Chasing the Bear

Chapter 11

"My God," Susan said. "What did your father say?"

"He said, ‘Dog's no good for birds for the rest of the day and we probably ain't either.' So we went home."

"And he never said what a brave boy or anything?"

"He said I was smart because I'd lived to hunt another day. Then we went home and sat at the kitchen table with Patrick and Cash and I told them about what happened. Cash got up and got a bottle of scotch from the kitchen cabinet and four glasses. Then my father poured scotch in three of them and some Coke in the fourth. And we drank together."

"You'd acted like a man," Susan said. "So he treated you like a man."

"In his way," I said.

Susan smiled.

"‘That brown liquor,'" she said, "‘which not women, not boys and children, but only hunters drank.'"

"William Faulkner," I said.

"Very good," Susan said. "For a man with an eighteen-inch neck."

"I told you they read to me a lot."

She said it again, "‘Not women, not boys and children.'"

"Sounds sort of sexist, doesn't it?" I said. "Ageist too."

"Maybe we can have his Nobel Prize revoked," Susan said.

"Good thing was, that whenever I was in trouble, I'd think about that bear and it helped."

"Because you were brave then?" Susan said.

"I guess, although to tell you the truth, I really think more about sitting around the table drinking soda while my father and my uncles drank their scotch."

"The ritual," she said. "More than the event."

"I guess," I said. "I thought a lot about it when I was in the woods with Jeannie."

"Jeannie?" Susan said. "In the woods?"

"It wasn't what you think," I said.