The Bear’s Baby and Other Stories

by Judith Moffett

Genres: Science Fiction; Dystopian

Synopsis

The Bear's Baby and Other Stories gathers together for the first time six standalone tales by award-winning author Judith Moffett. Featuring aliens intent on halting humanity's biosphere-destroying behaviour, an alternate USA under the presidency of Davy Crockett, cross-species telepathic communication, angels, dreaming, and climate change - although not all at once! - this is a collection defined by variety, and admirably demonstrates the broad range of Moffett's skill as a writer. With new introductions to each story from the author, The Bear's Baby and Other Stories contains: The Bear's Baby Chickasaw Slave The Realms of Glory Ten Lights and Darks The Middle of Somewhere Space Ballet

Release date: December 21, 2017

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 175

Sample

Denny heard the muffled whacking of the chopper blades and the motor’s deep roar, but he was underground and almost upside down, in the process of detaching a fuzzy bear cub from a dangerous nipple by flashlight, and couldn’t have dropped everything to scamper obediently back along the ridge trail right that minute even if he’d wanted to. Which, frankly, he didn’t.

The cub let go, rasping a complaint. Denny backpedaled on his elbows out of the black cavern – and out of immediate range of the huge, rank, snoring heap of mother black bear who had given birth to this baby in her sleep – scraping his stomach, holding the little cub off the ground in his gloved right hand. Being short and scrawny was an advantage in his line of work, but this maneuver wasn’t easy even for him.

Out in the pale winter daylight, he knelt in a pile of oak leaves to dump the baby gently into the pan of the scales and hold them up by the hook at the top. Pulling off his right glove with his teeth, he recorded the weight, 1.3 kilos, on a PocketPad, drew a blood sample, and stapled an ear tag into the now-squawling baby’s left ear – left for male. “Sorry, Rocket. Sorry, little guy.”

His movements were neat and practiced, and he was also hurrying. It was always best to reduce stress on the infant bears by being quick, but today Denny had a couple of extra reasons for hurrying. The winter, like most winters nowadays, was mild. Too mild. Denny had waited for the coldest weather he could, but the mother bear might not be all that deeply asleep. The other reason, of course, was that he couldn’t hear the helicopter any more, meaning that it had landed and that the Hefn Observer would be at the cabin by now, probably pacing back and forth on the deck, increasingly irritated as Denny continued to fail to show up. Punctuality mattered to the Hefn. In four years, this Hefn – Innisfrey, the Observer for Wildlife Habitat Recovery – had never been late for a rendezvous.

Denny wiggled his hand back into its gauntlet, picked up the cub, and wormed his way back into the den. His body almost completely blocked what little light seeped through the entrance, but he’d left the flashlight just inside, and so could see where to press the cub against his mother’s chest until he started to suckle. The other baby turned loose more cooperatively; but as it did so the mother bear made a harsh sound deep in her throat and moved her massive shoulder. Denny froze, his heart leaping into his own throat, the purloined cub complaining and squirming in the leather gauntlet. But it was okay, she settled down again, so he backed the rest of the way out and sat puffing until his pulse rate had returned to normal. He had always been against tranquilizing the mothers for the cubs’ first couple of physicals, the sedative got into their milk and affected the babies, but for the first time he wondered seriously if it mightn’t be a good idea to reevaluate that policy in the light of how the animals were being impacted by the warming climate.

Or maybe reevaluate Fish and Wildlife’s whole approach to black bear management. At least in rural areas like this one, that the bears had not been slow to recolonized as the aging, dwindling human population had abandoned their fields and pastures and moved into the towns, where there were services and the roads were maintained. Not even a wagon and team could get around very well over roads as bad as the ones around here had gotten to be, all potholes and big broken chunks of macadam. Even plain dirt would be better. Denny himself rode a horse (Rocinante) and led a pack mule (Roscoe) when he went into town for provisions. He wasn’t much of a rider, but then he didn’t have much of a choice.

The second cub was a female. “Rodeo,” Denny told her, “that’s your name, little bear.” At 1.45 kilos she was slightly chubbier than her brother. Rodeo’s “real” name was Number 439, the number on her tag. She was half of the third pair of cubs produced by Number 117, the sow presently enjoying her long winter’s nap down in the den, a huge healthy animal and an excellent mother; all but one of her cubs had survived to adulthood. She was six years old, the one hundred seventeenth female black bear to be radio-collared in the state of Kentucky since the Hefn had established the management program, and her “call name” was Rosetta. Like hurricanes, study bears were call-named by cycling through the letters of the alphabet. Cubs kept the first two letters of their mother’s name through subsequent generations, which allowed each initial to be used many times. If by some chance all the children and children’s children of a particular bear should die, the pair of letters would not be retired but would go back into service, available for use by the next young bear who wandered across the state line from Tennessee or West Virginia. To change state of residence was to become part of a different study and get a whole new identity.

Rosetta hadn’t done that; she was a Kentuckian born and bred, like Denny himself, though (also like Denny) she had wandered about for a good while before settling down in Denny’s district and digging herself this excellent den under a huge pin oak blown over in a tornado. He hadn’t named her or her first pair of cubs, who’d still been traveling with her when she’d moved into the county. But he’d named the next pair (Rocannon and Rotorooter), and was keeping a whole list of Ro- names in reserve.

Rodeo, having protestingly donated some blood and acquired a numbered ear tag of her own, resumed suckling the instant Denny put her back on the nipple, and this time her mother didn’t stir. Rosetta’s collar appeared to be in decent shape, and was still sending a good clear signal. Denny made a judgment call against taking samples of Rosetta’s blood today and exited the den. He poked his syringes and test tubes into the fingers of the gauntlets and stuffed them into his daypack, along with the scales and PocketPad and flashlight, and headed for the cabin at once, walking briskly, shrugging on the pack. The air was pretty cold, a little below freezing; he fished a watch cap out of his jacket pocket to pull down over his bald spot and his ears, and jammed his hands in his pockets.

Now that he was done with the bears, he looked at his watch and shifted mental gears. The Hefn Observer had been kept waiting for nearly an hour. Denny walked faster, almost jogging, a short wiry man with an anxious, rather ferretty face. The view from the ridge through gaps in the cedars, folded hills dusted over with snow under a pale sky, was lovely in its bareness, but Denny had no attention to spare for it this day. Hurrying past the viewpoint with the nicest prospect without a sideways glance, he plunged into a tunnel formed by cedar trees lining the sides of what had once been a wagon road.

The Hefn had ordered the field studies of black bears, coyotes, elk, and white-tailed deer in the eastern United States, it was their initiative, they were monitoring the ecological health of the planet by monitoring its apex predators and their prey species as these reclaimed or moved into habitat that year by year was returning to a wild state. But funding for Denny’s particular field study in Anderson County depended on satisfying the Hefn Observer he reported to, and failing to pay this fact due notice (by being dilatory) was not good politics. Denny had been on the job since the beginning of the project, and knew he was very good at what he did, but you still had to kowtow on a regular basis to the goddamned Hefn. He basically hated the Hefn, something he had in common with just about everybody else in the world. Answering to them was the disagreeable part of the bear study.

His whole situation was conflicted. It was probably the worst time in human history to be a human being, but it was also, he had to acknowledge it, one of the best to be a wildlife biologist in your own back yard. If it weren’t for the Hefn, and their Directive, and the Baby Ban Broadcast that had sterilized just about every person on the planet, there would be no black bear population in east central Kentucky – or elk population, or population of coyotes approaching the size of wolves, all busily subspeciating in the fascinating ways they were doing. Without the Hefn Takeover, east central Kentucky – now a recovering climax oak-hickory forest – would still be growing tobacco and Black Angus steers, and spindling big round bales of tall-fescue hay. The state’s black bears would still be in the Daniel Boone National Forest on the West Virginia border, way over in the Appalachian foothills, with far too few bears to go around for the numbers of local people eager to study them.

Denny really loved his work. Except in abstract terms he cared much more about baby bears than he did about human babies, but he despised the Hefn anyhow. The problem didn’t get simpler. Mostly he just accepted the way things were and focused on his job, but every time he had to show up for one of these meetings the conflict would boil up inside him again.

The ragged alley of tall cedars ended abruptly and he emerged into the clearing where the cabin sat. Beyond it hulked the chopper, a big metal dragonfly. Neither the Hefn nor the chopper pilot, a human, were anywhere to be seen. Denny trotted up the steps and along the deck and pushed open the cabin door.

A young woman in her mid-twenties, or thereabouts, was hunkered down in front of the stove, putting in chunks of firewood; she closed and latched the little door and stood to face him, dusting off her hands. “Hi,” said Denny. “I guess I’m a little late. I was vetting some new cubs and kind of got into a situation. Where’s the Hefn Observer?” As he spoke he stuffed the watch cap in his pocket and hung the backpack on a hook by the door.

“He went for a walk. He was getting sleepy,” she said. “It’s not Innisfrey this time, it’s Humphrey. I’m Gillian Hoffman, by the way.”

“The pilot, right?” She nodded. “Denny Demaree.” They shook hands. Denny started to unzip his parka, then had a thought. “Uh – maybe I should go try to find him? Did he walk down to the road?”

“He just went straight past the pond and on down the hill. Bushwhacking. On all fours, the last I saw of him. I guess he doesn’t get out of the city much.”

Denny considered. If the Hefn hadn’t stuck to either of the farm’s rough wagon roads, he could be anywhere. “Then I guess I’ll wait.” He hung his jacket on another hook and threw himself into one armchair, and Gillian took the other. The next instant he sprang out of the chair. “Hang on, did you say Humphrey? The Bureau of Temporal Physics and the Apprentices and all that – the one that does the viddy program? What the hell is he doing here?”

“Don’t ask me, I just fly the chopper.” She smiled. “Nice little place you’ve got here. Pretty luxurious for a field office.”

“I –” Denny stopped and willed himself to calm down. Humphrey. He had a bad feeling about this, but there was nothing to do but wait for the Hefn to show up. He sat down again. “Yeah, it is nice. Some old lady built this cabin and willed it and the whole farm to the local Girl Scout Council for a camp. The actual farm is a hundred acres, and a long time ago it used to be in my family, with a house down by the road. The well’s still there. This place, the cabin, was used as an admin building when the Scouts had it.”

“Then time went by, and there weren’t any more Brownies coming up through the ranks?”

He nodded. “The Scouts turned the place over to the state when they disbanded, and the state turned it over to Fish and Wildlife when the Hefn tapped them to monitor wildlife recovery.” He hopped up again, nervously. “I feel like I shouldn’t just be sitting around.”

“Humphrey’s not like Innisfrey,” Gillian said. “He won’t jump all over you for not being here on time. At least I don’t think he will.”

“Yeah, but why’s he here?” Denny said. He opened the door to the screened porch and walked outside, scanning the whole long view from left to right. Nothing.

“‘Sister Anne, Sister Anne, do you see anyone coming?’” Gillian called to him from inside.

Denny was surprised, and a little intrigued. The line, which he recognized but hadn’t thought of in decades, was from a kids’ edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Kids’edition or not, the story had given him nightmares. From deep within itself his memory obliged with the right response: “‘Naught but the wind a-blowing, naught but the green grass growing.’ Man, I can’t believe I still remember that! I reckon it must’ve been high summer in Bluebeard’s kingdom, the grass won’t green up here for a good while yet.”

“But here is Bluebeard himself,” came a deep voice from the deck, and the Hefn Humphrey burst through the front door and swept into the room.

Denny bolted to the porch doorway just in time to catch the Hefn’s showy entrance. He darted inside while Humphrey shut the door and turned to greet him properly. “You were expecting my colleague Innisfrey. I am, as you see, not Innisfrey, however. No. Innisfrey is at present otherwise engaged. I offered to take this meeting in his place, as I was already in Kentucky for a reason of my own. Humphrey, BTP. I am pleased to meet you, George Dennis Demaree.”

Denny stared, more or less dumbfounded. He had of course seen Humphrey on the viddy, doing regular progress reports and updates and announcements. Also scoldings. Humphrey was the highest-profile Observer of the lot, and had had the most to do with humans since the Takeover, but the image on the screen, which he had paid as little attention to as possible, had not prepared Denny for the force of Humphrey’s personality. He looked like Innisfrey, his short, stocky, oddly-jointed figure, covered entirely with gray hair (including a long shaggy beard which, though gray like the rest of him, made his improvised Bluebird witticism particularly apt), with large opaque eyes and forked hands and feet. He also looked, truth to tell, rather moth-eaten. Denny knew why; the anti-hibernation drug Sleepynot that the wakeful Hefn had to take in winter made their hair fall out in clumps. And he had Innisfrey’s faintly gamy wet-dog odor.

But the quality of his presence wasn’t remotely like cold, supercilious, charmless Innisfrey’s. All in all, the clash between apprehensive expectation and reality was so disorienting that it took Denny almost a minute to pull his wits together enough to apologize for being late.

“Not at all, not at all. Your tardiness providentially provided me with a chance to stretch my legs. The country hereabouts is delightful, your work here must have given you great pleasure.”

Denny nodded; then, realizing that he and his visitor were both still standing, blurted, “Uh, would you like to sit down?”

Humphrey said, “As it appears that we have two chairs and two humans and one Hefn in this room, I propose that you and Gillian Hoffman take the chairs.” And thereupon the Hefn Humphrey, household word, movie star, viddy personality, most powerful Observer on Earth, dropped to all fours, ambled over to the woodstove, and flomped onto the rag rug. He looked like a scruffy, off-color Great Pyranees. “All right, Gillian Hoffman? All right, George Dennis Demaree?” He gazed mildly from one to the other with those odd flat eyes, and Denny found himself in danger of being seriously disarmed.

Gillian had stood when Humphrey came in. She and Denny looked at each other, and then both sat down in the chairs they had been sitting in before.

“Now, to business! I am delighted to be the bearer of happy tidings,” Humphrey said, and those flat eyes somehow conveyed an impression of beaming with pleasure. “Innisfrey has, as you might say, filled me in, and I have examined the radio reports you have filed, and the written reports, all of them, for the entire duration of this study. You have done excellent work here! Thanks to you, and to the studies of coyotes and white-tailed deer carried forward by your fellow wildlife biologists, we have a complete and detailed picture of the two top predators for this recovering habitat, together with their most important large prey species, over the past four years.

“During this period in this area, the black bear population has experienced a seventy-four per cent gain in numbers. Eighty-six per cent of the bears are not immigrants but bears native to east central Kentucky. Remarkable! More than that, the bears are might one say in the pink? A comical expression to apply to a dark-colored bear! Their reproductive success has been excellent, and they are in prime condition! As the flora here proceed through the various stages of succession, the entire ecosystem burgeons and thrives.

“Therefore! With no reason whatever for concern that the trend is in danger of reversing itself, we have determined,” Humphrey said from his shaggy-sheepdog position on the floor, giving again that impression of beaming up into Denny’s face, “to terminate this study, and to reassign you, George Dennis Demaree, to a location in particular need of the skills you have exercised so diligently in this one. Congratulations!” And he bounded up and offered Denny his forked, hairy hand.

Denny bounded up as well. “But the study’s not finished!” he protested, his voice loud and rude with shock. Instead of shaking Humphrey’s hand, he waved his arms wildly. “It’. . .