In All This Quiet

The bear-tracker’s girlfriend keeps a journal. So does the bear-tracker, filled with observations and details: the bears, the bears, the bears. The bear-tracker’s girlfriend’s journal is a simple accounting of the date and today the weather was. She fills it in each night after they have doused their fire, as the light from their solar-powered lantern fades away. She compulsively checks back through her journal to make sure each day is accounted for, and they are all there: June 1st, June 2nd, June 3rd, today the weather was, but what if she missed a day somewhere along the line? What if she missed days, a week, an entire month?

The bear-tracker says you can tell the time of year by the sun’s position in the sky. He has a watch he winds every morning. He is confident in them all: his watch, the winding, the sun, and the sky, and so, too, he is confident in the days.

You can tell, he says to his girlfriend. You can always tell.

*     *     *     

When the bear-tracker’s girlfriend first met the bear-tracker, she thought he worked with a team, like she’d seen in nature documentaries on her grandparents’ television, to sedate the bears from helicopters and tag them. She had seen footage of their muscular brown shapes loping through the wild grasses.

The bear-tracker’s girlfriend had gone out for a drink that night. Her grandmother had shooed her out of the house for bridge club—do you really want to spend your evening with all us old hens?—so the bear-tracker’s girlfriend went to one of the local bars that was popular with the tourists.

Adventurers, they called themselves. They all had the same bumper sticker on their cars, if they had driven: not all who wander are lost. They all had the same look in their eyes.

It’s so magnificent, they said, and some of them came back from the wilderness after a few days and some of them got lost and some of them died and some of them came here to stay the way the bear-tracker had done.

She hadn’t seen him before, but he smiled and gave her a small raise of his glass from the other side of the counter. She was drinking the house red wine, the same kind her grandmother picked from the bottom shelf of the grocery store, all the bar had. He was drinking Pendleton whiskey, neat, except the bartender had put a floating pink cherry in it that he dipped out and gave to her.

The cherry was too sweet with her wine, but she liked the way his fingers had lingered near hers when he slipped it into her hand, wet with Pendleton’s.

What do you do, she had asked, which she had learned was a thing adults asked other adults. It wasn’t what kind of music do you like, did you see that movie, do you have a favorite color. She still doesn’t know the bear-tracker’s favorite color. The one she associates with him is the green-gold of the wild grasses roiling in the summer breeze, shimmering under the burn of the year’s warmest sun.

If anyone asked the bear-tracker’s girlfriend what she did, she would say I teach. She substituted for the local schools and had spent most of that spring teaching chemistry for a woman out on maternity leave. When the students asked her questions, she told them check the book and gave them all As, even the ones who hadn’t earned it. What the bear-tracker’s girlfriend really does, which she never says, is look after her grandparents and their house, where she has lived as long as she can remember.

When she was a child, a baby still, really, only eight months old, she was in a car crash with both her parents. She was the only survivor, found crying in the wreckage. Her grandmother has a clipping from the newspaper of the fireman who pulled her out of the twist of car, holding her wrapped in her little blanket. The look on his face, her grandmother says, was holy.

No one in the bar asked what the bear-tracker’s girlfriend did, but she asked the bear-tracker and he said I track bears and she said oh and sipped at her wine.

He had lived on a beach in California before he came here and he still had his surfer swagger, still had a tinge of bronze to his shoulders, still swept his hair out of his eyes. He told her about a friend who had drowned. He remembered waiting for their head to rise up again from out of the waves, remembered that great hollow empty of it never happening. The sound of the waves, he said, was like the wind.

You know, he said, how the wind can sound, and yes, she said. Yes, I know.

As the bar grew louder and more filled with tourists, they had angled toward each other, knees brushing, faces close. She could feel the warmth of his Pendleton breath on her skin.

He said, You could come with me next summer. You could be my cameraman.

He corrected himself in a moment: cameraperson, and she said we’ll have to see in the same tone her grandmother used when she really meant of course, yes.

*     *     *     

There is a morning where a fox is at their campsite, small and red and twitching-nosed. The bear-tracker’s girlfriend gets the camera while the bear-tracker stretches his fingers out to it in a delicate way, makes sound of soothe and call. The bear-tracker’s girlfriend wonders what it would be like to be a fox-tracker’s girlfriend instead, waking every morning to fox-chitter and tail-swipe.

Sometimes the bear-tracker’s girlfriend imagines what it would be like to be a beekeeper’s girlfriend, an investment banker’s girlfriend, a chimney-sweep’s girlfriend.

Do you ever imagine yourself as a beekeeper or an investment banker or a chimney sweep? her grandmother asked her once, and she never has.

*     *     *     

The first summer she went with the bear-tracker, she only stayed with him for two weeks. The bears were wary of her scent; she caught distant glimpses of them as the bear-tracker left her behind at their camp. She watched him disappear into the wild grasses, sat alone at the mouth of their tent.

It was all wind-rush and the noisy quiet of the natural world that, even in her border town, she hadn’t felt so heavily until then. At night, in her mother’s old bedroom that had been hers ever since her parents’ death, she could still hear the highway-rumble of cars, the sound of her grandparents’ house when the heat switched on, the buzz of sky-high airplane. She had thought that was quiet: cricket-chirp and cicada-buzz and, in the spring, shrieking of jay and magpie as the sun came up.

It was quieter with the bear-tracker, but louder too. Inside their tent at night, she followed the depths of his breath into sleep and, outside, all around, the sound of animal, of nature, of wild.

*     *     *     

The bear-tracker sometimes talks in his sleep, never anything that makes sense, a collection of random words spilling from his lips: moon, pink, blessed, imminent, fly.

The bear-tracker’s girlfriend listens and marvels at the sound of another human voice here, in all this quiet.

*     *     *     

Once, the bear-tracker’s girlfriend had the bear-tracker over to her grandparents’ house for dinner. She made a brown butter pasta and a chef’s salad; her grandfather wished they could have had some meat.

Tomorrow, Grandpa, she told him, tomorrow.

At dinner, the bear-tracker talked about the bears he had been tracking. He had names for them all: George, Clarice, Jane-Kate, Jonesy. There was one he called One-Eyed Jack, just my little joke, he said; the bear still had both its eyes.

How interesting, said her grandparents, and her grandmother gave her a look so heavy the bear-tracker’s girlfriend stood up, said, I made an apple pudding for dessert, and began spooning it out before their plates were empty.

*     *     *     

There are the days when he sees the bears and hands her the camera: Let’s get closer.

And there are the days when it’s just them and the wind being tugged through the swaying wild grasses, the blazing sunsets searing the sky, nothing like them, he says, nothing like them in the world.

There are days where there are bird-flocks soaring, small chittering things in the trees, and, at night, the rustling outside their tent, the shifts and sighs. It’s nothing, he tells her. It’s fine.

And the days when a bear comes up beside him, close as they sat together at the bar, sniffs at him, bats the side of his head with one questing paw and he says to the camera and to her don’t show fear and she records it all, frozen, not showing anything, not showing fear.

*     *     *     

At her grandparents’ house, there are albums with photographs of her mother.

Here she is on the first day of kindergarten.

Here she is at her piano recital in the second grade.

Here she is dressed for prom.

And here she is, and here she is.

But, the bear-tracker’s girlfriend wonders, is she really anywhere?

*     *     *     

The wedding dress still hangs in her grandparents’ attic, above those impossibly tiny shoes her mother danced in. The bear-tracker’s girlfriend had worn them for dress-up as a child, holds them in her palm now with her mother’s other things: her favorite childhood book, that shiny rock she had saved, a scuffed penny from 1929. Her mother’s precious things, says her grandmother, like she herself was a precious thing. And the one photo of the three of them together always displayed on the mantel: Mother, Father, Baby, her grandmother saying you can see it, can’t you? How much they loved you?

*     *     *     

Both the bear-tracker’s parents are still alive. His girlfriend met them once, when he took her back home to California; they had the same bronzed shoulders, the same confidence in their stride. The same easy smiles.

It must be so cold where you live, they said, but she had never felt the cold there, except when she tried to remember her parents, to remember that patch of ice on the road.

The summers are warm, she said. The sun is so warm.

*     *     *     

At night, in the tent, she listens to the loud quiet. The bear-tracker’s breath is part of it, and his sleep-talking and snores. He is all activity and bustle during the day, following the bears, making notations in his journal; he does yoga at sunrise.

In his sleep, he is still as stone.

*     *     *     

It is the outside that frightens the bear-tracker’s girlfriend. She remembers the flight down to meet his parents, how he looked out the window the entire time.

The sky reminds me of the ocean, he told her.

The plane that picks them up after the summer ends is smaller than that, judders in gusts of wind. He looks out the windows still. She looks down at her hands, the way they clench and unclench on her lap. She would ask him to hold one of them, but he is caught up in the blue, blue sky.

Her bedroom at home (her grandparents’ home) is a mix of her things and her mother’s. She sleeps on the same mattress her mother slept on, uses the same quilt that a grandmother she never met gifted her mother when she was born. She has spent hours tracing the stars in their squares with her fingertip. She has whispered her mother’s name like a prayer before closing her eyes.

In the tent with the bear-tracker, she traces imaginary stars on the outside of her sleeping bag. She calls his name before sleep, reaches out to touch his arm.

Outside, she can hear the rustling of the wind; she thinks it is the wind. Outside, she hears the sound of something that could be footstep, could be breath. She reaches for the bear-tracker in the loud, empty quiet.

She calls his name again.  

CATHY ULRICH

Cathy Ulrich doesn’t like sleeping in tents. Her work has been published in various journals, including trampset, Main Squeeze, and Does It Have Pockets.