I’ve had a thought so bear with me
Today must be Day of the Bear, for I’ve had bears on my mind. I’m not sure how it happened or whence its origin. I certainly didn’t dream of bears (a la Goldilocks); didn’t encounter one — if you can discount Stanley the barista at the coffee shop who might evoke feelings of envy in a grizzly if they happened to cross paths. Stan’s nickname, in fact, is Griz. To make things clear: I didn’t even dream of Stan. So that’s another box ticked. Or crossed. I consider what a psychologist might make of this ‘bear in my head’ stuff?
Some psychologists are able to trace a thought pattern, follow it back in time and lock into it at the very root. I guess that’s some form of thought contraction. Which explains why they are, sometimes loosely and rather insultingly, referred to as ‘shrinks’.
Anyhow, not being able to afford a psychologist’s fireside couch, I am forced to perform my own armchair deductions. I have to delve into the convoluted crevices of my brain to see if, at some point, I’d had some sort of half-association with bears. I look back over the last few days and try to recall if I’d been researching things astronomical which might have brought me in contact with Ursa Major and/or Minor, or both. Ursa, as we all know, being Latin for bear (and ursine being anything bearlike, a la Stan the barista.)
But no, I discover I hadn’t been researching the stars. Had I been reading about the — rather promiscuous — mating habits of she-bears? How the lady bear cunningly seduces not one but a series of suitors into a mating ritual and in this way tricks all the prospective daddy bears into believing that the cub (when it is born) is theirs? In this way, the cub is safe and grows up relatively unthreatened by the daddy bears.
Yes, I had been reading up on that but that was years ago — too long back to sit in my head like a song’s looped refrain (an earworm) that will not go away. So if it wasn’t astronomical and mating bears what else could it have been?
Hit the dirt
I pause to consider whether I’d been chatting with anyone about bears. Had somebody recently told me how I might survive a bear attack? You know, things like: Always carry bear spray, don’t tease, don’t run, don’t be stealthy, hit the dirt, play dead (a near impossibility if one has a grizzly breathing in one’s ‘playing dead’ face; one might easily succumb in such circumstances to death by natural causes), or, the even more improbable suggestion: Box its nose or eyes. I can just envisage the bear standing there, guard down like a tired and confused Tyson, inviting a sucker punch. Not going to happen! No, I am one hundred per cent certain my bear thoughts had nothing to do with any of the above. So I just give up, close my layman’s ‘analytical file’ and try to go about my business, which invariably involves making a cup of coffee. That’s when, not quite like a bolt from the blue, but close to it, I make the association. I catch sight of my satellite navigator sitting on the counter next to the coffee machine and it falls in place: The bear thought, root and all! It had to do with the recorded voice on my navigator, a lady’s, issuing instructions as I drove up the hills the previous day to a place I wasn’t familiar with. I distinctly recall the eerie, forested landscape on both sides, with a light veil of mist hanging about the trees, and right in the midst of all this the navigator warning: Bear left! And again, ‘bear left’. It took courage not to swerve off the dirt track.
■ Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.