Katelyn Keating trailer had rolled over some part of the bear, too. I switched the hazards on and pulled the rig off the road onto the shoulder a few yards ahead. I was in shock. I remember no feeling until I jumped out into the road, when the tears began. Bugsy kicked twice and shrieked. He could smell the bear, smell fear, smell the otherness of the bear, the omnivorousness. He was afraid. I could smell woodsmoke. I opened the trailer door to check him. His eyes were wide and white. He stamped a foot. I looked back along the road. A car had stopped before the bear, headlights on the sable brown fur, the bulk, the motionless bulk. The motion I had turned to stillness. Bugsy shrieked and kicked, rocking the trailer. I climbed back into the SUV and pulled away. On the road from Randolph to Winter’s Tale, there would be no cell signal for the rest of the drive. Janine had slowed when I pulled over, but not stopped. I drove the bumpy road behind her for ten miles, flashing my high beams. She told me later she thought the lights had bounced because the road was so rough. My sobbing made it difficult to see. A sobbing reserved for death, for the times I’ve witnessed death on the road and been unable to help. A specific sobbing etched into my life, made routine through predictable encounters with rural animal death; a sobbing unique from that of other losses, or of self-pity. I tried to think about Bugsy, how I needed to get him out of there. But I only thought of the bear. On the eve of November, she was in pre-hibernation hyperphagia, eating more than seems possible for a long winter ahead. She was probably foraging trash in this small town, just following the instinct she felt in her body before I collided with it. Janine finally pulled over at the crest of the Warren Mountain pass, where the recently graded gravel smoothed, and she could finally see I was flashing. We met in the road. Samantha slept on in Janine’s truck. “Is everything OK?” Janine asked. “I hit a bear in Randolph,” I cried. “Oh my god! Back in Randolph?” Janine said. “Are you OK?” “I’m OK, but the bear I think is dead,” I said. She went to the front of the SUV and looked. There was no blood, no dent, only a few black hairs. “Maybe it was just stunned,” she said. I’d stood in the road weighing life and death once before with Janine, after I’d passed a still-living cat gravely wounded on the pavement and had not stopped to help. Instead, I’d sobbed and raged and then dragged Janine back to the scene to help me face it. But maybe the bear was just stunned. I said, “I wanted to stop, but I couldn’t see a payphone.” Janine said, “I’m sorry.” She opened the front trailer door and switched on the light. Bugsy blinked. “He looks fine at least,” she said. “He was freaking out. I had to keep driving.” “Let’s get them home.” We carried on to the barn. There, I unloaded Bugsy from the trailer and closed him into his stall. I removed his shipping bandages and changed his
Crab Orchard Review
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