandly looked us over. “Mouth-to-mouth.”
    Don’t forget? Like any of us had been thinking about anything else? The Soviet Army could be attacking our town and the only concern I would have was whether it would mean