Free Far North by Marcel Theroux Page A

questions I wanted to put to him, but each time I asked him something he wandered off to poke his gun into the woods, as if at any minute he was expecting us to be surrounded.
    We didn’t leave that place for another hour at least. The men loaded their sled with their logs, and put themselves into harness to tow it. They were a sombre bunch, hardly sharing a word with each other, and I wondered if they always talked this little, or if it was my being there that had m"0em" widtthem so shy.
    I walked my horses, so as to keep the men company, and finally one of the two in harness asked me what it was bringing me to New Judea. It had been so long since I’d heard anybody call it that, that it took me a second to figure out what he meant.
    It almost made me laugh to see these men barely perching on their piece of the world and still calling it by the old name.
    I told him his question put me in mind of the old story about the hunter who goes to stay with his friend in the woods and on the way he gets mauled by a bear.
    He shook his head at me to say the story rang no bells with him.
    Our little walk together was pretty short on entertainment, so I decided to tell them how it happens.
    The hunter’s going through the woods. It’s winter, and the bear’s what the Russians here used to call a shatoon – which is to say, a bear that’s woken up out of his winter sleep because he couldn’t lay down enough fat in summer on account of food being short, salmon not running, no berries, and so forth.
    Their eyes were all big and fixed me on now, and it felt like I was telling the story to children. The one in particular who’d asked me the question had a pair of blue eyes that were as round and trusting as a couple of open mouths. His face spurred me to pad the story out with details because I liked the way he was drinking it all in.
    ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you can imagine, there’s nothing ornerier than a skinny, wakeful bear in February, with its fur hanging all baggy from starvation. What should this bear see but a juicy hunter making his way through the forest. Now, the bear’s drooling with hunger at the idea of eating this man and it leaps out and takes a big bite of him.
    ‘The hunter and the bear struggle for a while, but the bear’s more hungry, more strong, and more desperate. Then just as those big jaws are about to crush the hunter’s head like a pine cone, he manages somehow to wriggle free and sprint away to freedom.
    ‘Now you can picture for yourselves how battered and raggedy he is when he shows up at his friend’s cabin. He’s more or less alive, but the bear has taken a big chunk of his arm, and scratched up his face with its claws. Add to which, he’s dizzy with blood loss. So he’s banging on the door, in need of water and bandages to stanch the bleeding.
    ‘Now his friend opens up, takes one look at him, and says, in his gravelly deadpan way: “I see you already met Flossie.”’
    Maybe I had just lost my knack of telling a story. I certainly hadn’t had the opportunity to visit with anyone for any length of time lately. There was a silence after I stopped speaking that reminded me of the clang when the two of them put down the saw on the tree trunk.
    And then the man with the gun said: ‘It’s bad for bears round here. Seems like the fewer of us there is, the more there is of them.’
    And the man with the round blue eyes said nothing at all, but looked a little disappointed, as if he’d been expecting some other kind of story.
    I explained to them that I’d told them this because they’d call the place New Judea.
    They still looked at me puzzled.
    ‘I guess I’m saying,’ I said, ‘that when a thing is terrible and dangerous, a man needs to find a pretty name for it to let himself sleep a little easier at night.’
    That didn’t make it any plainer for them and my spelling it out bled any drop of humour from the story altogether.
    ‘What do you call this place then?’ said the