Bear Encounter: Part 1

Bart the bear was pissed off. It had started out as a fabulous day but in midmorning the shit hit the fan. Now he was digging through a stump eating grubs instead of the delicious apples a bear like him deserved. When he was done he leaned against a nearby tree and scratched his ass. Speaking of ass, the wind shifted and he caught a full on snout full of “eau de skunk”.

Sammy skunk was waddling through the forest. “If that didn’t stink, I would eat it.” thought Bart.

Sammy, unconcerned by Bart’s considerable bulk, wandered up to the stump and started looking for grubs of his own.

“Dude, you ate them all?” Sammy complained.

“I would eat you too if you didn’t stink.”

“Bring it, fat boy.” Sammy had nihilistic bravery that crossed the border of stupid and planted its flag solidly in the land of batshit crazy. Something he had in common with many fellow skunks, most drooling idiots, and all terrorists.

Bart wondered, for the 10,000^th time, if he should just rip Sammy into pieces. Sadly, you can’t do that to a skunk without ending up smelling like a skunk yourself. Bart sighed.

“Good afternoon gentlemen, though perhaps the term ‘gentlemen’ doesn’t apply here?” It was Edward Eagle, a pretentious git with a vocabulary that made Sammy’s head hurt. He perched in a tree well above Bart’s reach (as he always did, for he was not a fool).

“There’s nothing good about it!” Grumbled Bart.

Aside from catching and eating cats, nothing made Edward happier than gossip. So he patiently waited while Bart’s gears started to turn and the story began.

“I was eating some apples, from that tree… You know the one, the apple tree by the red barn.” Bart began.

“I know that place!” Sammy interrupted “There’s cat food there. Why just last week I got a whole bunch and it was delicious.”

“Would that be three nights ago, during the full moon, when I heard several shotgun blasts from that farm?” Edward prompted.

“He missed!” Sammy enthused, “Stupid human comes bumbling out of his house and I’m like ‘tail’s up bitch’ and he does the boomstick thing and I’m like ‘you missed pussy, I’m outta’ here’.”

“Boomstick?” Edward rolled his eyes in his head, which is a disturbing thing to see in an eagle, “I believe it was a pump shotgun.”

“Whatever,” Sammy capered about, “he missed, and I ain’t dead, and screw his pansy ass!”

“Hey! If you two are done interrupting…” Bart growled. Everyone went silent, Bart glowered until everyone seemed sufficiently cowed. Only then did he continue. Critters needed to know he was a bear and they were shit. “So there I was, gobbling up a bunch of wild apples…”

“Wild? The human planted them. Why do you think they’re so close to the barn?” Edward just couldn’t help interrupting.

“Are you mental? Even humans can’t build a tree. If the tree is somewhere it’s because it grew there. And that means it belongs to everyone. And what that really means is that it belongs to me!” Bart hated explaining stuff to Edward.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, if there’s a tree it grew there. Humans suck!” Sammy, who was always agitated, was even more vitriolic than usual. The more disturbed he got, the worse he smelled.

Edward wondered if the skunk’s stink was a matter of concentrated bad attitude. Or perhaps it was coagulated stupidity? Surely if emotions affect an animal’s being then Sammy, who was an equal mix of stupid and angry, was built from the ground up (including personality) to repulse other beings.

“As I was saying,” Bart glared at everyone “I was eating apples, from the tree which belongs everyone which really means it belongs to me, and inside their stupid house thing their stupid dog was barking…”

“Dogs suck! Whenever I see a dog I’m like ‘I’m gonna stink you up’ and if I get the chance I stink them but good. I’ve nailed three dogs this month alone! Every dog was like ‘I’m so sad I messed with Sammy!’” Sammy had an internal clock. Once every few minutes he had to scream invective at something. However, it wasn’t merely bravado. Sammy never went longer than a month without spraying either a human, their dog, a car, an occasional cat, or some combination of them. Sammy was a force of destruction and bringer of chaos. He’d been shot at more times than Bart or Edward could count. Yet he still lived. He was infamous among the forest community.

“I was ignoring the dog.” Bart didn’t bother acknowledging the interruption this time. “The dumb bastard was locked inside a house. What was it going to do to me?”

Edward waited, obviously the dog had done something. Gossip was wonderful!

“I knew the man of the house was gone. I saw him drive away.” Bart nodded at his wise planning. “So then I’m eating the apples and wow are they good, and I’m ignoring the dog which is going apeshit inside the house… But there was someone else in the house, a female I think. I didn’t expect that. She comes out with the dog and she’s holding its rope.”

Stay tuned… I’ll continue Bart’s story in my next post.