The Scent Keeper(12)

I lay in bed. Outside, I heard Cleo bleating. I wanted to go to the shed and be with her, but I knew I couldn’t. I couldn’t add one more bucket of pain to my father’s ocean, no matter what else had happened. So I lay awake, listening as Cleo’s cries turned from frustrated to heartbroken. Eventually she quieted and I was left alone with my own thoughts, which tangled and spun until exhaustion pulled me into sleep.



* * *



I woke to a scream, shooting its way into my dreams. I sat upright, my brain spinning. The sound was too high-pitched for my father, too loud for an owl. It came again, an icy wail of fear.

Cleo.

“Papa!” I yelled, tossing aside my covers. The screams continued, interspersed with deep-pitched blasts of noise, hoarse and rough, unlike anything I had ever heard.

My father caught me as I reached the bottom of the ladder.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

We ran to the window. The moon was full, lighting up the clearing. Something shaggy and huge was circling the perimeter, as if the darkness between the trees had turned solid and begun to move. Every once in a while the thing would shake, and water droplets would fly. I could hear Cleo in the shed, her hooves scrambling against its sides. In their cage, the chickens were a blur of feathers and shrieks.

“What is that?” I asked.

“A bear.” My father’s face was white.

The creature came into the clearing, and I could see muscles moving under its thick fur. It passed by the chicken coop and gave it a casual glance, as if appraising it for later. Then it went to the shed and circled it once, twice, Cleo growing more frantic with each revolution, her hooves pummeling the walls. The bear stood on its hind legs. I heard wood splinter, heard Cleo’s scream reach new heights as she leapt from the enclosure.

“Papa!” I cried out.

Cleo was running, darting right and left, trying to get to the cabin or the woods or just away, but the bear was unrelenting, cutting off her exit each time, moving in closer and closer. Cleo was terrified, her eyes huge, looking for safety. She had almost reached the cabin, but the bear made a quick move to the right, blocking her. She reared up, her hooves raking the air. The bear stood, too, and pulled back one paw. The first swipe cut her scream into silence. And then there was just the bear, and the moist, soft sound of eating.

I stood by the window, stunned.

“Papa,” I said, “why didn’t you do anything?”

Outside, the bear growled in satisfaction.

“How did it find us?” My father was asking the air, not me.

But I knew then. It was my fault. I had taken Cleo to the beach. We had called the bear. And there was no place inside me big enough to hold that knowledge.





THE INTRUDER


The bear didn’t leave immediately—our island was a fully stocked smorgasbord with nobody else in line. It spent the next day cleaning Cleo’s bones, then made its way through the chickens and the eggs, one by one, until all that was left was the rank odor of bear. The smell came in under the door, around the sides of every window, through every crack in the walls. I stopped eating.

My father stayed by the window, hands clenched. I’m not sure if he moved for days. We had no weapons; we’d never needed any. I had seen pictures of guns in books, but they’d seemed as fantastical as witches, or trolls under a bridge. In our cabin we had an ax for cutting wood, but the one time my father looked in its direction, I ran and stood in front of the door.

“No,” I said, terrified.

He relented, and went back to watching the bear. After a while he spoke again, his voice dull and factual.

“It’s a female. If we’re lucky, she’ll have a den somewhere else; she’ll go back to hibernate. If she has babies, she’ll stay with them and she won’t come back here for years.”

Then there was nothing left but waiting.



* * *



Cleo was gone. I didn’t know what to do with the suddenness of it. Mice were killed that way, gripped in the talons of owls at night, sailing off screaming into the dark—but not things I loved. The world had been one way and then, with a swift slap across my face, it was another.

I had fallen out of a tree once, when I was first learning to climb. It hadn’t been far, but I’d landed on my back and the ground smacked the breath from my lungs, leaving me suspended, neither here nor there, for one long, crystalline moment. Cleo had raced up, licking my face until I’d finally inhaled and life had swooped back into me with a rush. But now there was no Cleo.

I wanted to scream. I wanted to cry. I wanted to hit my father, the walls, myself. I wanted to do something, anything that would let the pain out, but there was nothing.



* * *



Once the chickens were finished, the bear turned to the apple trees. Then it shoved over the fence to the vegetable garden with a desultory slap of its paw and rooted through the potatoes and the carrots. We watched as our provisions for winter disappeared, sucked down into the seemingly endless appetite of the bear.

When the clearing was truly cleared, she lumbered up onto our porch. From up in my loft, I could hear her sniffing at the crack in the door, and I froze. She soon grew disinterested, however. There was no need for the effort it would take to get inside; our woods and beach were full of food. She disappeared into the trees. We couldn’t see her anymore, but I could smell her anytime I opened the door.