The Weirdo (2 page)

"Remember, three scoops a day in the evenin'. Peaches has packaged up the daily vitamin doses individually for you. Jus' toss 'em in with the food. Enough for the whole time here. I got him bathed this mornin', an' his special soap is in the shoe box. 'Bout two weeks, do it again. Warm water, Samantha, Jus' dunk him in your tub...."

Sam nodded. They'd gone over it on the phone. Warm tub bath? Her father would tell Sam to use the hose on him.

Uncle Jack was paying fifty a week to have Sam mind Buck for the six weeks. Said he didn't want to keep Buck in a kennel that long. "Dog'd go plumb stir-crazy." The money would come in handy for Christmas, two months away. She glanced into the shoe box at the tied sandwich bags of vitamins. Such planning.

Still inside the wagon, Peaches said, "Sorry we're missin' your mama...."

"She always stays late on Monday to make out the food order."

Delilah was dietitian for the county school district. She supervised student lunches for the four schools without a day of college training.

"I tol' your papa he can work Buck if he'd like, but I'd also appreciate you givin' him a lil' exercise every day. Jus' let him get back in that cornfield an' flush a few birds," said Uncle Jack. Quail and rabbit hopped around out there.

"Okay," Sam promised.

Most of their 230 acres were in corn, the stripped stalks now in Halloween garb to await plowing under in the spring. Sam's father, Jack's younger brother, leased the planting acres to a neighbor farmer west of the property, which was a quarter mile off the north-south federal highway.

Chief Warrant Boatswain Stuart Sanders presently had duty at the Coast Guard base on Craney Island, up in Hampton Roads, across from Norfolk. Most nights he commuted back to the farm; others, he stayed on the base, depending on his duty watch.

Sam hadn't been around Buck too much, but she knew he was a highly trained animal. Uncle Jack and Aunt Peaches, childless by choice, worshiped him.
Peaches called him "Buckie" and kissed him on the mouth.

"But jus' don't put him in with those noisy mongrels," Jack said, nodding toward the hunt pens.

"I promise. He'll stay in the barn tied up till I get home from school."

"In the house, please, Samantha," said Aunt Peaches. "He won't destroy anything. Never has."

Sam said, "Okay, in the house," knowing her papa would never allow it.

Uncle Jack opened the left-hand rear door, and Buck jumped out. Jack said, "Sit, Buck! You remember Samantha, don't you?"

Oh, my,
thought Sam.

Buck looked up at his master with those intense yellow eyes as if to say, plainly, "Why, yes, I do."

Buck plainly adored Uncle Jack.

Sam took a deep breath.

"Well, he's all yours, Sam, an' off we go to gay Paree," said Uncle Jack. He was forever the Rotary-Kiwanis-salesman type, backslapper supreme. "After Paris, on to Athens and a Mediterranean cruise with a two-week African safari as the topper."

He kissed Sam's cheek, then bent over to pat Buck's head. Aunt Peaches had gotten out of the car and knelt down to hug and lass the Baron. "We are sure goin' to miss you, Buckie," she said.

As they returned to the car, Sam said, "You all have a load of fun." She felt another stab of envy. Someone was going somewhere, but it wasn't her.

Buck sat obediently but gazed at the Le Sabre as it got back on the dirt road, hom tooting happily again. Uncle Jack and Aunt Peaches waved good-bye. Sam's hand waved back like a railroad crossing signal. A sudden look of emptiness was on her face.

Times like these reminded her just how ridiculous it was to be stuck fourteen miles from Currituck, the nearest town, one that had fewer than five thousand people. Watch TV at night, and all the programs were about people who lived in cities. None about people living on lonely roads like Chapanoke. TV people lived in apartments or on streets with streetlights and grass lawns and neighbors.

Sam sighed as the green wagon went east. As soon as it disappeared around the first bend, she sat down by her charge for a little conversation. "Now, Buck, for the next six weeks you and I are going to be close. Real close. I don't need any trouble. I've got enough of that already. So you've got to stick around, behave yourself, listen to me...."

Buck didn't seem to be paying any attention to her words, not that she expected him to. He was occupied with the new smells of the farm and the October fields. His nostrils dilated in audible sniffs. Then his head
swerved to the right, and he took off in that direction, a gray streak. So much for training.

Yelling at him to come back, Sam saw, in the distance, what he'd seen—a black bear coming out of their small apple orchard between the cornfields. It was heading back into the swamp. Baron von Buckner, probably not knowing that bears even existed, gave chase. He was barking, which only served to speed the bruin along. Martin and Rick joined the racket, Martin in his finest baritone.

Running with every ounce of strength sixteen years on earth had given her, Sam watched helplessly as the bear bounded into the Powhatan, CDX Buck right after it.

Hearing the
rouf-rouf-rouf
already beginning to fade, she shouted, "Buck, come back, dammit, come back!" and, panicking, started to follow, then drew up, furious at what the dog had done. Tennies had no place in the Powhatan, so she ran to the house for waders and a warm jacket. The temperature was dropping every hour.

***

Brother to the Indians, who always apologized after a Ml, bears are wise and mystical. They live on after death as wind and rain and stars, Indians say. The wind is the breath of a dead bear.

I reconstructed Henry's life: born in the south part of the Powhatan, he'd weighed little more than eleven ounces, just a fraction of what human babies weigh. His sister, in the same litter, was an ounce lighter. Cubs mostly come in twos.

Well before their birth, Henry's mother had scooped out a den in dry, soft earth beneath a fallen tree, lining it with twigs and leaves. After feeding throughout the fall, she'd become semidormant in December, sleeping in anticipation of her cabs.

Bears do not truly hibernate. They simply become inactive, breathing four or five times a minute. If disturbed, they awaken with a growl and often leave the den within seconds, angrily.

For days, Henry trembled from the ordeal of passage into the world, eyes tightly closed, nursing whenever hungry, making a humming sound.

Mother and cubs left the winter bed in mid-April, and their life was very secure throughout the summer and fall. Henry's mother was never more than twenty or thirty feet away. His time was spent wrestling with his sister, learning to feed himself and climb trees, or sleeping.

When winter returned to the swamp, he weighed seventy-two pounds, and it was back to a new den and more dozing until spring.

That April, able to survive without his mother, feed
ing himself on tender leaves, buds, and new spring grass, Henry responded to the mysterious ticking of his own life span clock, parting from his mother and sister, never to join them again.

Looking much as he'd look for the rest of his life—eyes small, ears rounded, coat glossy black, snout brown, claws sharp, and jaws powerful—Henry was a fine specimen. By the time he was six years old and fully grown, he'd reached his maximum weight of over three hundred pounds.

From the moment we met, the one thing I positively knew about Henry was that he couldn't have cared less about my face. Animals judge humans by smell and body language, not appearance.

Powhatan Swamp
English I
Charles Clewt
Ohio State University

***

UP IN her bedroom, Sam glanced at her .410-gauge shotgun. Her father had given it to her for her twelfth birthday, but she had yet to shoot it, much to his dismay. It gathered dust in a corner of the room, next to her frilly four-poster bed, another sore point. Modern furniture was what she wanted.

On second thought, the gun was a bad idea. If Buck
happened to tree the bear, she'd need a rope to drag him away. The dog, not the bear. Bird shot and bears were a bad mix, anyway.

Taking stairs two at a time, she ran to the work shed by the barn, cut a piece of laundry line, then headed out, not thinking to leave a note in the kitchen to say where she'd gone.

Ever since she could remember, her mother had said, "Never go back in there alone, Samantha.
Never!
"

Up until Mr. Howell was murdered she'd occasionally entered the swamp with her father on hunting trips, never enjoying them. Once she'd seen him kill a deer, bad dreams resulting. Or she'd gone in a little way with Steve or her mother, on guard against snakes, to pick berries for canning. Mid-December for mistletoe was another time. But never far into it, never alone.

The last four years, since the Powhatan had become a National Wildlife Refuge, few people except biologists, geologists, and archaeologists had penetrated deep into it. Of course, poachers still hunted back in there, risking arrest.

Facing the porch at about fifty yards, a broad tangle of brush and low trees and licks of brown water, the swamp sometimes looked ghostly when thin mist arose. Summers, when the breeze blew off it, there was a damp smell of rotten leaves in the air. Breeze carried sounds, too. Birds and frogs and four-footed-animal
noises. Some nights, as a little girl in the four-poster, she'd covered her ears at the cries and croaks, the yap-yapping of the foxes, the bloodcurdling shrieks of the bobcats.

Three times they'd lived in the farmhouse—when Bo'sun Sanders had duty in the Norfolk-Portsmouth area—and she'd seen the Powhatan in winter, spring, summer, and fall. It had a different mood for each season. None of them too inviting, so far as she was concerned.

Now, hearing Buck faintly in the distance, she waded across the ditch fronting the road and entered the refuge.

"Always try to stay on hard ground. Keep out of the water as much as possible." That was her papa—swamper, hunter, fisherman—talking to Steve long ago, warning him. It made sense. There was enough hard ground on which to maneuver most of the time. Except in the lake, random pools, man-made ditches, and creeklets, the water was seldom more than a foot deep, but hard ground was always safer.

There were nine trails along the banks of the ditches and sloughs, first used by lumber wagons two centuries ago, more recently used by lumber trucks. They were now barely passable in some places, overgrown with vines and weeds. Sam had been on only one of them, long ago.

Most worrisome were the peat pits. One type was
the moss peat her papa used for litter and mulch. The other was fuel peat, with deposits as deep as thirty feet, used for heating in other countries.

Both kinds were found in the Powhatan. Sometimes underground fires hollowed the deposits, leaving a thin black crust to cover huge holes that were often filled with water. Her grandpa and papa had fallen into them before, as had deer and bear and all lands of other animals. The lucky ones, her papa and grandpa included, had crawled out.

Feet pounding on, Sam hoped she'd be lucky this late afternoon.

In addition to traces of the rough lumbering trails, there were remains of a narrow-gauge railroad, relic of timbering days. Four years of growth were beginning to return the swamp to a state of semi-wilderness. No hunting or fishing was allowed, a law that did not sit well with Sam's papa and many others.

***

Indian summer, ripening time, is the time for serious eating in the Powhatan—named after Chief Powhatan, father of Pocahontas—time for bears like Henry to store up fat to last through the winter, which is usually comparatively mild, nothing like the frigid weeks in northern forests.

Yet I remember days when ice edged the ditches
and ponds, the surface of Lake Nansemond; when snow softly mantled the swamp. So the animals and birds, responding to the season, ate from dawn to dark.

Food is plentiful in autumn. Pawpaw and blackgum and pokeberries, and the luscious wild grapes. Tupelo berries are choice, and acorns are thick under the oaks.

Twenty-two species of animal life walk and crawl and slither around the swamp. Shrews and moles thrive, as well as mice and muskrats. In addition to the bears, bobcats, river otters, mink, gray and red foxes, raccoons, weasels, and white-tailed deer all live there. The gray wolf once stalked the Powhatan but has not been seen since Indian days.

There are the usual noisy flocks of red-winged blackbirds and grackles and cowbirds and common crows; hundreds of thousands of robins, gray catbirds, and Carolina wrens singing gaily. I could hear the
hweet
of the towhee and
tock-tock-tock
of the working woodpecker, see pine siskins feeding on juniper cones. Overhead, night and day, fly tundra swans and Canadian geese, en route to wintering grounds in the south. Loons, going that way, too, wail mournfully. Great ospreys occasionally let their passage he known with a harsh
kreekkreekkreekkreek.
The soaring turkey vultures stay home. They love the Powhatan.

Though it sounds strange, sometimes I talked to the
swamp, and sometimes it talked back in its own, unique way.

I know that many people say "ugh" at the mere mention of swamp, the reputation being more of beast than beauty. Yet it is probably the most misunderstood landscape of all. And those who do enter it and stand still for a while to listen and watch, can often find a melancholy beauty, especially in autumn and early winter. I found that beauty through the eyes of Tom Telford, who was conducting the bear study in the Powhatan.