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And that’s what we did. Straight up the valley. The bear growled and came from behind but didn’t catch up. He just threatened and kept close enough so we couldn’t consider running up into the woods.

The girls were ahead of Reggie and me, screaming. The bear kept coming on.

Over the next hour our retreat slowed to a fast walk. The bear always behind us.

Finally Reggie fell to his knees.

“Take Addy,” he said. “Take her with you.”

I looked around for a weapon. Alacrity was already armed with a yard-long branch that she held like a baton.

But the bear had stopped too. He held back a few steps and sniffed the air. He let out a great bellowing roar that made Wanita scream and cry.

“Shut up, you ugly bear,” Alacrity said.

Reggie was lying on his side, Addy tied to his shoulders and still unconscious.

I struggled with the double weight of Addy and Reggie, pulling them both up a few feet from the stream. Alacrity stood guard with her stick, shouting at the bear now and then. Wanita stood close by me.

“Alacrity, come on back here to me,” I said in an urgent but muted voice. “Come on. Leave that bear alone.”

“Tell him to leave me alone,” she said, more to the bear than to me.

“Come back here,” I demanded.

Slowly she obeyed. You could see that she hesitated to back down from her attacker. She was ready to go down fighting.

“Come on, now.”

We huddled together on the steep sloping bank of the small mountain stream. The bear watched us closely from the other side. He alternated between sniffing the ground and standing on his back legs, surveying the full area.

“You can go to sleep, Chance,” Alacrity told me. “I’m not tired. I’ll watch him.”

I laughed to myself at the maturity of the child. I would have told her to take a nap herself, but before I knew it I was in a deep sleep.

“Hello, little man,” Juan Thrombone said.

He was sitting on a big stone set alone in a wide desert. The sun was already down, but there was enough light to see the receding field of sand and rock.

“It’s all in our mind, little one,” Thrombone said.

“What?”

“The things you count and calculate. The number of colors, the weight of light on a lawn. It’s all in our mind. I know because I have seen it. I have seen it. And it’s not really there.”

“I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about, man.”

“The smallest one can tell you.” Thrombone’s smile grew large with something he was thinking. “I tried to talk to her, but she drew me away to a place where stone moves within stone, thinking deep rocky thoughts and singing to the stars. I never knew that a stone’s voice could be so high.”

The man of stone and bone, cloth and flowers, stood up. It took a long time for him to attain his full stature. He was a short man seeming to be a giant. He stretched, and this made him laugh. The laugh was a musical tenor with a twang and a whine around the edges.

I thought that I probably couldn’t kill this man; he probably couldn’t die.

“No, little man. No. We can all die — and you” — he looked at me with intent yet benign eyes — “you could kill anyone. That’s what makes you human. You’re the best at it. You’re the cream of the killers.”

I didn’t like his knowing what I was thinking.

“But let’s not worry about that now,” Juan Thrombone said. “You can kill me whenever you want, Chance. But first we should drink something and eat something. First we should sing, little man. My friends will bring you to me.”

“What friends?”

“You’ll know them,” he said. Night was descending on the desert. I strained to glimpse the odd Mexican man, but he faded away.

“Chance.” Wanita was tugging at my arm. “Chance, wake up. Wake up. Look, look.”

I sat up quickly but got dizzy and fell back.

“Chance!”

I sat up again. The green canopy of leaves was spinning around in my head, but I stayed up. Wanita was still pulling, wanting something from me.

We were surrounded by bears. They ranged in color from cinnamon to black. Some were very large, others were less than three feet in length.

We weren’t actually surrounded. There was one path, up away from the stream, to the east, that we could take.

The bears, some of them, were yowling and standing up on their hind legs. The big black bear that chased us at first was already halfway across the stream. He was telling us to move on — there was no doubt about that.

I hefted Wanita in my arms. Reggie groaned and rose. Addy was still tied to his back. Alacrity naturally took up the rear guard even though I told her to go ahead of us. She walked backward behind us, swinging her staff as the bears herded us upward.

They flanked us, big woolly shepherds bringing their flock to a man in a dream. I was sure that these bears were Thrombone’s friends. I was sure that he’d changed his mind and, instead of chasing us away, was calling us on.

I would have dreaded the destination if it wasn’t for those bears. I counted more than sixteen, but I think that there were even more. Smelling strongly of bear musk, roaring and barking. The deep growls sent fear through me, fear for the children and myself. If we slowed down, snapping jaws would urge us forward. And if a bear snapped, Alacrity cracked it with her staff, which sent out a communal bear complaint that was deafening.

They drove us all day long, into the moonlit evening.

Wanita sobbed on and off in my arms. I wanted to check on Addy, but the bears wouldn’t let us slow down. We moved deeper and deeper into the woods until late in the evening.

Reggie, who was the strongest of us, finally gave out again under Addy’s weight. He went to his knees, and the big black straddled him, snarling dangerously.

I put Wanita down and went for the bear. But Wanita grabbed on to my foot and I fell.

Alacrity, however, was surer of foot. She jumped at the big black, yelling. He swung at her but, amazingly, she ducked under his swipe and came up delivering a powerful blow to his snout. The bellow was enough to knock me over, but Alacrity just swung again. The bear backed away from Reggie but then reared. I had my footing and my knife out by then. I was up beside Alacrity, half believing that the girl and I could down a giant bear.

We were surrounded on all sides by pacing, angry bears. Reggie was down. Wanita was holding her brother’s head.

The big bear bellowed again.

“Come on!” Alacrity challenged.

But he didn’t charge. Instead, he leaned backward and walked away until he disappeared into darkness. The rest of the angry bears did the same.

At that moment it started to rain. The moon had been covered over just that quickly, and drizzling rain began to fall. Alacrity and I huddled around Reggie and Addy. We all tried to fit under the plastic tarp I had kept. The girls were crying. Reggie’s eyes were open, but he wasn’t saying anything.

Addy burned under the cold rain.

We were all sneezing and coughing by morning. But with the light Alacrity regained her courage. Wanita didn’t seem afraid either.

“You think they’re still out there?” Reggie asked.

Alacrity lifted the tarp to let us see.

There were bears everywhere. The big black with his bloody snout was foremost, not five feet from us.

“Gimme your knife, Chance,” Alacrity ordered.

I almost obeyed.

“No,” I said. “I think we better keep going.”

“Gimme your knife,” she said with emphasis.

I found it hard to resist her will.

Alacrity raised her staff, and for a moment I was sure that she was going to hit me.

“Nooooo!” yelled Wanita. “No, Alacrity. It’s okay. It’s gonna be okay.”

Alacrity lowered her pole, looking deeply into the smaller girl’s eyes.

“It’s okay?” asked the little self-styled captain.

Wanita nodded.

“Okay then, come on, everybody,” Alacrity said. She shooed us up ahead and took her position at the rear. It was yet another change in a moment. Alacrity had proved herself a leader and a general, a hero — and maybe a fool.

The bears drove us hard all morning long. There must have been a hundred of the creatures. You could hear the shuffle of their hides against bark as they went. Fights broke out among them. They roared and broke down small saplings for sport.

I took Addy for a while to give Reggie a break. She was heavy. Not dead, just deadweight. I carried her for only an hour and was already exhausted. I marveled, in my pain, at how Reggie had carried that load for a whole day.

The bears wouldn’t let up. Alacrity was our biggest problem because she had begun to pick fights with our burly shepherds. More than once we heard the thwack of her staff and the roar of ursine rage.

I was getting weak, intent upon walking until I passed out, when we came to a dead end.

It wasn’t really a dead end. It was more a thick wall of woods. The white firs blocked our way as efficiently as a brick wall. The bears hung back, pacing and growling in a low, purring call.

“Maybe they want us to rest here,” I said hopefully.

“Maybe now I can have your knife,” Alacrity said.

“Come,” said a voice off to the left.

The bears were gone just that quickly, and before I turned around I knew that he would be standing there.

J
UAN THROMBONE STOOD IN
a solitary gap in the wall of trees. He stood in a space that had not been there before, surveying our tattered, half-dying group with a smile.

“Come quickly,” he said, gesturing with the fingers of his left hand. Then he was gone, back into the thick woods.

Wanita jumped from my arms and followed Alacrity into the breach. Reggie staggered after them.

I stood for a moment between the vanished army of bears and the impossibly thick woods. I felt Addy’s nose and mouth to be sure that she was still breathing. The only choice that I had, the only choice that was mine, was to stand still. It felt good to be standing still and in control of my fate, if only for just a moment. I wanted a PayDay candy bar and to hear the Chambers Brothers song “Time Has Come Today.”

It was mostly shaded there before Juan Thrombone’s terrain. A single shaft of light fell not three feet from where I stood.

I took a deep breath of freedom and then carried my friend, heavy as a sack of sand, into the dark doorway of a land I came to know as Treaty.

The path between the trees was large enough for three to walk abreast. A glowing, golden light filtered down from above. The trees stood so close together that they seemed to be the logs in a western stockade’s wall, or at least a great thicket of bamboo.

Juan Thrombone led the way crazily, skipping and dancing like a child. He sang to the trees and ran and climbed. He even did cartwheels and flips now and again. Alacrity tried to keep up with him, but he was too fast and changeable even for her.

No one asked him who he was, because all of us had met the man in our dreams.

After an hour or so I passed Addy over to Reggie again. We were all stronger following that golden path. Our sniffles were gone. Addy groaned and complained when we secured her arms around Reggie’s neck. It was the first sign of life that she’d shown in more than a day and a half.

“Come quickly,” Juan Thrombone said again.

We kept coming for hours.

The brown needles and leaves on the path glowed under the softly broken sunlight. The air was warm and comfortable. A breeze blew from the direction in which we were headed. It whispered slightly in my ears. It was the call. There was something so wonderful in the whispering tones that I had to consciously slow down, to keep from wearing myself out cutting capers like our host.

I realized that I was no longer headed for the music but that I was in the center of it. Many of the trees that surrounded us were singing like musical instruments that were almost human.

“This is what I was looking for,” Reggie said to me.

“What?” I asked, irritated that he had distracted me from the melody.

“This road,” he said. “This is the road I was looking for. But it’s not really here.”

“What are you talking about? Here we are on it.”

“But if you went backward,” he said, “it would be gone.”

“Why are you men wasting the air with words?” Juan Thrombone said.

He was standing there next to us, hands akimbo and eyes alight. Wanita and Alacrity were going on up ahead.

“Plenty of time to talk and chatter. Plenty of time to drink and drool later on when we get there.”

“Where?” I asked.

“To our destination, little man, tender fool, Last Chance.”

“What destination is that, Skin and Bones?” My retort made Thrombone smile wider.

“Treaty,” he said. “Treaty.”

He ran backward toward the girls, leaving me to wonder if he was jokingly asking for a truce or informing me of the name of our destination.

Treaty. We came to it by way of a rise in the path. At the very top we looked across a field of grasses and brush into a great forest chamber. A place like none I had ever seen before. Twelve giant sequoias stood like pillars. The largest of these trees was the exact center of the great space. From it, and from the surrounding trees, hung large man-made netting that held shingles of leaves that angled down; they made a loose roof for the spaces right under the trees, making houses without walls under each giant redwood.

“The wind swirls around the roof and the rain rolls out and away,” said Juan to me. “You can see the sun and the stars, but no one can see you. Here the war is over, Last Chance. This is Treaty.”

“Do you live here?” I asked.

“I am wherever I am,” he answered.

“But do you have a house, a bed even?”

“My bed is where I lay these bones. My home is what I survey. I stay around here mainly because of the puppy trees. But I have been elsewhere.”

Talking to him tired me. As soon as he started to answer, I wanted to stop listening. It was as though his voice was in my head rather than in my ears. It was hard work to listen.

“Anywhere,” Thrombone said as if giving me a respite from the exhaustion he had induced.

I wondered if I was still dreaming.