Free Legend of a Suicide by David Vann Page A

back. And I didn’t have my knife. Just the gun. I’m sure hungry now, though. Do we have any food left? Did you catch any fish?
    Roy hadn’t thought about fishing. There’s a little bit left, he said. I’ll heat something up for you.
    That’d be great.
    Roy went to work then on heating up a can of cream-of-chicken soup, their last can of it, with a can of corn and a can of string beans. His father had his flashlight out and was working on their lamp. He must have smelled the paraffin and given it a bat, he said.
    By the time the food was warm, the lamp was operational again and they could see inside the cabin.
    What did it look like? Roy asked as he set their food down on the floor.
    What?
    What did it look like, the bear?
    Just a black bear, not very big, a small male. I saw him down below me late this morning, rooting around the bushes. I hit him in the back with the first shot, and it knocked him down but then he was thrashing around a lot and screaming. My second shot hit him high in the neck, and that killed him.
    Jesus, Roy said.
    It was something, his father said. Next time, we’ll have to skin one and salt and dry the meat. Any salt left, by the way?
    Yeah, we have a bag of it still.
    Good. We can also just leave some saltwater out in a pan and let it evaporate on a sunny day, which should come about twice every million years.
    Ha, Roy said, but his father didn’t look up from his food. He seemed very tired. Roy was, too. That night he fell asleep almost immediately.
    He dreamed he was chopping up bits of fish and every piece had a small pair of eyes and as he chopped, there was a moaning sound that was getting louder. It wasn’t coming from the pieces of fish or their eyes exactly, but they were watching him and waiting to see what he would do.
     
    Roy woke to his father moving stuff around their cabin, cleaning up and sorting things out. He yawned and stretched and put his boots on.
    That bear cleaned us out pretty good, his father said.
    I’ll have to fix my sleeping bag, Roy said. He had slept in the bottom half of it with all his clothes on, including his jacket and hat and a small blanket his father had thrown over him.
    Yeah, that and the radio and the door and my rain gear and most of our food. We’ll have to fix it right up.
    Roy didn’t answer.
    I’m sorry, his father said. I’m just a bit discouraged by this. He spoiled a lot of our food, and some of it could have been saved yesterday but now the bugs are all in it, so we’re going to have tojust throw it out. We have freezer bags, you know, that you could have put some of this stuff into.
    Sorry.
    That’s all right. Just help me sort through it now.
    They continued sorting, and what they had to throw out, they carried in a garbage bag a hundred yards away and buried in a pit.
    If another bear comes along, maybe it will smell this first and come over here and dig and we’ll be able to shoot it before it gets over to the cabin.
    Roy wasn’t real excited about shooting more bears. The last one already seemed like a waste. Do you think that bear you got was the bear that did this? he asked.
    His father stopped shoveling for a moment. Yeah. I tracked it. But it could have been a different bear possibly. I lost the trail a few times and had to pick it up again, and it is pretty odd that that bear was so far from home. So we should keep a lookout just in case.
    Roy decided he wasn’t going to shoot unless the bear was attacking one of them, especially if they weren’t going to skin it and eat it. How much did it scream when you shot it?
    That’s not the kind of question you ask.
    When they had finished burying the wrecked food, his father walked back to the cabin and put the shovel inside. They stood on the porch then and looked out at the water, which was still and gray.
    We need to get our food situation together, he said. You can start fishing and I’ll work on the smoker. We need the wood shelter, too, and we need to cut some wood, but