HELP! A Bear Is Eating Me! - Mykle Hansen [3]
But the one thing I most adore about society, cities, the unnatural lifestyle in-toto, is this invention we’ve got called Justice. Have you heard of Justice, Mister Bear? Justice is awesome. Justice means that if you lived in Seattle and you walked up to me on the street and started rudely eating me in this way, without my explicit consent, my screams of pain and alarm would not go unheeded. In moments, a squad car would arrive on the scene and police officers would draw their weapons and order you to lay face down on the sidewalk. And if you refused to comply, then those officers — to protect their own lives! — would empty several rounds from their powerful human handguns into your ugly bear face, killing you into submission. Then a luxuriously appointed ambulance would arrive, and friendly paramedics would rush me to a nearby excellent hospital where on-call neurosurgeons would first extract my foot from the stomach of your still-warm carcass — your flesh twitching reflexively as they dig with their scalpels and saws — and then they would spend hours, if not days, fastidiously reattaching each severed nerve and tendon, stitching my foot back on my leg as if I were a torn teddy bear, only ever so much more important. Perhaps to reconstruct the gnarled bits of my ankle they would take a skin graft from my other leg, or from a donor leg, or maybe I’d even receive the first successful human foot transplant, a miracle of medical technology and anti-foot-rejection drugs. My miracle foot and I would be written up in medical journals and made briefly famous on local television, perhaps even asked to endorse products. Then later, when I could walk again, as well as before if not better, I’d buy a round of drinks for the nice policemen who introduced you to the exquisite human concept of Justice, and then I’d drive home resting upon soft new seat covers sewn from your stupid hide.
Certain people — hippies, I guess you’d call them — often insist to me that human beings need nature for some reason. Not just the nature we already have in our zoos and farms and parks, mind you, but also this wild, untended mess of Ur-Nature here in Alaska. We need this nature up here, they say, in order to survive down there, they say, and then they invoke all sorts of explanation about the interconnectedness of the spotted owls to the salmon to the cows to the lumber products, and sure, I’m not some trained environmentologist so I can’t say they’re totally wrong. Maybe they’re right.
But this I do know: if human beings down in Seattle need for huge dangerous bears to be running around unchained in Alaska, then Alaska’s going to have to address its Justice problem, posta la hasta. I mean, aren’t there supposed to be Forest Rangers from Fish & Wildlife on patrol around here, making sure that people and animals obey the law and don’t litter or double-park or eat each other without a permit? I haven’t seen one ranger and I’ve been here for hours. Maybe, when they finally kick out those indigent Eskimos and start drilling some oil in this state, they’ll get the income to import some tough inner city street cops to keep these bears in line. For that matter, if there was even one cell phone tower within five miles of here I could just dial 911! But there’s not an ounce of reception on my Nokia picture-phone. No bars. This place is backwards and primitive and wrong.
It’s dark, and the bear is quieting down. He’s snuggled up against the side of the car, just a few feet from me. I think he’s falling asleep. Maybe in a little while here I’ll wriggle quietly free, and get the shotgun out of the Rover and offer Mister Bear some Remington 870 hollow-point after-dinner mints.
You think you’re tough, Mister Bear? I’ve kicked bigger asses than yours. Eat, sleep and be hairy, for tomorrow