HELP! A Bear Is Eating Me! - Mykle Hansen [27]
Mister Bear, you got the wrong guy. You’re supposed to be eating Edna, not me. I, not you or Edna, am supposed to be boffing my secret fuck in the woods behind Camp Image Team. But Edna has this incredible talent for fucking me up.
I recall we were enjoying a very late breakfast back at Camp Image Team, Frink and Halsey had finally coaxed enough heat out of Frink’s anemic Coleman stove to sort of mildly cook some bacon and eggs. Just to accomplish that had taken them hours, while the rest of us stalked around like hungry snakes, smoking cigarettes and drinking cold, gritty coffee and cleaning rifles and suiting up for some serious killage. I hadn’t had nearly enough sleep, for the same reason that Marcia from Product Dialogue was still asleep in her one-bimbo pup tent — because between the hours of 3 and 3:45 A.M. I had traded Edna’s toilet-flushing snore for Marcia’s pork-holstering fanny in that same single-bimbo housing unit. So I could hardly complain, really, about the loss of sleep. But the absence of breakfast had me murderous.
Edna had risen earliest of all, and there she sat on the self-inflating couch, picking fussily with her plastic fork at the runny eggs on her styrofoam plate, taking issue with Halsey’s cooking and the little black bits of flaked-off frying pan, being impossible to please, being difficult, being Edna. Much to my dismay she wore not the brown fur coat but one of those bright orange don’t-shoot-me-I’m-not-a-bear hunting vests, over a dumpy blue down ski jacket. Edna doesn’t even try to look her best.
But I was prepared to accessorize her with a special cologne: Ranger Steve’s Sure-Draw Bear Bait, Yukon Formula. The efficacy of Ranger Steve’s secret recipe is sworn to on his website by a throng of experienced bear hunters, including celebrity outdoor hunting guide Rock Majestic. (I wasn’t able to find a bear bait endorsed by Ted Nugent.) Supposedly Ranger Steve’s bear bait is carefully pH balanced to smell exactly like both a honey-dipped pig on fire and a barn full of bears in heat. Supposedly bears swarm to it like flies to shit. Supposedly you just spray it on some jelly donuts, leave them lying out in a spot that’s easy to shoot at, the bears show up looking for the party, you blow away the bears. Ad infinitum. With this stuff one could bag a six-pack of bears in an afternoon, if one could just work out how to lash them to Baumer’s Toyota. (No bear marks on my Rover, please.)
I loosened the top of the plastic squirt bottle so the juice would spill more easily — it stank badly of bacon fat and cold tuna — and then I considered the choreography. Come from the left? From the right? Throw it at her from here, or sneak up from behind? The thing is, it had to look right because everyone was watching. It had to look accidental. And I’m a direct-approach guy, so I decided I’d just sit down beside her and … whoops! Clumsy me! Yeah. Perfect.
I took my plate of half-cooked food in my right hand and the bottle of bear bait in my left, walked over to the bouncy, boneless, unpredictably flaccid self-inflating couch where Edna sat, and plopped down suddenly, right up friendly next to my darling wife. And … whoops! Clumsy me!
Only my darling stupid wife chose that very stupid instant to jump up, leaving the couch jiggling like a hot water bottle, causing me to lose slightly more of my balance than I had planned to lose, spilling the Ranger Steve’s not on my darling stupid cunt wife but on the spot where she had just sat, and then causing me to roll sideways over into that very same puddle of stinking Sure-Draw bear slime.
“Marv! Don’t sneak up on me like that! Look what you did!”
“It’s nothing, baby, everything’s fine. Come sit down over here and talk to me.”
“What is that you just spilled all over the couch? It smells.”
“It’s just hot sauce, baby. Try some, it’s good on bacon.”
“What are you doing? Look, you’re ruining your clothes! Didn’t you just buy those pants?”
“Oh, c’mon, give me a hug.”
“MARV! Are you drunk! You smell like dead fish!”
“It’s just nature, baby. Nature smells