Alan Sincic

This book is not what you think it is. It does not begin with you sitting in the hollow of a tree, eating crackers and scratching your elbow as you look out across the forest in the morning. Ignore that picture over there. That was a mistake.

In fact, you shouldn’t even be reading this sentence, sentence that talks about how you left home to live by yourself in the middle of the woods in this treehouse you carved from out the hollow of the tree with the table and the chairs and the stairs with the wooden bedroom with the wooden lamp, the wooden rug, the wooden bed and the pair of wooden shoes. You would not be doing something like that. That does not sound like you at all. Better we just end the story here.

Even now it’s not too late to turn back. You could close the book here, at this word, here, before the bear comes to visit. Because once the bear comes to visit everything changes. That’s it. That’s just the way it goes when the bear comes to visit. You have to hide up in the branches at the top of the tree with your toast and blackberry jam and your funny papers and your pajama bottoms flapping in the breeze while the bear (who knows better than to crack a book) he totters round the kitchen with his big paws a-clackin’ across the beautiful tablecloth you finished carving the night before.

Now you’re stuck. If you throw the bottle of jam at the bear, he’s liable to get mad and come after you. If you climb down to offer the bear some jam, there’s not going to be enough jam for you. But if you just sit up here in the branches waiting for something to happen, then nothing is going to happen.

Which might be nice for a change, right? Nothing happens. Good luck with that one. The problem with nothing happens is that it never happens that way. It’s never nothing happens. Something always happens.

The branch breaks. Or the bear leaves. Or the bear so loves the house he -- maybe should he stay? Other bears will come to visit when they hear about what a good time this bear is having, bear after bear crawling in through your windows and over your crockery and across your newly waxed wooden floor. In any case, and no matter what happens, your oatmeal’s getting cold.

The sound of thunder overhead. The wind picks up. Looks like it’s gonna rain.

Up and down the leaves around you buoy. Up and down you ride the branch. It’s the weight of the bears, shuffling round the house in the hollow of the tree, thumping round the kitchen and the parlor, nosing up under the bed and the sofa, sniffing at the sill of the window you scrambled out a second ago.

On the lookout they are for a something they none of them seen before. What would it be? Hard to say. Something like enough a bear to fit a bear, but fresh enough to be a sign of something other. Other. That would be you. Out the window a snout. A sniff. A nose, the black nose, the wet-as-a-pebble nose of a bear.

Below you, on the ground, in a cradle of root and leaf and random tinder lies the book. The wind nibbles at the open page, the yellow bond brittle at the edges from all the season of wear. Turn the page you’re thinking, turn it back, but that would be the wrong direction, the wrong position, upwind of the bears, no, not a place to be. Such a random thing, the wind, to carry the scent of you hither and thither.

And then you notice it, and wow you think. Not wow the bears. We know about the bears. The wow is for the woods. What with the fog and all, the clunk of the jar, the bother with the comics, how to fold them under the arm in the course of climbing the tree, you forgot about the woods. How big and how broad. In a roll up and down the hills, nothing but trees in every direction.

Something. You sniff the air. From a ways. Over yonder. Far. A whiff of smoke. Brick of a chimney. Human the smell.

The jar skitters off the branch and somersaults into the turf. Thump. The wind hits the funnies, smacks them open, kites them away. The toast, it flippers up to follow, but a crow swoops. Snatches. Up into the cloud of the leaf and the branch in the blue it goes. Gone the funnies. Gone the toast and the butter and the crisp of the morning, out, out over the yonder and away.

Overhead the clouds they blossom. The branch quivers with a burden. You shift your weight inward, to where the branch and the trunk converge.

It rises up around you -- the scent of the oak, the sap, the bark and the sod, the lichen and the humus and the scat and the fur and the snap of the tinder. With your hind legs you grip the trunk and downward you slide. How the bark it crackles. How the wind it sings. And here the jar. And here the scent of the berry. Click-clack the claw on the tin of the lid. You shoulder your brother aside. You lap at the sweetness. You paw at the husk of the leather, here in the hollow of the root. You tear the bud open. The yellow petals you shatter.

From heaven a growl. A gift of rain. From deep in the heart of the animate earth, from up from the hollow in the heart of you, a growl in return. You shed the rain, you all of you, with a bristle and a shake, and into the green cover you amble, and onto the trail to carry you home.