“You’re sporty,” you say. “You’ve made that clear. We’re NARPs, you’re not. So what is it? What’s your sport?!”
He takes a long breath.
“Tennis,” he says.
“Oh,” you say.
“What do you meanOh? I was almost state champion last year; if it wasn’t for this knob-head Eric Tulliver, I would have—”
“It doesn’t matter,” you say. “Can you get that cooler?”
Will stops talking and rubs his eyes. He studies the bear. Then the cooler. Then the bear again.
“Sure. It’s a shuttle run,” he says.
“A what?”
“Just a drill we run in practice. You sprint to the baseline to pick up a tennis ball. Then you sprint back to drop it. Over and over. Sounds simple, but it’s torture. The worst. I can crush them, though. I am the freaking king of the shuttle run, bro.”
He’s lacing up his boots, and it’s like he’s suddenly in some kind of other mode of being.
“Tulliver had a killer backhand,” says Will. “But I had better footwork, which gave me a chance. I took him to a tiebreak in the final set. And I think it was all the shuttle runs. If it wasn’t for the…”
“Will,” you say, and point. “Cooler.”
He looks at you, and he’s about to say something when you hear another voice.
“Psssst. Here, little guy. Come over here.”
You both look up, and in that blue light of the predawn, you now see Diana sitting on a tree stump, holding out a granola bar. Fran is beside her. The bear turns its head and looks at them instead of you and Will
“You don’t want that cooler,” whispers Fran. “You want this delicious nut-free granola bar with chia seeds in it. That’s right. Chia seeds! Lots of antioxidants.”
She’s using the kind of singsong voice you’d use with a baby.And when she gets to the last word, Diana motions to the cooler ever so slightly with her head. Will’s whole body tenses. And what goes down next all seems to happen so fast, but it also feels like you can see every frame of it in slow motion.
Will takes off. And Will is indeed very fast. Faster than you ever could have imagined. He makes it to the cooler in seconds. So quickly, in fact, that the cub hardly notices him. Will scoops up the cooler with a single fluid movement. He has it in his grasp. It’s his. But then two things happen in quick succession. The first is that the baby bear finally notices what’s going on. It yowls and Diana jumps back, tripping over her own feet. Fran catches her. The second thing is that instead of running back, Will’s body freezes entirely like he’s been hit with a stun gun.
He doesn’t move at all.
“Will,” you say. “You got it! Get back here.”
But there’s no movement. You can’t even tell if he can hear you.
In moments, you see something bursting out of the brush. And, somehow, you know what it is before you even see it. But still, seeing it is utterly terrifying. It is, of course, the mama bear come to get her child, and she smashes through, leaving a trail of trampled vegetation in her path. She is very large, and she is less than twenty feet away from Will. She does not appear to be stopping. And Will, you’re certain, is going to die right now in front of all of you.
“Will,” you say. “Get out of there! Now!”
Will turns toward you finally. But it’s only for a moment. You’re sure he’s going to run now. As he has just proven, he is extremely fast. If he took off at a sprint, would the bear really follow him? Would he have a shot at outrunning her? You’ll neverknow, because instead, he locks eyes with you, and his face looks desperate, like he’s powerless to move. Before you can ask him what he’s doing, he swings the cooler by the handle.
“No!” you say. “Don’t…”
Then he lofts the whole thing in the air, right toward you.
You’re completely shocked, but somehow you stumble into position to catch it. It comes winging in, spinning like an asteroid, and hits you hard in the chest. You almost drop to the ground, the wind knocked out of you. The handle pounds your chin, but you manage to clasp your arms around it and hold it tight. It’s possible your jaw is broken, along with a couple of ribs, but Will’s pass was right on the money.
And, of course, the movement startles the mama bear. She pauses for a moment. Then she keeps walking forward. And when she gets a few feet away from Will, she blows hard at the ground and swipes a paw at a nearby tree. Will doesn’t move. The mama bear looks up at him and moans. Then she slams both of her paws into the ground. The next pause seems to last about three hours. Maybe it’s five seconds in real time. You have no idea. But right when you think Will is going to have to fight a bear, and that you’re going to have to help, the tent flap flies open and what appears to be a shirtless Troy emerges from its depths.
His hair is wild from a night of bad sleep, his glasses crooked. His eyes are wide open, and he is carrying a frying pan and some other object you can’t quite make out. From the second he’s out of the tent, he starts wailing on the pan like a drummer for a metal band and walking toward the bears. He has his eyes closed and he is singing a song at the top of his lungs that is so loud and off-key, it takes you a moment to realize what it is.
