Free The Girl Next Door by Brad Parks Page B

a breakdown of the mortality and morbidity tables with me.
    “Aw, come on, it’s just a little bear,” I teased.
    “Yeah, but what if he likes dark meat? You’d be all right. But I’d be lunch.”
    “Skinny guy like you? You wouldn’t be much more than an appetizer.”
    “Laugh it up, white boy. I ain’t going nowhere.”
    I listened for sirens but didn’t hear any. So I turned to Lunky and said, “This young man has seen the bear. Interview him. I’m going to go find the little critter.”
    I bid them good-bye and started jogging down the middle of the side street. A few houses in, I saw an old woman on her porch, looking wary, clutching a broom—as if that would give her all the defense she needed when the bear decided to climb her front steps. She was craning her head to the right.
    “That way?” I asked.
    “I think so. You with animal control?”
    “No, ma’am, I’m with the newspaper.”
    “And you chasin’ that thing? You some kinda crazy?”
    I kept jogging, which I suppose answered her question. About midway down the next block, I found the source of everyone’s excitement on the left side of the street: a mass of black fur roughly the height of a Great Dane, with tulip-shaped ears and dirt-covered hindquarters.
    In my entirely inexpert opinion, I judged this to be a young adult male Ursus americanus, maybe 150 or 200 pounds and well fed. He had knocked over a garbage can and was having a fine time pawing through its contents, his nose eagerly exploring the various odors. Banana peels. Potato chip bags. Chicken bones. It was bear manna.
    Every once in a while, he’d take a nibble at something and I’d get a glimpse of his rather well-developed incisors. So I kept a safe distance, probably a hundred feet or so, though I wasn’t particularly worried. This fella was so happily engaged in yesterday’s dinner he was oblivious to my presence. Bears have good hearing and an excellent sense of smell but notoriously bad eyesight. As long as I kept quiet and stayed downwind, he’d never know I was there.
    Then, to my horror, I felt a sneeze coming.
    It started as a mere suggestion, a small tickle somewhere in my sinuses. I thought I could keep it at bay until the feeling passed, only it kept getting more insistent, like it wouldn’t be denied. I held my finger under my nose to try and stop it, because isn’t that what they always did in cartoons? But that only made it worse. So did a variety of other efforts: Lamaze-style breathing, biting my lower lip, making funny faces.
    None of it worked. The more I fought it, the greater the urge to sneeze became. Plus, I could tell my resistance was only going to make the inevitable explosion that much more percussive. When I finally succumbed to the sneeze and let it loose, it sounded roughly like a shotgun.
    The bear immediately looked up.
    I froze.
    He regarded me with interest, no longer engrossed by the balled-up diaper he had been sniffing. He held his nose in the air and then, in an ominous development, reared up on his hind legs, with his front paws dangling, like he was some kind of circus bear.
    Except, of course, I don’t think he was planning to dance around on a giant beach ball for my amusement. I’m no park ranger, so I didn’t know what this signified. Mere curiosity? A display of aggression? A challenge to his hegemony over the Jones family garbage can?
    I once read a wilderness safety pamphlet that said if you ever encountered a bear in the wild, you were supposed to be big and noisy—the idea being that bears are naturally shy and would easily be scared off. So I went up on my tiptoes, raised my arms in the air, and said something that sounded like, “Raaaarrrr!”
    But I guess this bear was more of an extrovert than most, because he just tilted his head and sniffed at me some more, thoroughly unimpressed by my version of big and noisy. I let out my roar again, though perhaps it was less convincing this time, because it sounded more