Moon Bear's Mate

Chapter 2

Chapter Two

The great moon bear padded slowly in the desert night. The empty plains of sand, broken intermittently with frail, leafless shrubbery, glowed a languid purple, red mixed with the soft blue light of the full moon overhead. With his head low, and beady black eyes facing forward, the bear’s shoulder blades rolled left and right with each heavy step. The slim but powerful caniform left a puffed trail of dust in its wake.

The bear had little fat. Eating infrequently, and sleeping even less so. But the bear’s musculature remained. He was strong, powerful, and made sure to ingest enough sustenance so that he would not lose that. Because he would need it eventually when it was time to defend himself.

The wear of the search had taken its toll, but it would all be worth it. The bear was certain of this.

He lifted his head, sniffed the air, and caught the scent of an animal that did not belong in the desert, much like he didn’t. It was just the faintest hint, carried on the arm of a light breeze, fleeting, half a second there, and half a second not.

The moving air in the desert was of a deceptive quality, because whatever it touched, it leeched what moisture it could. The wind was to the parched person traversing the sandy wastes what the endless sea was to the man stranded in a lifeboat.

But, in the evenings, it was enough. The bear was certain he was on the right track. The wind, gentle, slow, filtered through his generous coat, finding its way through the weaving fur to touch his skin in brief bursts. But it did little to cool the broiling blood beneath.

The bear had become accustomed to controlling his exertions, taking in deep and long shuddering breaths, salivating endlessly, and moving slow and only in the night. Being so far out of his natural habitat, it was the only way to contend with the blanketing desert heat, even in the evenings, for the heat escaped upward through the sand in great, rippling sheets, and it warmed the underside of his body, where his patch of white fur, unique to the moon bear species, had the appearance of a stained silver breastplate.

The bear needed to keep going. He had little other goal in life than to find another like himself; another animal in a place it did not belong. Perhaps even a companion. Maybe a brother, maybe a sister, or maybe, if he was lucky, a mate.

What that other animal would end up being, friend or foe, lover or acquaintance, did not matter to the bear. He would be content with simply finding another like himself. It would calm that aching storm in his heart that told him every single day that he was alone in this world. That he was an aberration, something Mother Nature birthed by accident, and then immediately abandoned. A chance pairing of the right genes with the right circumstances at the right time.

Any morsel of knowledge confirming the opposite would quiet his surging frustration. Answering the question of whether or not he was alone would bring the bear the peace he sought. At least, he desperately hoped so.

And, for now, peace was all that he sought. Love, a mate… they were just distant ideals better left unearthed. He knew of the possibilities, but didn’t dare to give them safe harbor in his mind. They were best cases which he cast aside; forced himself to forget.

For now, at least.

Many years ago, younger and less wise, he had not known where the source of his frustration came from. He had exhausted his l**t everywhere he could, but that was only a distraction. He had lived a life of vice, brief for him, but what might be half a lifetime to anybody else.

But that lifestyle had been unrewarding, as he had eventually figured out. Something akin to an existential crisis had struck him in his seventieth year, and he had set out then to find the ultimate truth about himself, about what he was, and whether there was another like him anywhere in the world.

The bear once again caught a whiff of that scent. The smell was odd, and the trail it left almost bare, like bread crumbs sprinkled over rolling sand dunes. But it was something, at least. More than that, it was all he had to go on.

In the distance he saw illumination on the underside of a single voluminous cloud that might or might not bring welcomed rainfall to the region. On one side of the sky, the massive moon drowned out the stars, and on the other, the giant cloud shrouded them.

But illumination on the underside of a cloud… Now that was unusual in the middle of nowhere. He cleared a ridge, eyes scanning the distance, where he saw the telltale signs of human civilization. Lights on posts, conical corridors of yellow cast down onto winding slabs of dusty concrete and black, sand-swept tarmac. Circles and squares of red, flashing brighter intermittently, attached to the end of moving rectangles that rolled on cylinders.

This was the only place where people lived for miles and miles. This had to be where that other like him was going. Where else would the animal he was chasing go? Perhaps he had finally found that companion. He allowed himself a brief glimmer of hope that soon he would get his answers, and silence the need to know that boiled constantly in his thoughts. Perhaps, then, the bear would start to understand his place in this world.

A great sheet of metal erupted out of the darkness, glowing harsh white and green. Rectangular, and supported by two thin poles, the signpost was momentarily blinding in the night. A dusty rumble sounded to the bear’s side, and when he looked, his eyes flashed yellow, and his face was lit up for the tiniest fraction of a second, before the turning road took the light off him. The rumble waned, faded, and as the bear looked after the four red squares getting smaller and smaller.

He returned his attention to the town of glowing yellow, unaware that inside the car, the driver and his passenger had exchanged two questions that went unanswered: “Did you see that?” and “Was that a bear?”

The bear did not fail to notice the large sheet of metal, briefly lit up, had the words printed on its surprisingly reflective rusting surface: ‘Welcome to Salty Springs. Population: 25,000’.

It was on the edge of the small desert town, a man-made oasis in the unforgiving dry barrenness, that the bear began to grunt. He padded against the sand with his paws, hopped up onto his two hind legs, rising over ten feet tall, and looked out at the settlement. He sniffed the air again before dropping back onto four feet, an indescribable elation filling him.

He began to run. At first a lumbering jog, but soon he found his rhythm and accelerated into a sprint. He bounded with deceptive speed, and in the bear’s eye was a glint, a shine. The bear stopped, skidding to a halt, sending plumes of dust and sand streaking outward into the night, and began to sprint in a different direction, the volume of his hoarse inhaling matched only by the thunder of his paws against the ground. The taste of dust and sand was bitter in his mouth, but by now he was used to it.

The bear ran toward a nearby tree, small and thin. He had his mouth open, tongue a little extended, a smudge of reddish pink amidst the bear’s brown hues, and to a chance passerby, it might look like the bear was smiling.

Nearing the tree, the bear slowed, turned, and then hoisted himself up onto its hind legs again. Towering, the bear was a huge beast, his true size concealed when he moved on all fours. The bear then began to scratch himself, digging his nails into his chest and stomach. He backed up against the tree, and did the same to his back, snapping off branches and twigs as if they were made of brittle straw. Scratching was a necessity.

The bear groaned then, and it turned into a roar, not one of violence or ferocity, but almost an exclamation of pleasure. To someone who just happened to be there at just that time to see that sight, it might seem like the bear was playing, having fun, all alone, in the middle of the desert.

And then the bear dropped back on all fours, and lay down. Panting, but unable to expel heat quickly enough, the bear knew it would have to lie like this for maybe half an hour to cool off and let the warmth of his spirited exertion out.

But the bear still wore its seeming smile. Lying alone in the night, fur now crimson with the desert sand, he was content.

And as the minutes passed by, and as the bear cooled, his shape started to change. First there was a loud snap that startled a nearby bird into flight. The bear’s hip had bisected, and his hind legs now looked horrifyingly distorted.

A second c***k echoed in the night, and the skin above the bear’s shoulder blades split open, revealing the red-stained white bone beneath. The blades began to flatten outside the body, before scar tissue wrapped around them in their new position.

The bear’s fore legs dislocated, shoulders popping out of their sockets, grew outward horizontally until they hung at his sides, like the arms of a human.

The bear lost its senses. It could no longer see, no longer hear, no longer breathe. Its heart stopped while the flesh inside him melted down into a biological soup. His fur receded back into his body, and for a ceaseless moment he was nothing but a gigantic pink raisin, covered in ever shifting scar tissue.

But then a new shape started to form. Flesh compacted inward where it shouldn’t be, and expanded outward where it should. The bear’s snubby snout punched in, and the brow and forehead grew more prominent.

At first there was a vague outline of the bear’s new form: torso, arms, and legs. Then there were fingers, and toes. The claws receded into nails, and body hair sprouted from his pores like shrubs growing in time-lapse.

His eyes turned from black to a deep green, and the irises were speckled with cream-colored streaks.

The bear shifted into a lean and muscular man, lying n***d and laughing. On his face was a look of pure and utter joy. He put his arms behind his head, looked up at the sky, and just laughed. His abdominal muscles sprung out in harsh relief as laughter spilled from his mouth, and as tears streamed down his cheeks. And when it finally ebbed, he lay there smiling, happy, his white teeth almost shining with reflected moonlight.

But then even that faded, too. The feeling was gone. The shift was like a d**g, and the high it offered came and went fast. The man, all six-foot-three of him, climbed slowly to his feet. His muscles, well-trained and highly defined, rippled beneath his skin as he moved. His calves were rhomboids, and his thighs thick like a sprinter’s.

He walked, putting each of his bare feet into the large paw prints he had left behind when he was a bear. He followed his own tracks back to where he had started, and saw there his clothes draped over desert shrubbery. He put them back on, jeans and a t-shirt, humming to himself, something forlorn in the tune, a sadness almost.

He sighed then, as though immediately missing the time he had spent as a bear. But he knew the sun would be rising soon, and he would not be able to stay in that form. It was too hot for that. The bear could not shed that heat quickly enough.

Picking up his duffel bag, military-green and containing everything he owned, he strode toward the road, and then walked along it toward the sleeping town of Salty Springs.