Free Montana by Debbie Macomber Page B

the black bear would stand about ten inches high on his hind legs. He’d give it to Tom. The boy reminded him of a young bear, struggling to prove his manhood, all legs and arms and feet. He remembered himself at that age, when his voice had danced between two octaves. He’d been tall and thin like Tom, with legs like beanpoles and no chest to speak of.
    Walt toyed with the idea of saying something to his great-grandson. He wanted to assure Tom he’d fill out soon enough, but he didn’t want to embarrass the boy.
    The three worked in comfortable silence. Walt yearned to share stories of his youth with the two brothers, but talking drained his energy. The hell with it, he decided. God had given him the opportunity to spend time with these young ones and he was going to use it.
    â€œBears eat trees, you know,” he stated matter-of-factly.
    Tom glanced up. “Trees? Are you sure, Gramps?”
    The older of Molly’s two boys had a skeptical nature; Walt approved. He didn’t like the idea of his kin accepting anyone or anything at face value. He suspected his granddaughter might be more easily swayed, but her son wouldn’t be. It reassured him that the boy revealed some good old-fashioned common sense, a virtue in shockingly short supply these days. Take that local militia group, for example. He’d butted heads with them more than once in the past few years. While Walt didn’t necessarily agree with everything the government did, he sure didn’t believe the militia’s wild claims of foreign troops planning to invade the country with the assistance of the federal government. That was as ludicrous as their other ideas, like computer chips surgically implanted in peoples’ brains so the government could control their activities. He’d never heard such nonsense in all his days and cringed every time he thought about decent folks believing such craziness.
    â€œGramps?”
    Tom’s voice shook him out of his thoughts. He had trouble keeping his mind on track these days.
    â€œWhat is it, son?”
    â€œIs that true?”
    He frowned. What was the boy talking about? The militia’s paranoid ideas, he guessed. Wasn’t that what they’d been discussing? “Of course it’s not true,” he barked. This computer-chip nonsense was as asinine as the supposed sightings of black helicopters swooping down and spraying bullets from the sky. “Question everything, son, you hear me?”
    Tom nodded and returned to his sanding.
    With his heart as weak as it was, Walt didn’t know how much longer he’d be around on this earth. He liked to think there’d be time to tell Tom and Clay about life during the Great Depression. And the war. Children these days didn’t know the meaning of hardship, not like his generation.
    â€œGramps?” Clay stared at him expectantly. “But you said bears ate trees. So don’t they really?”
    Oh, yeah. That was it— that was what he’d said. About bears. “They eat the bark,” he explained, his mind traveling the winding twisting byways of time long since passed. He shelved the depression stories in order to explain what he knew of bears. “They scrape off the bark with their claws. Without the bark, the tree dies. So, yeah, you could say bears eat trees. Next time you’re in the forest, take a gander at a dying tree. If it isn’t some disease, my guess is that a bear’s been clawing on it.”
    â€œIs that why you’re carving a bear?” the older boy asked. “Because they eat trees?” He ran the sandpaper lightly over the carving of the owl. Watching him reminded Walt that he didn’t see many of the northern saw-whet owls these days. The saw-whet was small as owls went, only seven inches high, and weighed less than four ounces.
    He didn’t get much opportunity to study nature the way he once had. He missed his walks, missed a lot of