Brother Bear

As it turns out, that bear I met who came from Warren County, New Jersey, and likes all the same stuff that I do, and has an identical birthmark is actually my twin. Separated at birth. Larry Bear is his name. I’ll be damned! Actually, I have been damned for all intents and purposes. He’s been running up gambling debts, conducting his affairs with enviable promiscuity, and generally being a disreputable bum around this forest for years. And when most critters see me, they tend to assume I am he.

Not to be outdone by me in the wild, life-changing surprise department however, he had no idea who his father was, or that he was still alive and residing within garbage can-throwing distance. The only family he had ever known was a “pack” of feral huskies who aspired to lupine status. In effect, he was raised by phony wolves. As a result, he had acquired a taste for a dish comprised of deer meat and Purina. I tried some, and I’m inclined to stick with frozen pierogies and squirrels.

In the past week, I’ve made multiple attempts to introduce him to old John Birch Bear, but he has failed to arrive at the appointed hour each time. Birch Bear is none too excited about meeting him either. Apparently, when we were born, a fortune-telling porcupine prophesized most threateningly: If a single forest two twins do roam, confined you’ll be to a nursing home.

“But it will be a really cool Star Wars themed place with storm trooper nurses and all the ice cream you can eat!” he added. Prescient.

Consequently, my father outfitted Larry with a sack of trail mix and sent him down the Appalachian Trail as soon as he could walk.

An Evil Twin?

So I ran from those menacing dancing bears as fast as I could. I leapt over streams, ducked under branches, slid down ravines. I grabbed hold of a birch tree to temper a particularly sharp turn and smashed belly first into the very bear the others had originally been pursuing.

Dazed, we slowly arose. I scratched behind my ears. He scratched behind his ears. I put my left foot out. He put his right foot out. We both did the hokey pokey in perfect unison. I tilted my head this way and that. He tilted his head this way and that. I performed a jerky flailing dance with my tongue hanging out and my eyes crossed. He performed a jerky flailing dance with his tongue hanging out and his eyes crossed. Recognizing a shared fondness for that scene in Duck Soup where Groucho and Harpo mirror each other’s movements, and a rare willingness to waste inordinate amounts of time, we continued doing this for a good 25 minutes.

In the course of this we got to talking. He had been born in Warren County, New Jersey and put up for adoption. We discovered that we shared a birthday. And a favorite flavor of squirrel goulash – banana nut! And a proclivity to tie the laces on our dancing shoes “bunny ear style” out of an inability to learn the other way that everyone else does it. Finally, we simultaneously grabbed each other’s right feet and discovered identical birthmarks under our third claws.

You guessed it dear reader! Bears everywhere are trying to cop my style! And who could blame them?

Do the Charleston!

I was in the forest practicing doing the Charleston where no one could see me. My ankles were going every which way and my furry paws were jutting to this side and that. I closed my eyes and saw the band on the other side of the dance hall.

As I spun around, I opened my eyes and saw a 400-pound bear galloping towards me. I leapt out of the way and into a tree, at which point I noticed two other bears chasing the first. The first bear slipped out of sight, at which point his pursuers noticed me and started climbing my tree and shouting all sorts of unfriendly-sounding things in my general direction. Something about a few hundred dollars owed from botched bets on badger boxing, something about hibernating with other bears' honeys, something about months of unsettled tabs from the Perilous Shore, something about toenail clippings left in beehives.

I expressed the sincerest bewilderment, but they would have none of it. They grabbed a fallen branch off the forest floor and poked me out of the tree. I fell over backwards and landed miraculously on my feet. Without a thought, I took three steps forward, point the toe, three steps backward, point the toe.

“Charleston. Charleston. Made in Carolina.”

Bewildered, the other bears facing me began mirroring me.

“Yeah that’s the idea! … Some dance. Some prance.”

Drool-soaked grins spread across the bears’ faces. Next, I added in the arms, and clumsily they tried to follow suit; more often than not, their arms would follow their legs rather than alternating sides, so that they resembled robotic punching machines.

“I’ll say there’s nothing finer than the Charleston! Charleston!”

They were still in the game, however, until I added the ankle movements.

“Lord how you can shuffle. Every step you do leads to something new.”

They were starting to stumble pretty badly, so I pushed the tempo and reduced them to a furry heap on the forest floor and made my escape.

Another Sucky Scenario

When twice within a week a fellow critter assaults you, you begin to wonder if there’s some big secret that everyone is in on except for you.

With my father’s residence firmly established out at Binary Sunset, it dawned on me I could put off no longer the ordeal of cleaning out his old den. I enlisted the help of Roderick, who made sorting through the old bear’s belongings easier by just eating anything that didn’t appear toxic. Everything else, we put on a pile to donate to charity.

There are limits, however, to the number of miniature ketchup packets even the most gluttonous raccoon can ingest. In addition to the stash in the fridge, there were cartons upon cartons in various closets, all meticulously labeled with the dates and names of the high school cafeterias from which they had been pilfered.

While Roderick left to score some cheeseburgers to make his job more palatable, I continued to excavate my way through my father’s life. Among the most notable finds was a stash of newspaper clippings going back to 1947 of fatal bear attacks in the U.S. It did my heart good to find something over which I could bond with my dad like that. As a gesture of goodwill, I brought him his portfolio, updated with a clipping from last Thursday’s Times about that feast out in Yellowstone.

Having cleared most of the detritus, I revved up the old Hoover, which promptly caught fire – I suppose it hadn’t been used in a few decades. A family of aardvarks had moved into the forest to set up an appliance repair, so I brought it in. Little aardvarks were scurrying all over the place, with their mother chasing after them. The bloke behind the counter dryly enquired what he could do for me. Pointing over my shoulder, I said, “This vacuum cleaner is busted.”

With a slap across my face, he shouted, “That’s not a vacuum cleaner, that’s my wife!”

The Cold Treatment

Friends, let me tell you, bears are not logical creatures. You go through life saying “thank you” and “gesundheit”; holding up logs for pregnant bunnies to pass under; allowing coyotes to snag the freshest road waffles. My greatest fear in life is to offend somebody – what else is a bear to be afraid of? Really. It is in the context of this preamble that I shall relate to you the horrors of my day.

I appropriated some construction equipment I found by the highway for the purpose of transporting supplies for Roderick’s fishing venture. It was in the course of these errands that I met the most irrationally quick-tempered ursine ice distributor. Not a minute into our dealings, he asked me if I preferred the ice in the form of cubes or chunks. Eying a fine sow walking past, I exclaimed, perhaps more enthusiastically than is comme il faut, “Chunky!”

The ice bear gave me an icy stare as he asked where I wanted the chunks loaded, and I pointed over my shoulder and said, “Right in the back of that dump truck.”

At which point the bear lost his cool, shouting, “That’s not a dump truck, that’s my wife!” and clocked me. Knocked me out cold.

Nursing Home Nightmares

I went to check on my father yesterday over at the home. When I arrived, some muskrats were holding a Han Solo look-alike contest in the common room. The old bear had hung a big, colorful sign on his door that said, “NO BATHROOM! NO!” for the benefit of a senile neighbor of his who was in the habit of shuffling over to use his toilet.

“The old crone has no sense of decency!”

One of the nurses, a field mouse, had been smuggling him flasks of whiskey. We come from a long line of whiskey-drinking bears: a great uncle of mine met his end after helping himself to a barrel of Jameson’s. (I was reminded of this unfortunate incident when I saw an ad to this effect on a subway in New York when I was in town for a dance marathon convention held by a bunch of Peabody enthusiasts.)

These libations were probably not helping with his nightmares of course. He told me of a dream he had in which he watched a crowd of drunks pile on a cart behind a decrepit old horse and proceed to beat the poor thing to death when it failed to pull them all. I told him to get out and socialize more with the other animals, and headed home.

This morning I got a call from the head nurse telling me that Birch Bear had hit his neighbor over the head with his cane when she came to use his bathroom again. Luckily, she was fine if not a bit disoriented, but they confiscated my dad’s cane and put him on some harder meds.

And Bat's The Way It Is...

I’ve spent the past few days nursing my wounded ego and the poison ivy I picked up on the way to the puppetry gig. I’ve been signing apology notes to be sent to the parents of all the bats in attendance at our program.

The show was ill conceived: it was a series of biblical morality story adaptations for pirates dancing to Michael Jackson hits. Pretty early into the bit about Sodom and Gomorrah, the tape player malfunctioned. In my consternation I said some things that were picked up by my clip-on microphone that I have come to regret very deeply.

It is by great good fortune that the little fledermice in attendance were blind, and therefore did not notice that in my violent scratching at the poison ivy on my wrists, the puppets on my hands appeared to be engaging in unspeakable acts. One less thing to explain to the parents. Anyway, the long and the short of it is that I was back on the job market again.

I figured Roderick always has something cooking, so I went and found him hydrating himself at The Perilous Shore. Sure enough, he was devising a plan to sell summer season passes to his ice-fishing club. Osgood behind the bar has an exclusive on the peppermint schnapps, and I’ve got the job of hauling in the ice.