Trapped

Charlotte Gross

 

I never ate the first and only pie I ever baked. Calling it a pie is generous; it didn’t bake so much as blacken to a mass, more like a meteorite than a pastry. I blame the grizzly.

When I reported the problem bear to the Northwest Wyoming Fish and Game office, where I was a wildlife technician, my bosses wouldn’t let me help with any step beyond setting the culvert trap. In the incident report, I had noted what I could of the bear’s approximate weight, whether it wore a radio collar or ear tag, and the nature of the “problem” behavior. Namely, breaking and entering my cabin. At my hands, the bear became Grizzly 246. Without me, Fish and Game wouldn’t have had the animal for their study.

The day after my visit from 246, another wildlife tech and I packed bags with gear for measuring every inch of a bear. Dr. Schwartz found us in the backroom.

“You got a collar in there for tracking?” He patted one of the bags with a wiry hand. We nodded. Obviously. “Good.” He adjusted his glasses, and looked down at the report. His lips moved as he read it over. “Thorough report,” he said. “You wrote this up?” He looked at the other tech.

“No, I did.” I didn’t let the blond kid speak. Dr. Schwartz inclined his head.

“Be sure you get good data,” he said. “Even if you destroy 246 and don’t just relocate, the stats are essential.” He tapped the rolled-up paper against his palm. “Let’s hope she’s a mature female.” He smiled straight at me. It wasn’t the first time I wanted to knock his teeth in.

That evening, I rode in the truck with the blond tech and Tim, the game officer in charge of the operation. Laconic, broad-shouldered, and as smooth with a blood sample syringe as he was with a .24 handgun, Tim was exactly the kind of guy my ex would have hero-worshipped. Even half a year later it was painful to call Scott my ex, but I wouldn’t let myself think about him now.

With the white steel culvert trap on a trailer behind us, we clanged down the employee housing road to where it ended beyond my cabin. I felt a sudden wariness, moving so close to my house with these men. I didn’t know them beyond small talk about deer populations and what bait drew bears most reliably. We’d never even worked in the field together before. My worlds were shading too close to each other. An animal never shows where she makes her den.

The blond tech—in my head I called him Mike, though I didn’t bother to ask—told me to jump down and scout out a flat spot for us to lower the trap. I swung my field bag over one shoulder and dropped from truck to dirt. I hid how I felt about having a kid younger than me by a good five years order me around. I turned my head away from cottonwood branches obscuring road from river. Staggering through the brush, I emerged on the other side to spongy turf. Behind me, the truck idled. Mike and Tim laughed at something. I heard the rattle of metal as they pulled gear from the truck bed and unhitched the trailer. Their voices were clear enough to sound human, but I couldn’t pull words from the string of language.

“Here, guys!” I shouted when I found promising ground.

I tramped back to the truck. Together, we heaved and cajoled the trailer through the thickets. Woods’ rose and raspberry brambles raised lines on our forearms below rolled-back red uniform sleeves. The men grunted with each strain of effort. At the landing point, Tim counted down from three and we eased the trap from its wheels.

“The chicken?” he said.

Mike reached into his pack and pulled out a full carcass, slimy in a plastic bag.

“Lucky bear,” Mike said.

Tim took the bag and climbed into the trap. I watched him hook the bait to the tripwire and then pull a blowtorch from his pack. A burnt offering for the bear. I wondered if the griz would have prefered my ruined huckleberry pie.

▱

A culvert trap can remain untended overnight. Should a bear shuffle in and the door guillotine shut behind it, the animal can remain inside without hurting itself or breaking loose. From my cabin that night, I didn’t hear any rattle of claws against metal or roars of a trapped grizzly. It wasn’t until the following afternoon, when I was in the field counting whitebark pine yield, that I heard the news over the radio. The trap had caught a bear. Suspected to be 246.

When I pulled into the office lot at the end of my field shift, I was surprised to see an ambulance. I parked the truck and pulled keys from the ignition, my eyes never leaving the office door. I couldn’t name the dread I felt gathering behind my sternum. As I collected my gear, the door opened. EMTs carried a stretcher between them. They moved without urgency. Wildlife techs, officers, and biologists followed. I paused with my fingers on the truck door handle. It was impossible at that distance to search their closed faces. They had covered the body on the stretcher, even the head. Though I wasn’t moving, I felt myself slow. I felt each beat of my heart. The stretcher disappeared behind white metal doors. The ambulance shuddered to life and drove out in a cloud of dust. No lights. No siren.

“Who?” I didn’t have to ask anything more when I approached an older, bearded tech. The first person between my truck and the office.

“Officer Tim,” he said. His voice was monotone. “Bear got him.” The dread I’d felt hardened. It was as though the burnt brick of my pie sat in my stomach. My face must have asked, how?

“I wasn’t there, but I guess they made some mistake with the tranquilizer. Thought the bear was out cold, but when they opened the trap to get it—” he made a swiping motion with a hand. “Right to the head and neck. Fatal.”

“And it got away?”

“Yeah,” the bearded tech said. “It was just Tim and the kid out there.” He glanced back toward the doorway. Other wildlife techs gathered around Mike, who looked like a zombie. Face pale, eyes glassy. “He was too busy trying to help Tim to bother shooting. Said it must’ve just stumbled off.” The tech shook his head. “Only data they got was the bear’s female.”

I couldn’t feel anything beyond a generalized grief. I didn’t even know where Tim was from, what he liked to do off duty, whether he had family.

Grizzly 246 was no longer a nuisance bear. She was a trap-shy bear. A man-killer bear. A dead bear.

▱

I was never supposed to be part of a grizzly tracking project. It was Scott’s world. He was the one who went to school for conservation law enforcement, who knew everything about counting trout and quartering deer. I was going to be a doctor. No one from Fish and Game knew I’d filled out their application forms only after one medical school, then another, then every single school rejected me.

Like anyone else from northern Maine who sees some glimmer of life beyond the orbit of liquor stores, gas stations, elementary schools, and stinking paper mills, my roadmap out of Rumford was vague. At the time, revulsion felt like enough, combined with a to-do list of 1) graduate high school, 2) don’t fuck up, 3) go to a fancy college, 4) don’t fuck up, 5) graduate with a useful degree, 6) get into med school. Get out of the trap.

But then I fucked up. Or rather, got fucked. For a while, my golden sister Annabelle was the only person who knew Scott had broken up with me the day I graduated college with that useful degree in hand since I’d long ago stopped telling our mom anything. She was always too exhausted from the mill and too enmeshed in her own boy troubles (and they were all boys, in my mind). I’d thought I would go live with Scott for the summer while he patrolled the state forest up the coast. I hadn’t known he’d asked for placement on a roving enforcement unit in Alaska.

“I still love you, babe,” he’d said to the back of my head as I curled around myself in the bed of his pickup. The black robes I’d stripped off lay crumpled in the corner. “But, you know, I got to follow this gig as far as it takes me.” I jerked away from the hand on my shoulder. This was it? After three years together? “I just need to get out there,” he said.

“Did you think about me at all?” I pushed myself backward in the truck. Out of his reach.

“Bernie—”

“Don’t you know how fucking helpless I feel?” I could barely get the words out. He didn’t try to stop me when I grabbed the robes and jumped down. I didn’t bother to get dressed. Just ran.

Back at Mom’s house, I’d thrown myself into medical school applications in a fever. On shift at Big Bub’s diner, I greeted customers with ferocious friendliness. I started running every day. I went to bed early. I would do everything right.

Clearly, I didn’t. Otherwise, why would I be working for Fish and Game and living in a cabin at the edge of Grand Teton?

What no one except Annabelle knew was that, weeks after Scott left, I missed my period. She was the one who helped me blame round after round of med school rejections on the distraction, as she called it. And she was the only one who knew the afternoon I called in sick at the diner that I’d bled a huge, dark clot of blood into the toilet. Days before I could even make it to the clinic in Portland I was spared a choice. A choice was torn from me.

I could pretend all that was behind me now. In this new place Scott had never been part of, it was easier to forget about him, and about what he’d left me with. Most days. I could be a new person here. I could be the kind of gal who bakes. I wasn’t trying to get back with Scott, but I convinced myself he wouldn’t have left if I were more feminine. If I baked pies.

When I’d slid that first and only huckleberry pie into my cabin’s crack-doored oven, I was trying hard not to think about what he might be doing in Alaska. Was he meeting cute girls who could all fillet salmon and bake perfect serviceberry pies? I tried not to think about what it would be like to cook for someone else, to share what I was making. It was better not having anyone around to hurt me.

I stepped away to grab a fleece before returning to clean the mess of mixing bowls and huckleberry splatter. Beyond the open door, cicada chirps rose in crescendo. The insects were clinging to summer’s lingering light, as I was. I paused a moment to watch the mountains deepen from lavender to indigo. Here at the border of Grand Teton, I could face away from the other employee cabins and pretend I stood alone in the park itself.

In my bedroom, I checked my phone. No demands from Dr. Schwartz or other bosses; no messages from Annabelle or Mom, either. A few months ago I’d stopped half-hoping for, half-dreading a bubble of text from Scott. It still hurt to even look at his name in my contact list. I tossed the phone aside. I pulled the jacket over my head as I turned and kicked open the door from my room.

A huge, dark shadow moved between the stove and me. A mixing bowl clattered to the pine-planked floor. The shadow huffed. A pink tongue flicked over teeth and wet nose.

“Oh … shit.” I hadn’t meant to speak.

The shadow snuffled and lowered to lick the fallen bowl. A whiff of musk mingled with sweet, baking berries. I looked at the ears for a tag—then every moment of training I’d ever sat through vanished. I bolted.

I didn’t stop until I reached park headquarters. I must have set a record, running the mile from where my cabin sat at the far, wooded edge of employee housing just outside the national park boundary. It took at least twenty minutes for my heart rate to slow to normal and I could form any thought beyond, Bear!

I paced in the circle of light in front of the closed main building, breathing deep, steadying breaths. That this grizzly had chosen my cabin to raid felt incredibly unfair. Why was I always the one who took the fall? It wasn’t me leaving trash bins unbolted or lunch coolers in the bed of my pickup. Fish and Game, the Park Service, all of us had heard reports of more bears—grizzly and black—sniffing their way to the edges of Grand Teton and Yellowstone. The animals were pushing their territory closer to that one percent of front country most visitors tour. Evidence of a robust population, Dr. Schwartz said—a robust population his study team had revived from endangered-species status. Evidence that bears are desperate for food beyond climate change-stressed whitebark pine, the environmentalists argued.

Whatever. I just wanted the bear out of my kitchen. I just wanted my pie. Hadn’t enough been taken from me?

I sat and watched the Big Dipper brighten to life above ragged peaks. I pulled my fleece tighter against the cooling air. On the sage flats, a coyote yipped. I sniffed, convincing myself I could catch the scent of smoke. I was supposed to have lowered the oven temperature partway through the pie’s bake time. Fear of my visitor battled fear the pie would burn my cabin down. I stood and trotted back down the road.

I slowed once I’d moved beyond shadows thrown from other, bright-windowed cabins. The end of the road was so dark. I wished I’d brought my headlamp or phone for light.

“Hey, bear,” I called as I approached. It went against instinct to make my footsteps crunch in the gravel and then to clap my hands in warning. But a startled bear is an aggressive bear.

“Hey there, bear,” I said, almost singing. No way was I going to call anyone else in to help. This was my problem. I sniffed. Acrid, with a sticky-sweet note. The pie was definitely burning. The bear must have only eaten what I’d left out.

“Hey, bear?” I called, a last time. I reached a hand around for the light switch. I flicked it, and flinched backward. Nothing. The bear was gone.

I knew I couldn’t just let it melt back into the park and forget about it. I’d have to report its presence. We needed the numbers for our count, and I’d been lucid enough to notice the animal’s ear wasn’t already tagged.

Still jittery with adrenaline, I yanked the pie out of the oven. Thick smoke made me sputter. I waved it aside, and poked with a fork at the leathery crust, the sunken crater of filling. My one attempt at domesticity. Something so simple, yet I’d still managed to fuck up. I scraped the mess into the trash beneath the sink.

Only then did I look around to see what other damage the bear might have wreaked. I was surprised not to see shards of glass. No cupboard doors hung off their hinges. Mixing bowls and measuring cups littered the floor, but none had shattered. The bag of flour I’d left out laid empty, its contents spilled like a dusting of snow. I took out the broom and dustpan and knelt to sweep.

Before me, a single, hind paw print marked the flour. I’d never seen tracks that looked so much like a human foot.

▱

For days after Tim’s death, we tracked Grizzly 246. I’d have done exactly what she did: retreat deep into the Tetons, away from human trails, away from culvert traps. Even if she was somehow still susceptible to the old burnt chicken in a cage trick, we wouldn’t be able to lug that kind of setup to far-north Webb Canyon, where we found her signs. From a command center camp on the shore of Jackson Lake, we trekked up the canyon in shifts. No one talked much. It was hard to, when Tim’s loss was so recent. Even thought it was the loss of someone I’d barely known. And yet, I couldn’t help but pause, awed, at each turn in the terrain. I breathed in the fierce peaks above and bright wildflower meadows. It helped.

Setting a leghold snare means someone needs to be around to check it every two hours. The locking circle of aircraft cable, hidden in grasses and duff by a pile of elk guts, was our last resort. I didn’t ask Dr. Schwartz, the game officers, or any of the other techs why they were so concerned about avoiding lacerations to the grizzly’s leg if they were just planning to shoot her anyway. Even in the backcountry, the threat of unflattering photographs and defamation loomed.

On the third night of our vigil, I took up position against a bull pine. Deep in the canyon, I kept watch on the margin between a willow-lined drainage and pine stands. I sat within hearing, but downwind from the clearing where we had set the trap.

I unfolded my legs from under me, careful not to crunch down on any twigs as I shifted. I’d fought the need to pee for too long. I tried wiggling my sit bones in the needle duff. I clenched and unclenched my glutes, but I couldn’t ignore the pressure behind my waistband any longer. Above, the fingernail moon cast just enough light for the pines to move with strange shadows. It was impossible to feel alone. Every rustle, every shift in breeze showed a forest alive. I could feel its eyes. Massaging the tingling cramps from my legs, I looked left, then right, as far around my backrest tree as I could. I flexed numb toes, wanting more than anything to stay put and stay safe. But it was impossible. I had to pee.

I was glad the other techs and wildlife officers were only within radio distance and couldn’t see me gracelessly stumble to standing. I leaned with a hand against pine bark, waiting for the rush of black closing my vision to clear. I shook out one leg, then another. As quietly as I could, I waded through low brush to a spot closer to the willows where I could crouch.

Would the smell of human urine warn an animal away more than the smell, the sound, the presence of a human body? Would a bear habituated enough to enter a house care? My fingers were too busy fumbling with the button on my pants and long underwear layers beneath for my mind to consider the questions any longer than it took to form them.

Pants still below my knees, I looked up at the scraps of constellations between pine boughs overhead. More stars than I had ever counted hung glittering like powder suspended in solution. I reached to hike up the layer closest to my skin, pausing to warm my fingers between cloth and leg muscle. I heard a snap in the darkness. Without thought, I yanked my clothing up. Hearing, smell, sight—every sense suddenly opened.

A crunch from the thickets in front of me. I couldn’t move. Branches cracked. Leaves brushed against some huge, moving bulk. I felt my whole scalp shift. Bear.

She shouldered out from the willows, dark in the darkness. Moonlight silvered the blond tips of her fur. An etched bear, come to life. She grunted when our eyes met. It was almost a grunt of recognition. I did not breathe. Too late to look away. I had already issued her a challenge without meaning to. The hump of her back shifted. She lowered her head. She opened and shut her jaw as if yawning—a warning. She breathed a deep huff.

I tried to quiet and shrink my body into a figure as unthreatening and invisible as possible. My hands reached for a canister of bear spray that wasn’t at my hip. Spray, gun, anything I might use to defend myself was by the bull pine.

The grizzly swiveled her head, suddenly. Out of the thicket to her right poked a bright, small face. Her cub. It raised its nose to pull in my scent, then nuzzled against its mother’s leg when the larger bear shot out a paw to pull it in. I almost whimpered. A mama griz does not know fear. Female with cub of the year, I read from the mortality data sheet in my mind. This bear would kill me. And then she would be a dead bear.

Her eyes flicked from her baby to me. She huffed again, deep, guttural in her throat. I wanted to close my eyes for the charge. But then she swung her head to nudge the cub back into the undergrowth. I felt a pang of something like longing when the little body wriggled back into the tangle of Woods’ rose. The mother looked back at me. Head, then shoulders, then flank followed the cub. Branches closed around her swaying haunches. The crunch of twigs receded.

I fell back a step and let my legs give out beneath me. There were no words left in my mind. I curled myself into the pine needles, shaking, shivering with more than cold.

▱

I don’t know how long I laid there. I thought I could hear the bears moving, circling my hollow. I would not—could not—signal to the others from Fish and Game that I had our target so near.

I didn’t notice the constellations fade until only the brightest stars remained trapped in the branches above me. I only sat up when I heard a new and awful sound. A bellowing, crying, human sound. In one motion I was running. I wanted to relieve the agony of that cry more than I’d ever wanted to help anyone or anything before. I ran toward the source. It was, I knew, the trap.

To my left I saw officers and techs strung along the edge of the clearing where we’d set the snare. I pulled my jacket over my nose against the stench of elk remains. I couldn’t see the men’s faces. They sighted down their guns. In the grey light, a shadow bear heaved and pulled at her caught leg. To my right, cowering beneath willow branches, hid the cub. I sidestepped toward it. The trapped grizzly saw my movement. Even in her agony, she tracked me with her snout.

“Hold!” shouted one of the officers to the others. He ignored me, focused only on the bear, and the tranquilizer gun in his hand. Data first, and then death. I could see him trying to steady himself, aiming for an opening behind the bear’s wild, jerking foreleg.

The grizzly yanked upward. She pulled the trap from its anchor. The metal still cinched her paw, drawing blood that dripped black into leaf litter. Standing, she snorted in air, straining to find me as I approached her cub. Her full teats swung with her body. They looked shockingly like a woman’s breasts.

The bear’s eyes found mine. I saw her as if she were stripped of her pelt. I was staring into my own brown eyes in a mirror.

“Three, two—” I heard the officer with dart gun count.

The bear raised huge, five-toed paws to the opening sky.

 

Charlotte Gross works outside on traditionally Washoe land. She has watched for fires from a Sierra Nevada lookout, Nordic ski patrols, guides mountain bike rides, leads backpacking trips, and facilitates writing workshops that connect people with their landscapes. You can read her stories in Salamander, Camas, Whitefish Review, Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, Green Mountains Review, The Hopper, and elsewhere.