She-Bear

The human mother and the human daughter are an ordinary abridged family. Out of seventeen million Russian families, five million have absentee fathers. The human mother cleans floors in one establishment and two offices to make ends meet. She earns more money from her three jobs than the suit people in the establishment bring in, but it still isn’t enough. The human daughter hands out flyers by the shopping mall and goes to school in the interim. At school, she sings covers of popular songs at holiday parties. Her voice draws a lot of praise.

In the break before senior year, her class goes on a forest trip, to build a fire and eat grilled meats. Human girls hope to get kissed, and human boys just want to go home. To them, the forest feels like someone else’s territory. The human daughter also expected a certain boy with a fat neck to pay more attention to her. But that doesn’t happen. He’s sleepwalking through the trip — he stayed up till dawn again, playing his shooter video games. Bored and disappointed, the human daughter goes into the bushes to pee and drops her hair clip. The grass is bursting out of the ground; empty bottles and thick plastic bags are piled on it, as if asleep. From the forest’s edge, a bear watches the human daughter. The smell of food lures him. Once the human daughter leaves, he picks up her hair clip in his maw. After the humans clean up their spread, the Bear eats what’s left.

He keeps sniffing the hair clip to catch her scent. In his animal mind, he is rhyming the smell of her hair with the color of honey. At night, the Bear goes into the little town to sniff out the human daughter. He gets distracted and attracted by the stench of dumpsters, containing delicacies more scrumptious even than live fish, which he hasn’t tasted since he was a cub. Across Russia, more and more bears have started walking into towns to feed. This bear contains himself for a time but eventually digs into one deliciously decaying dumpster. Some teenagers capture the episode on video. They post it online, and it quickly goes viral. People get scared. The town police warn residents not to leave their homes at night. Men with shotguns form a volunteer squad and start patrolling the town’s perimeter, searching for the Bear. He knows he’s being hunted and hides mainly in the bushes; it’s tough to hide among concrete buildings.

Three weeks pass. The Bear finally sniffs out where the human daughter lives. The intercom has been broken for a while. On a gray day, he enters the apartment building and bangs on her door with his paw. The human mother is away cleaning offices. She and her daughter got into an argument over bad grades. The daughter wants to be a singer when she grows up. She doesn’t understand why she should waste energy on her studies. The human mother hit the human daughter. Not hard, but hard enough to hurt her feelings. To spite her mother, the daughter skipped school today and is resting before her shift distributing flyers. She’s listening to music, singing along, and doesn’t hear the knock on the door at first. When she finally opens the door, the Bear hands her the hair clip, decorated with leaves and pine cones. He really put some effort into it. The Bear tells her that he wants to take her into the forest with him. And if she doesn’t agree to go, he’ll kill her. The human daughter follows him. Out of fear, but also out of spite. The music continues to play, entertaining itself and the four walls.

The Bear moves the human daughter into his den and doesn’t let her out of his sight. When he leaves the den, he barricades the entrance with a boulder. The Bear brings her mice, squirrels, mushrooms, and berries. The human daughter is forced to eat all of it raw. She gets poisoning after poisoning, so severe that she hallucinates, but somehow she survives. The Bear brings her water in a plastic bottle that he found in the forest. He fills it in the river. She begs him to let her go wash up. The Bear understands human language but doesn’t entirely grasp human habits. He leads her to the river. The human daughter attempts to swim away, but the Bear chases her down, bites through the flesh of her leg, and carries her back to the den. 

Her leg swells to the size of three legs, but the hallucinations don’t come this time — there isn’t much to show the dying. The Bear brings her water. The human daughter doesn’t drink it; she’s unconscious. The Bear periodically pours water on her mouth, licks her wound, shaped like the imprint of his teeth, and applies dirty dried-up fir needles to it as dressing. Sometimes he howls. He feels sorry for her. Maybe her youth, maybe his saliva, maybe the fir needles save her life. She survives. The wound closes up.

To some extent, the human gets used to the Bear. Or she pretends to. Now he brings her three bottles of water at a time. She uses two of them to wash and drinks from the third. Her eyes get adjusted to near-total darkness. The Bear plans their wedding. He steals a white sheet and duvet cover from a clothesline outside some single-family home. The human bride tears the linens and fashions a dress out of them, which she continues to wear even after the wedding. It’s just the two of them at the ceremony.

The human mother is searching for her daughter. The police say that she left home with some human boy. The mother doesn’t believe them. A neighbor, a ninety-year-old one, insists that she saw the daughter leaving with a bear. Naturally, the cops don’t believe the neighbor. 

The human mother doesn’t know what to think. A volunteer search party looks everywhere, including the forest. The Bear’s den is hidden in the belly of a hill, with a cliff face on the other side. When the volunteers conduct their search, the human daughter is ill with poisoning. And the Bear sits quietly. By the wedding day, the volunteers stop looking.

The Bear and the human start living as husband and wife. In autumn, the Bear brings mushrooms and berries back to the den. The human daughter dries them. Closer to winter, the Bear’s mood sours, and he gets more irritable. The Bear disappears for four days. He returns with a full stomach, hauling a giant hunk of rotten meat and another bear’s skin, still veiny, and caked with blood. The human daughter is furless, and the Bear gleans that she may freeze to death in the winter. She has been cold for a long time. She has no choice but to wrap herself in the rotting bearskin and eat the tainted jerky. She needs energy — she is expecting.

To stock up for winter, the Bear fills extra bottles from the river. He barricades the den from the inside with a large rock. Then he goes to sleep. He asks his wife to join him, but she tells him that humans can’t sleep that long. He dozes off, but he is a light sleeper. In his sleep, he sucks on his paw and keeps one eye on the human daughter. She feeds herself and her baby bump bear jerky, dried field mice, berries, nuts, and mushrooms.

In March, the Bear awakens. Early. It’s still cold. He gets angry that the human daughter has yet to give birth; people take so long to do things. He goes away for three days just to lumber around. He attacks a human traveling on wooden sticks, either to eat him or just out of rage. The Bear doesn’t eat the human; he leaves him on the snowy ground to bleed out. The victim gets taken to a hospital in a moderately severe condition. From 1991 to 2019, 290 bear attacks on humans have been recorded around the globe.

The Bear cheats on the human daughter with a she-bear. He returns home to the den empty-handed, without water. His wife is parched; she gives him a piece of her mind. He growls at her but goes out to get water. The river has now thawed in some places. After the attack on the skier, hunters started looking for the Bear. They spot him at the riverbank and shoot. One of their bullets enters his body on one side and exits through the other. The Bear struggles to his den and makes sure to barricade it from the inside. The human daughter sucks on the moist rock of the den wall to hydrate; she’s come up with this method in winter. For four days straight, she watches over the Bear as he licks his wound and quietly howls.

At the end of May, the human daughter gives birth to a human cub. The baby girl looks like a bear cub but has green eyes. The human daughter breastfeeds the newborn. She tells her bear husband that she doesn’t have enough milk, as he hasn’t been bringing her the right food. She asks him to let her go and forage for herself. He thinks it over and lets her out of the den but demands that she leave the baby with him. He scent-tests her maternity and is convinced that she won’t abandon her child.

The human daughter returns with berries, mushrooms, and flowers. She eats, and feeds her daughter with her light-blue milk, singing human songs to her. She doesn’t know any lullabies, so she cycles through songs she knows from YouTube videos she used to watch. The human cub continues to resemble a cub as she grows, but her face expresses human emotions. The human daughter leaves the den every couple of days now. She wanders around the forest, forages for food, and sings songs under her breath. Her green eyes adjust to the sun rather quickly; her head stops spinning from the fresh air. With every outing, she strays farther and farther away from the den, but she always returns. One day, for the first time in months, she sees a person in the distance. For a moment, she stops singing and gathering berries in a bottle, but then she resumes her foraging and vocalizing and, having filled the bottle, goes back to the den. 

The Bear gets used to her outings. When she is away and the human cub starts crying, the Bear goes to the far side of the den. Once, the human daughter doesn’t return at dark and doesn’t come back the next day either. The Bear can’t believe that he scent-tested her wrong. The human cub is whining again, and the Bear considers eating her to get her to shut up. In the absence of his wife, the baby is useless to him, and he is hungry. He reaches in her direction with his maw but changes his mind. It’s hard to search on a full stomach. He leaves the den to find his wife.

The human daughter walks through the forest for three hours. She can’t tell if she’s going in circles or if she’s strayed far from the den already. She makes it to the meadow where she built a fire and grilled meats with her classmates. The town is roughly eight minutes away from here. It’s hot outside. The streets are sparse with people. The intercom is still broken. The human daughter enters her apartment. Her human mother is home. She makes a gesture people call “flinging up the arms” and cries. The daughter carefully selects human words, as if she is a foreigner, and tells her mother to pack her things. She knows if she doesn’t leave now, the Bear will track her down and find her in this town.

The human mother never used to listen to her daughter before, except on her birthday. And today is, in a way, a birthday. The human daughter takes a hot shower for the first time in a year. They quickly pack the essentials. The daughter puts on jeans, a T-shirt, and an overshirt. They wait on the platform for the train. The human daughter studies the army of trees behind the train station. They ride through a stretch of dark forest. The daughter stares deep into it with hatred. The mother looks at her daughter aghast — over her nipples, two wet circles appear on her T-shirt and overshirt.

The Bear searches for the human daughter, lumbering as if he had woken up in winter, and gets so angry he neglects to be careful. The same hunter the human daughter saw while foraging for berries shoots at him. A bullet hits his back; another, one of his front paws. The Bear stumbles to his den, but the hunter and his son catch up to him and finish him off. They find the human cub and take her in. They name her Masha. The hunters hang her father’s skin on the clothesline outside their hut to dry. Eventually, they sell it relatively cheaply.

The hunter feels bad for Masha. He bottle-feeds her milk. Masha grows up. She sniffs out all the people and animals in the hunter’s household. They begin to smell familiar and comforting. The hunter’s wife and daughter are always tired, so they shoo Masha away whenever she asks to be picked up. The hunter carried her around at first, but he has back problems and soon can’t pick her up any longer. The hunter’s grandchildren play with Masha. She behaves like a real human child: eats, sleeps, and plays on the same schedule as the grandkids. The only difference is that she eats from a bowl on the floor and sleeps on a rug.

The human cub understands human language and emotion and obeys the adults much better than the grandchildren. The kids treat Masha like a doll, cuddle her, dress her up, and brag about her to their friends.

The time comes to send the hunter’s grandkids to school. To do so, money is needed. They sell Masha to a petting zoo. There are other animals in the zoo, but she is the only bear. Masha is still a cub; human children and adults pay money to hug her. Masha gets tired of this job rather quickly (it’s just like dealing with the hunter’s grandkids but lasts all day long; all these humans smell different, unfamiliar, and hug her in peculiar ways). After each hugging session, zoo employees, who switch frequently and also smell unfamiliar, give her some food. She gets double the food for correctly executed embraces.

Masha understands human language, even the jumbled-up kidspeak, and does what the people ask. She hugs them, stands on her hind legs, and kisses them on command. She does everything right and gets fed. But the kids are insatiable and keep escalating their demands, asking Masha to play patty-cake or give them piggyback rides. When she gets tired, she stops catering to them, which bores the kids, and they go on to bother the other animals. In those cases, Masha doesn’t get fed, but she gets to rest. She just goes into the corner of her enclosure and lies down.

Masha doesn’t interact with the other animals. At night, she tries to pronounce human sounds, strung together into meanings, but all that comes out is roars and howls. Sometimes the zoo workers take Masha to the city park to take photos with people, sitting in their laps or hugging them. In the petting zoo, Masha turns into a young she-bear. She doesn’t show any signs of aggression, which is why they elect to keep her, even though she’s an adult now. But the daughter of the petting zoo owner, who lives in another city and has never met Masha or any of the other animals, is getting married. The wedding requires money.

The petting zoo owners sell Masha to a circus.

Not for much, as she is too old to respond to training. However, the human she-bear quickly learns to do tricks for food. Her trainer is elated. In just four months, she already knows how to ride a bike, play ball, take photos, and dance. In a ballet skirt, of course. Masha doesn’t mind. She gets fed. They bathe her in a special tub. She likes baths. At least she doesn’t have to hug anymore. Only at the end of the performance, she sometimes lightly puts an arm about the trainer and bends her body forward like him, facing the people sitting in rings around the arena.

The human mother and daughter ride and ride, nonstop. They make three transfers and then ride overnight on another train. They arrive in a big city. Just a random one. They have no friends or relatives here. Neither of them has been here before. The human daughter wanted to live here. The human mother starts cleaning offices. The daughter starts handing out flyers and then gets a job at a fast-food restaurant. At first, they rent a one-bedroom on the ground floor of a five-story building. The daughter has trouble sleeping; she keeps having nightmares of the Bear crawling in through the window. So they rent a two-bedroom on the eleventh floor of another building. Her sleep improves. Her milk supply dries up. She doesn’t tell her mother anything about her time in the forest, and her mother doesn’t ask. 

In the evenings, the human daughter goes to night school. She helps her mother clean the houses of people she considers rich. Money comes in from the sale of their hometown apartment. The daughter convinces her mother to spend the money on herself for once. She obeys her daughter again but covertly slides her half the money. The daughter uses the money to open a hardware store in their new neighborhood. At first, the store doesn’t bring in any profit, but then somehow the business picks up speed and starts bringing in a modest, but consistent, income.

Two years later, the human daughter marries a customer who came into her store to buy a stand-up hanger rack. She doesn’t tell her new husband anything about the year she spent at the Bear’s. She deliberately doesn’t remember anything from that time. She and her human husband have a human son. The human daughter sings him kid songs. She finds lullabies on the internet and commits them to memory. The human husband works at an office, the kind the human mother cleans. The mother helps her daughter with the store. The human son is a typical human kid. He likes the simple, bright flavors of junk food, and video games with lots of shooting in them. After the first grade, he begins to shy away from his mother’s hugs, especially in public.

Masha becomes a celebrity in the human-bear world. She understands numbers, letters, and words. In the arena, her showstopper act with her trainer is solving a large crossword puzzle, which a random spectator chooses out of hundreds of puzzles. Masha can also guess the poet when a spectator recites a few lines aloud. After they speak the lines, Masha points at the portrait of the author. When the portrait is not among those displayed, Masha shakes her head. When she doesn’t know, she clutches her head with her paws. 

The spectators love Masha. Especially human children, but human parents too. They shame their kids for knowing less about literature than a bear. Masha is a star in the arena, but she lives in a cage, like an animal. At least she gets fed regularly, her cage gets cleaned, and she is kept in a dry, warm part of the circus. Every month or two, a veterinarian gives Masha a physical. The daughter of a human and a bear also has a cage on wheels. It’s not very comfortable, but Masha likes rocking back and forth in it while on tour. On trips, the She-Bear often gets better food than at home.

When the hardware store turns eleven human years, the marriage nine human years, and the son eight human years, the whole family goes to the circus. The human daughter knows there will be bears in the show. She isn’t worried. She has seen bears at the zoo, when she took the human son there, multiple times even. She wasn’t scared. On the contrary, she liked seeing them caged, even if the cages were roomy. In time, she has learned to regard bears like any other animal — as just another part of the world to introduce her son to at a certain age.

After the clowns perform, the She-Bear enters the arena. She is wearing a sparkly skirt and dancing with her trainer. Then, the poet portraits are brought out. Lots of them. The human daughter doesn’t know this many poets. Adult and child volunteers from the audience take turns stepping to the mic and reading lines, mostly off their phone screens. Only two adults and one child recite lines from memory. The human daughter and her human husband aren’t sure if the bear is guessing correctly, but based on the audience’s reaction, it seems that she is. Filled with excitement and anticipation, the human husband starts googling the lines spectators are speaking into the mic and checking if the She-Bear is pointing to the correct portrait. She is.

When the poet’s photo is not displayed among the portraits, Masha shakes her head. The spectators are amazed. Especially human children, but human parents too.

Spitting as they speak, a shrill-voiced human recites some lines into the mic. Suddenly, something else captures all of Masha’s attention. An impossibly familiar scent crawls up her nostrils. Masha looks around for the source. The annoyed speaker squeaks out the lines over again. The trainer says his standard magic word, which he thinks will recapture Masha’s attention, but it doesn’t work. It’s an easy poet to guess, even if a relatively modern one. Even the human daughter recognizes the lines and sees the corresponding portrait onstage. Some spectators begin whispering the name of the poet to Masha; others point toward the portrait — everyone wants the bear to guess correctly.

The trainer stubbornly repeats something for the audience, and something separate, a more severe command, for Masha. Then he reaches his treat-filled hand toward her. She doesn’t react to that either, which angers him. He yells for the helpers. They bring him a stick with nails in it. For ten years, Masha has worked on words and treats alone. And today, she has stopped. The person who read the lines by the easy modern poet starts yelling into the mic that he knew it was all blasphemy. 

Masha finds the source.

She exits the arena and lumbers toward it. The trainer, wielding the stick with nails in it, runs after her, poking her in the back, but she roars and swats him off. Some audience members get scared; others think it’s all part of the act. A waddling Masha runs up the stairs to the fourth row and approaches the human daughter. She is sitting in the second seat from the edge, next to her human husband. The human husband tries to hold off the She-Bear, but she simply pushes him aside, and he tumbles backward onto the spectators a row behind. The human son screams. Some others yell too. The human daughter springs up. All-around commotion ensues.

Masha fixes her green eyes on the human daughter, consuming her with her gaze. She outstretches her furry arms toward her. At once, the human daughter understands everything and just stands there, motionless. Masha locks her tighter and tighter in her embrace. Blood starts to trickle from the human daughter’s nose.