To Win A Bear

He made it to the cold state.

The wonderland. The hunt.

Finally. Between his work and his time at the club, there hadn’t been days or cash enough for the passion of bullets and crimson fur.

He’d spent a fortune—for him, especially. But it was worth it. This trip was going to be different. He’d been promised a kill. In fact, he distinctly remembered the woman on the phone say “kills.”

He’d been dreaming of hunting bears since he could read. He remembered how he’d felt, folded up in his corner of the library, digging into a book on Alaskan Kodiaks. He’d wanted to meet one of those grizzly monsters face to face. He’d wanted to bare his teeth and kick some ass—cowboy style.

But after years of mundanity, the dream had nearly dissolved. So when he and the rest of the crew—a rugged looking sort from all over—arrived in the small village outside bear country, he welcomed his nerves. He was finally here. The rest would fall into place. 

That first night was spent around an old splintering table where men with thick beards inundated them with stories about the peninsula. 

They warned of reindeer, communists, nuclear testing, war.

There was a stink of barrenness, of desperation. Of lost language and guilt.

But he wasn’t there for culture or the view, and when they showed him his temporary digs outside of the village, he accepted them without protest and slept his deepest sleep in years.

He started the first day with a grin that stretched across his face. Uncomfortable to look at, but born of pure excitement–the kind only grown men feel and prefer to hide. He took in his surroundings–fog, steam rising from people’s coffee mugs, the sounds of the other men milling about. There were short ones, fat ones, ugly ones. A few of the bigger hunters bragged about facial hair and wisdom, but the real men, it seemed, kept their thoughts to themselves. 

He left the campgrounds that first day in good spirits. But he returned in much worse. 

For the first time in decades, there hadn’t been a single sighting.

A few of the hunters grunted and moaned at this–but not him. No, he would be patient.

The next morning, they woke at dawn and scoured the wilderness for bears. Again, they found nothing. 

He tried to keep his head up, but the next week passed with much of the same. Eat, sleep, prepare. It didn’t seem to matter–they were all alone out here, beside the fog-veiled peak and the still water, not a soul around, only their own footsteps to follow. 

It was getting hard to eat. Hard to breathe. The other men kept laughing through the days, planning their next trips. But he wouldn’t get another. For him, this was it. 

He stopped eating the soup and spent all of his nights in the quiet, thin tent, his thoughts floating in the dark.

Where were the reindeer? He wondered. And where were the bears?

All he’d found here was the brittle cold and food that didn’t fill him.

He’d expected so much more. The Kamchatka Peninsula was known for its intrigue. He’d heard the Russians call it the Land of Fire and Ice. 

Maybe it was just good marketing. Maybe he should’ve tried Alaska. It was cheaper, after all. But the bears here were supposed to be big. And, most importantly, guaranteed.

He liked guarantees.

And he wasn’t the only one. Eventually, everyone else became miffed at the prospects, too. The entire trip they’d seen one stark, white field after another. He didn’t mind the light, but his eyes were burning—starved for variety.

One of the other guys on the trip, Bo, a good ole boy from Louisiana—he swore they’d come. He’d been here before, on this same trip, killed more than his fair share of brown bear. He was sure that in the right conditions, you could even smell them.

But Bo’s philosophies were gambles at best. Tall tales. Besides, could the man really smell anything with that big chew in his lip?

The man shook his head at the swamp trash and rubbed the salt from his eyes. Bo was a liar, and liars were the one thing he couldn’t stand. 

Bears or no bears, he couldn’t be the first to turn back. He couldn’t go home. He wouldn’t. Not yet. He knew what the others would think if he took off now. It wouldn’t look good. An American. Worse, even—a New Yorker. Too anticipatory, too antsy to wait for greatness. Lost without his skyscrapers and cab fare. No patience or class or respect.

Perhaps the bears could sense it too.

He yanked his collar up further, almost to his nose. He just wanted one big, dark bear head. He was owed that much, at least. Goddamn peninsula, he thought with defeat. He couldn’t pronounce the name of the land he was standing on.

In an hour, the horizon went dark. The Russians had told him—though he hadn’t believed them, at the time—that the sun doesn’t set here. It just burns right out.

And they were right. As the sun hid behind the Northern peak, the temperature dropped below 0. They’d been at this for nine ungrateful hours. And still, no bear. 

His new friend Dimka sighed, muttered something about the rising snow and the dark, and grabbed his bag. He hopped into the back of his snowmobile and disappeared up the sugared hill, gone from the hunt.

That left three of them.

Between them, minutes passed in hours. It was cold. The kind of cold that settles between your shoulders and your being. Between your socks, your shoes, your feet. The kind of cold that sticks.

It wasn’t long before he found himself nodding off by his tree. They’d been tracking footsteps the size of his torso for hours now. Fresh, the other men said, studying and feeling the ground. He couldn’t tell. He wasn’t a hunter himself—just a man with a gun and a romance for killing things. But something touched and livened his brute heart—something real—to see brave things fall from the sky.

He spent the next hour dreaming of the chase, of wine-stained snow. Well, not quite as dark as wine, more of a pink—the color’s depth gnawed through with melted ice. Beautiful, really. He remembered his first winter kill with fondness. It wasn’t a grizzly bear, but it was feathered and fierce and fought all it could.

A tap on his shoulder woke him then. He pulled his hand up from its spot between his thighs and sighed. Just another huntsman, looking to get the competition lost.

“Ready to head on back?” the man said, the lobes of his ears darkened from the brisk wind. 

Funny, he thought. They were all like that: cheap opportunists, desperate to get him back to camp and have one less man to fight for the coveted head of his beast.

Some men could be so transparent.

“Not yet,” he responded, a little later than was normal. But he didn’t care much for how he sounded. He only wanted a moment alone with a tall, dark presence. He wanted to feel their difference and their sum, wanted to splay them out, finger to toe. See if their blood was red, like his. See if it pooled and shone and ripened in the light.

He sat for another minute, yawning, hands twitching in his pockets. The other hunter shrugged and stalked off to a snowmobile. 

Then there were two.

Bo hopped up and meandered toward him after the big guy left. He didn’t say a word, just nodded his head to a spot across the field.

The beats in his chest rose to a manic swell—

“Got one?” he whispered to Bo, heart pounding. On the last day of the hunt, at the last bearable hour—now they came?

Bo nodded. The man breathed a sigh of relief. Took the damn things long enough. But now he would have what he was due.

He scanned the dusted hills, following Bo’s outstretched fingers, but he couldn’t see much until—

There.

Between two windswept trunks, it stood.

He could only see the ears, so he crept further up the slope, his weight shifting from knee to knee. Bo’s heady breath competed with his own.

“Look at her. Gorgeous.”

Well, it wasn’t a “her.”

This bear was big. Colossal. It looked about a thousand pounds.

And the very fact that Bo didn’t know the difference between the sexes—well, that was proof enough to him. This bear was his.

In the near blackness, they scouted after it. He marveled at his opportunity: there wouldn’t be another hunt, not until next Spring, and he was out of justifications and savings. This was it.  

Neither of them discussed who would kill the beast. But Bo had done this all before. He shouldn’t take the prize. Besides, hadn’t this place seen enough of the ignorant, buzzcut type? Hadn’t a bear of this proportion earned a more refined, educated keeper?

They waded, together, through the frozen abandon. The bear’s path might’ve seemed aimless to the untrained eye, but Bo said he knew better.

Two steps forward toward the beast.

Now it was rolling, with delight, on a log buried in the snow.

The man looked at the sight with eager eyes and wetted palate. His skin burned.

But as they rounded the corner and raised their rifles, the bear stopped. It found its way to its hind legs and its ears perked up.

He met the beast’s eyes. With that, it took off, with reckless, joyless speed, sprinting across the wasted landscape, sprinting home.

Bo took the first shot, but no hit. The man breathed deeply, a rising sense of purpose swirling deep in his throat, his mouth overflowing with thick anticipation—

He fired. 

But the bear was still up. His bullet wedged itself into a lonely stump. He looked up to the sky, both ashamed and angry at the circumstance.

“That’s it,” Bo snarled, unloading his gun onto the quiet land.

The man watched him. Let him finish his rounds.

“A complete waste,” Bo cried again. Then, with a dry throat,“You ready?”

He sat in silence for a moment. Bo was turning blue from the cold. He probably was too. But he wasn’t ready to turn around, to give in. 

The man shook his head. The bear might’ve run, but it was hiding. It was out there. And as long as he kept looking, he’d get his dollar’s worth. 

Bo coaxed him with the temptations of fire and light, but he couldn’t stop. Not yet. In a matter of hours, the hunt would be over, done, finished. And he’d return to narrow streets and tall buildings without a story or a medal or a head.

What would he tell the boys at the club when he landed, broken by the sting of fresh regret? 

Bo rolled his eyes and scoffed. To him, this was just another day in April.

Entitlement, the man thought. It ruins us. 

Bo raced up the powder and started the snowmobile. The engine faded away. And at once, he was alone.

He took a minute to prepare himself. The warmth between his thighs was waning, and his legs were heavy as lead.

But he shook off his jacket and his doubts and tracked the footsteps over the next hill. And the next. And the next.

By the water, where the land flattened out, he found it again. The moon reflected off the packed snow, revealing rounded ears, a perfect snout—a head of at least 20 inches. He might yet set a record.

He huddled down as low as he could and let the ice melt beneath him. He steadied his hand and took his time—this was the moment he’d lived for. 

His entire frame tingled and hardened as he loaded his gun. He wouldn’t look away, and this time, no one could run.

The bear clawed at the space between the freezing water and the land. It concerned itself with matted, filthy fur and seemed to be on its own hunt for a reasonable place to sleep. 

The man cocked back his heavy metal stick and aimed it at the bear’s big, brown eye. Almost human, he thought. He’d read that Kodiak bears were smarter than dogs. Though he wasn’t quite sure what that proved. His family had never owned any pets. His daddy hated dirty things and mother kept the house pristine.

His eyes jolted from side to side as the bear whipped its head left to right, searching for the source of his breath. Their eyes met once again. 

He pulled the trigger and screamed. 

The bullet left its chamber with a desperate hiss. The bear cried out as the fire found its throat. 

He shot again, the bolt rocketing itself through the animal’s pupil and ripping apart its brain. He moaned with pleasure as he watched the tall, brown creature crumple to the ground, its limbs piling up to only half its size.

Then came the silence. It was the most whole, deep quiet he’d ever felt. He sat in it, melted in it, drowned. 

He was as giddy as a schoolboy. He clambered up and kneeled beside the animal to measure the skull. It was 21 inches in diameter—making it the biggest bear killed in Kamchatka since 1979.

And it was his.

He tugged on the arms, but he knew there was no chance of moving the whole thing on his own. He thought, absently, that he might chop away at it, but then the coat, of course, couldn’t be salvaged for his floor.

Instead, he made his way up the mountain as fat flakes fell into his eyes and covered his hair and face. The snow was coming fast, and the low, disfigured trees shook and quaked in the distance. The winds picked up and circled the far plains like a hurricane.

By the time he found his snowmobile, it was nearly buried.

He wiped off the controls with stiff fingers. Shit. The gas was almost gone. He contemplated whether he should go wake those other insufferable, hungry idiots to help him. This was a nearly impossible task alone.

But he was the one who’d put in the effort. This wasn’t a fucking team sport. He did the killing and he would have the credit. Or he would have nothing.

So he turned, decision made, back down the slope, the gears and wires groaning and popping beneath him. 

The bear lay slumped, face down, in the growing snow.

When he reached the thing, he strapped it up to his snowmobile with rope and tugged good and hard. The night was growing black and deaf, but blood roared through his ears. He heard everything and inside, he was warm.

He dragged the bear behind him as the snow fell in clean white sheets.

Its body hung and twitched as the machine conquered frozen roots. He sat, uncomfortably aware of how the animal’s fluids leaked and pooled in a trail behind them, smothering the white lands with muck. 

The fuel gauge beeped out as he watched this perfect landscape succumb to mud and guts.

He was entranced by Kamchatka. By the wonderland. The hunt.

But when the soviet snowmobile choked out at him again, this time, the alarm cleaved his brain. He looked at the gauge—his heart pulsing—they had one mile to go before they’d make camp.

Hail hit his face. A blizzard in April. Of course it was.

They made it a few more feet before the machine gave out completely with a final, resounding thud. Behind it, the bear sat motionless and emptied, tangled up in the man’s identity and wires.

He dropped down from the snowmobile and cut the rope. He tied the end around his waist and continued on, bear in tow, up the towering walls of powder.

He couldn’t see in front of him. The snow was dense and cruel. There were no more reminders or warnings or chances.

Whiteness poured from the sky, flooded the land. Stole his boots right off his feet and buried him, many deep.

He was floating, lost, disconnected. Overcome by excess, fury, and decades long gone. 

There were no witnesses. No others. No one to know what he had done.

No life—not here. Just a man and his bear, swallowed back from where they’d come.