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!”