Sylvia Plath

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The Fifty Ninth Bear

This short story originally appeared in the February 1961 edition of the London Magazine.

 

By the time they arrived, following the map of the Grand loop in the brochure, a dense mist shrouded the rainbow pools; the parking lot and the boardwalks were empty. Except for the sun, already low above the violet hills, and the sun’s image, red as a dwarf tomato lodged in the one small space of water visible, there was nothing to see. Still, enacting as they were a ritual of penance and forgiveness, they crossed the bridge over the scalding river. On either side, ahead and behind, columns of steam mushroomed above the surface of the pools. Veil after veil of whiteness raveled across the boardwalk, erasing at random patches of the sky and the far hills. They moved slowly, enclosed by a medium at once intimate and insufferable, the sulphurous air warm and humid of their faces, on their hands and bare arms.

Norton dallied then, letting his wife drift on ahead. Her slender, vulnerable shape softened, wavered, as the mists thickened between them. She withdrew into a blizzard, into a fall of white water; she was nowhere. What had they not seen? The children squatting at the rim of the paintpots, boiling their breakfast eggs in rusty strainers; copper pennies winking up from cornucopias of sapphire water; the thunderous gushers pluming, now here, now there, across a barren ochre-and-oyster moonscape. She had insisted, not without her native delicacy, on the immense, mustard-coloured canyon where, halfway down to the river, hawks and the shadows of hawks looped and hung like black beads on fine wire. She had insisted on the Dragon’s Mouth, that hoarse, booming spate of mud-clogged water; and the Devil’s Cauldron. He had waited for her habitual squeamishness to turn her away from the black porridge mass that popped and seethed a few yards from under her nose, but she bent over the pit, devout as a priestess in the midst of those vile exhalations. And it was Norton, after all, bareheaded in the full noon sun, squinting against the salt-white glare and breathing in the fumes of rotten eggs, who defaulted, overcome by headache. He felt the ground frail as a bird’s skull under his feet, a mere shell of sanity and decorum between him and the dark entrails of the earth where the sluggish muds and scalding waters had their source.

To top it off, someone had stolen their desert water bag, simply pinched it from the front fender of the car while they were being elbowed along by the midday crowds on the boardwalk. Anybody might have done it: that man with a camera, that child, that Negress in the pink sprigged dress. Guilt diffused through the crowd like a drop of vermilion dye in a tumbler of clear water, staining them all. They were all thieves; their faces were blank, brutish or sly. Disgust curdled in Norton’s throat. Once in the car he slumped down, closed his eyes, and let Sadie drive. A cooler air fanned his temples. His hands and feet seemed to be lifting, elongating, pale and puffed with a dreamy yeast. Like a vast, luminous starfish he drifted, awash with sleep, his consciousness fisted somewhere there, dark and secret as a nut.

‘Fifty-six,’ Sadie said.

Norton opened his eyes; they stung and watered as though someone had scoured them with sand while he drowsed. But it was a fine bear, black-furred and compact, purposefully skirting the edge of the forest. To left and right, the tall, mottled boles of pines speared skvward, spreading out, far overhead, their dark thatch of needles. Although the sun stood high, only a few splinters of light pierced the cool, blue-black mass of the trees. The bear-counting started as a game on their first day in the park, and continued still, five days later, long after they stopped listing licence plates from different states and noticing when the mileage showed four, or five, or six identical figures in a row. Perhaps it was the bet that kept it going.

Sadie bet ten dollars on seeing fifty-nine bears by the end of their stay. Norton had set his figure carelessly at seventy-one. In secret, he hoped Sadie would win. She took games seriously, like a child. Losing wounded her, she was so trusting; and above all, she trusted her luck. Fifty-nine was Sadie’s symbol of plenitude. For Sadie there were never ‘hundreds of mosquitoes’, or ‘millions’, or even ‘a great many’, but always fifty-nine. Fifty-nine bears, she predicted breezily, without a second thought. Now that they were so close to that total- having numbered grandfather bears, mother bears and cubs, honey- colored bears and black bears, brown bears and cinnamon bears, bears up to their middles in trash cans, bears begging at the roadside, bears swimming the river, bears nosing around the tents and trailers at supper-time – they might well stick at fifty-nine bears. They were leaving the park the next day.

Away from the boardwalks, the spiels of rangers, the popular marvels, Norton revived a little. His headache, withdrawn to the far edge of awareness, circled and stalled there like some thwarted bird. As a boy, Norton had developed, quite by himself, a method of intense prayer – not to any image of God, but to what he liked to think of as the genius of a place, the fostering spirit of an ash grove, or a shoreline. What he prayed for was, in one guise or another, a private miracle: he contrived to be favoured, by the sight of a doe, say, or the find of a lump of water-polished quartz. Whether his will merely coincided with circumstance, or really did force tribute, he could not be sure. Either way, he had a certain power. Now, lulled by the putter of the car, and feigning sleep, Norton began to will toward him all the animals of the forest – the fog-coloured, delicately striated antelope, the lumbering, tousled buffalo, the red foxes, the bears. In his mind’s eye he saw them pause, startled, as by some alien presence, in their deep thickets and noonday retreats. He saw them, one by one, turn and converge toward the centre where he sat, fiercely, indefatigably willing the movement of each hoof and paw.

‘Elk!’ Sadie exclaimed, like a voice out of the depths of his head. The car swerved to a halt at the side of the road. Norton came to with a start. Other cars were pulling up beside them and behind them. Timorous as Sadie was, she had no fear of animals. She had a way with them. Norton had come upon her once, feeding a wild stag blueberries out of her hand, a stag whose hooves could, in one blow, have dashed her to the ground. The danger simply never occurred to her.

Now she hurried after the men in shirt sleeves, the women in cotton print dresses, the children of all ages, who were crowding to the verge of the road as to the scene of an astounding accident. The shoulder dropped steeply to a clearing in a thick growth of pines. Everybody carried a camera. Twirling dials, waving light meters, calling to relatives and friends above for fresh rolls of film, they plunged over the slope in a wave, slipping, lapsing, half-falling, in an avalanche of rust-coloured pine needles and loose turf. Greateyed, kingly under the burden of their spreading, dark-scalloped antlers, the elk knelt in the damp green bottom of the little valley. As the people came charging and crying toward them, they rose with a slow, sleepy amazement and moved off, unhurried and detached, into the pathless wood beyond the clearing. Norton stood on the top of the slope with a quiet, insular dignity. He ignored the people about him, disgruntled now, and barging about noisily in the under- brush. In his mind he was forming an apology to the elk. He had meant well.

‘I didn’t even have time for a shot,’ Sadie was saying at his elbow. ‘It was pitch-dark down there anywhere, I guess.’ Her fingers closed on the bare flesh of his upper arm, soft-tipped as limpets. ‘let’s go see that pool. The one that comes to a boil every fifteen minutes.’

‘You go,’ Norton said. ‘I have a headache, a touch of sunstroke, I think. I’ll sit and wait for you in the car.’

Sadie did not answer, but she ground the car into gear with an unmistakable wantonness, and Norton knew he had disappointed her. More and more during the second year of their marriage she seemed unwilling to go anywhere without him – to the market, to the bank, to the park. She clung to him, shy as a child, as if he provided a sanctum outside which she would be ruined, undone by brutal elements. He read her like a book. Even her tantrums were infante, transparent. A prolonged din of pot-lids in the kitchen, a glass hurled to smithereens in the fireplace, a slammed door – these naïve stage effects testified to some straw too many in her slight load. The simplest question would free her tongue, her tears, and, after a decent interval, embraces, the act of love, would heal the last of her hurt.

Now, with a sense of impending storm, Norton watched Sadie stalk away from the car in the peaked straw hat with the red ribbon bow under the chin, her underlip set, pink and glistening, in a grieved pout. Then she passed, with the line of other tourists, over the glaring white horizon.

Otten, in daydreams, Norton saw himself in the role of a widower: a hollow-cheeked, Hamletesque figure in sombre suits, given to standing, abstracted, ravaged by casual winds, on lonely promontories and at the rail of ships, Sadie’s slender, elegant white body embalmed, in a kind of bas relief, on the central tablet of his mind. It never occurred to Norton that his wife might outlive him. Her sensuousness, her simple pagan enthusiasms, her inability to argue in terms of anything but her immediate emotions – this was too flimsy, too gossamery a stuff to survive out from under the wings of his guardianship.

As he had guessed, Sadie’s jaunt on her own was anything but satisfactory. The pool boiled up, right enough, a perfectly lovely shade of blue, but a freakish shift in wind flung the hot steam in her face and nearly scalded her to death. And somebody, some boy or group of boys, had spoken to her on the boardwalk and spoiled the whole thing. A woman could never be alone in peace; a solitary woman was a walking invitation to all sorts of impudence.

All this, Norton knew, was a bid for his company. But since the incident of the water bag, a revulsion from the crowds of tourists had been simmering at the base of his skull. When he thought of going out into the mobs again, his fingers twitched. He saw himself. from a great distance, from Olympus, pushing a child into a steaming pool, punching a fat man in the belly. His headache stabbed back out of the blue like a vulture’s beak.

‘Why don’t we leave the rest till tomorrow?’ he said. ‘Then I’d feel up to walking round with you.’

‘Today’s our last day.’

Norton couldn’t think of an answer to that.

It was only when they passed the fifty-seventh bear that he realized how upset Sadie was. The bear lay stretched into the road ahead of them, a ponderous brown Sphinx occupying a pool of sunlight. Sadie could not have missed seeing him: she had to pull out into the left lane to get round, but she set her lips and said nothing, accelerated, and shot them past a bend in the road. Norton remembered hearing of a child who never turned his anger on the objects or people around him, but threw himself on the floor, kicking and crying, ‘I’ll break my legs, I’ll break my legs.’ Sadie was driving recklessly, now. When they came to the junction near the great rainbow pools, she drove by so fast that a group of people about to cross the road jumped back in alarm, and the ranger with them yelled out angrily, ‘Hey, slow down there!’ A few hundred yards beyond the junction Sadie began to cry. Her face puckered up and her nose reddened; tears streamed into the corners of her mouth and over her chin.

‘Pull up,’ Norton ordered at last, taking the reins in hand. The car bumped off on to the shoulder of the road, bucked once or twice, and stalled. Sadie collapsed like a rag doll over the steering wheel.

‘I didn’t ask anything else,’ she sobbed vaguely. ‘All I asked was the pools and the springs.’

‘Look.’ Norton said, ‘I know what’s the matter with us. It’s about two o’clock, and we’ve been driving around six hours without a bite.’

Sadie’s sobs quietened. She let him untie her straw hat and stroke her hair.

‘We’ll go along to Mammoth Junction,’ Norton went on, as if he were telling a soothing bedtime story, ‘and we’ll have hot soup and sandwiches, and see if there’s any mail, and we’ll climb all the hot springs and stop at all the pools going back. How’s that?’

Sadie nodded. He felt her hesitate for a second. Then she blurted, ‘Did you see the bear?’

‘Of course I saw the bear,’ Norton said, hiding a smile. ‘How many is that. now?’

‘Fifty-seven.’

With the waning of the sun’s force, the pleasant, pliable shape of Sadie’s waist in the crook of his arm, Norton felt a new benevolence toward humanity bloom in him. The irritable flame at the base of his skull cooled. He started the car with a firm, complacent mastery.

Now Sadie strolled, well fed and at peace, a few yards ahead of him, invisible, swathed in a mist, but surely his as a lamb on a leash. Her innocence, her trustfulness, endowed him with the nimbus of a protecting god. He fathomed her; enclosed her. Still he had never quite lost his awe of her body. Each time he undid her dress, unsheathed her from her electric silks and crisp laces he felt unaccountably bearish, a violator of her whiteness. He did not see, or did not care to see, how her submissiveness moved and drew him. Night after night she would turn to him with the full, somnambulant abandon of a deep-throated flower. Yet in the very act of love he was unmanned; he nuzzled and drowsed at her breast like a child searching out its mother. And now, through the steaming, suffocating baths of mist, she led him, and he followed, though the rainbows under the clear water were lost.

Dark came upon them without warning. By the time they completed their circuit of the boardwalk, the sun had gone under the hills and the tall pines walled the deserted road with shadow. As he drove, a touch of uneasiness made Norton glance at the gas meter. The white pointer registered empty. Sadie must have seen it, too, for in the obscure, fading light she was watching him.

Do you think we’ll make it?’ she asked, with a curious vibrancy.

‘Of course,’ Norton said, although he was not at all sure. There were no gas stations until they got to the lake, and that stretch would take over an hour. The tank had a reserve, of course, but he had never tested it, never let it run below a quarter full. The upset with Sadie must have taken his mind off the meter. They could easily have filled up at Mammoth Junction. He switched on the long beams, but even then the little cave of light moving ahead of them seemed no match for the dark battalions of surrounding pines. He thought how pleasant it would be, for a change, to see the beams of another car close behind him, reflected in the rear-view mirror. But the mirror brimmed with darkness. For one craven, irrational moment, Norton felt the full weight of the dark: it bore down on top of his skull, pressed in upon him from all sides, brutally, concentratedly, as if intent to crush the thin, boneplated shell that set him apart.

Working to moisten his lips, which had gone quite dry, Norton started to sing against the dark, something he had not done since childhood.

‘You wanderin’ boys of Liverpool
I’ll have you to beware
When you go a-huntin’
With your dog, your gun, your snare…

The plaintive cadences of the song deepened the loneliness of the night around them as if they, too, were marooned on a continent on the dark underside of the world.

‘One night as I lay on my bunk
A-dreamin’ all alone…

Suddenly, like a candle in a draught, Norton’s memory flickered. The words of the song blacked out. But Sadie took it up.

I dreamt I was in Liverpool
Way back in Marybone…’
‘With my true love beside me
And a jug of ale in hand
And I woke quite broken-hearted
Lying off Van Dieman’s land.’

They finished in unison. Forgetting the words disturbed Norton; he had known them by heart, surely as his name. His brain felt to be going soft.

In half an hour of driving they passed no landmark they recognized, and the pointer of the gas meter was dipping well below empty. Norton found himself listening to the tenuous whirring of the motor as to the breathing of a dear, moribund relative, his ears cocked for the break in continuity, the faltering, the silence.

‘Even if we make this,’ Sadie said once, with a taut little laugh, ‘there will be two more bad things. There’ll be a trailer parked in our car space and a bear waiting at the tent.’

At last the lake loomed before them, a radiant, silvery expanse beyond the dark, cone shapes of the pines, reflecting the stars and the ruddy, newly risen moon. A flash of white crossed the headlights as a stag galloped off into the brush. The faint, dry reverberation of the stag’s hooves consoled them, and the sight of the open water. Across the lake, a tiny crownlet of lights marked the shops of the camp centre. Twenty minutes later, they were driving into the lit gas station, chuckling like two giddy adolescents. The engine died five yards from the pump.

Norton hadn’t seen Sadie so merry since the start of their trip. Stepping out, even in state parks, among other tents and trailers, unnerved her. One evening when he had walked off along the lake shore for a few moments, leaving her to finish up the supper dishes, she had become hysterical – run down to the shore with her dishtowel, waving and calling, the blue shadows thickening around her like water, until he heard her and turned back. But now the safely-passed scare of darkness, the empty tank and the unpeopled road was affecting her like brandy. Her exhilaration bewildered him; he shouldered the campground and around D-loop to their site, Norton’s heart caught. Their tent was gone. Then, flushing at his own foolishness, he saw that the tent was merely hidden behind the long, balloon shape of an unfamiliar trailer which had moved in on them.

He swung the car into the parkins space behind the trailer. The headlights fixed on a dark, mounded shape a few yards from their tent. Sadie gave a low, exultant laugh. Fifty-eight!’

Distracted by the bright lights, or the noise of the engine, the bear backed away from the garbage can. Then, at a cumbersome lope, it vanished into the maze of darkened tents and trailers. Usually Sadie did not like to cook supper after dark, because the food smells attracted animals. Tonight, though, she went to the camp ice chest and took out the pink fillets of lake trout they caught the day before. She fried them, with some cold boiled potatoes, and steamed a few ears of corn. She even went through the ritual of mixing Ovaltine by the yellow beam of their flashlight, and cheerfully heated water for the dishes.

To make up for the loss of the water bag and his carelessness about the gas tank, Norton was especially scrupulous about cleaning up. He wrapped the remains of the fried fish in wax paper and stored it in the back seat of the car, along with a bag of cookies, some fig newtons and the ice chest. He checked the car windows and locked the doors. The trunk of the car was packed with enough canned and dry goods to last them two months; he made sure that was locked. Then he took the bucket of soapy dishwater and scrubbed down the wooden table and the two benches. Bears only bothered messy campers, the rangers said – people who littered food about or kept food in their tents. Every night, of course, the bears travelled throughout the camp, from garbage can to garbage can, foraging. You couldn’t stop that. The cans had metal lids and were set deep in the ground, but the bears were sly enough to flip up the tops and scoop out the debris, rummaging through wax paper and cardboard cartons for stale breadcrusts, bits of hamburger and hotdogs, jars with honey or jam still glued to the sides, all the prodigal leavings of campers without proper iceboxes or storage bins. In spite of the strict rules, people fed the bears, too – lured them with sugar and crackers to pose in front of the camera, even shoved their children under the bear’s nose for a more amusing shot.

Iin the furred, blue moonlight, the pines bristled with shadow. Norton imagined the great, brutish shapes of the bears padding there, in the heart of the black, nosing for food. His headache was bothering him again. Together with the headache, something else beat at the edge of his mind, tantalizing as the forgotten words to a song: some proverb, some long-submerged memory he fished for but could not come by.

‘Norton!’ Sadie hissed from within the tent.

He went to her with the slow, tranced gestures of a sleep-walker, zipping the canvas door with its inset window of mosquito netting behind him. The sleeping-bag had taken warmth from her body, and he crawled in beside her as into a nest, burying his face in the hollow of her throat, searching, like some schooled dowser, for the springs of forgetfulness.

The crash woke him. He dreamed it first, the tearing smash, the after-shattering tinkle of glass, then woke, with a deadly clear head. to hear it going on still, a diminished cascade of bells and gongs. Beside him Sadie lay taut as a strung bow. The breath of her words caressed his ear. ‘My bear’, she said, as if she had called it up out of the dark.

After the crash the air seemed preternaturally still. Then Norton heard a scuffling in the vicinity of the car. A bumping and clattering set in, as if the bear were bowling cans and tins down an incline. It’s got into the trunk, Norton thought. It’s going to rip open all our stews and soups and canned fruits and sit there all night, gorging. The vision of the bear at their stores infuriated him. The bear was to blame for the filched water bag, the empty gas tank, and, as if that were not enough, he would eat them out of two months’ supplies in a single night.

‘Do something.’ Sadie huddled down into the nest of blankets. ‘Shoo him away.’ Her voice challenged him, yet his limbs were heavy, recalcitrant as ice.

Norton could hear the bear snuffling and padding along beside the tent. The canvas luffed like a sail. Gingerly, he climbed out of the sleeping-bag, reluctant to leave the dark, musky warmth of his bed. He peered through the netting of the door. In the blue drench of moonlight he could see the bear hunched at the left rear window of the car, shoving its body through a gap where the window should have been. With a crackle, like the fisting of a ball of paper, the bear brought out a little bundle of straw and trailing ribbons.

A urge of anger beat up in Norton’s throat. The damn bear had no right to his wife’s hat, mangling it like that. The hat belonged to Sadie as indissolubly as her own body, and there was the bear ravaging it, picking it apart in a horrid inquisitive way.

‘You stay here,’ Norton said. ‘I’m going to drive that bear off.’

‘Take the light,’ Sadie said. ‘That’ll scare it.’

Norton felt for the cold, cylindrical shape of the flashlight on the floor of the tent, unzipped the door, and stepped out into the pale blur of moonlight. The bear had got the fried fish out of the bottom of the car now, and stood reared, preoccupied, fumbling with the wax paper wrappings. The remains of Sadie’s hat, a grotesque crumple of straw, lay at the bear’s feet.

Norton aimed the beam of the flashlight straight at the bear’s eyes. ‘Get out of here, you,’ he said.

The bear did not move.

Norton took a step forward. The shape of the bear towered against the car. Norton could see, in the glare of the light, the jagged teeth of glass around the hole gaping in the car window. Get out…’ He held the light steady, moving forward, willing the bear to be gone. At any moment the bear should break into a shuffle and be off. ‘Get out…’ But there was another will working, a will stronger, even, than his.

The darkness fisted and struck. The light went out. The moon went out in a cloud. A hot nausea flared through his heart and bowels. He struggled among petals, waxy white and splotched with red, tasting the thick, sweet honey that filled his throat. As from a rapidly receding planet he heard Sadie’s cry – whether of terror or triumph he could not tell.

It was the last bear, her bear, the fifty-ninth.

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Sylvia Plath was a renowned poet and writer best known for her collection, Ariel and the novel The Bell Jar.