eaten every picnic basket in Rosedale Park.’ Employee Morale: If bear is sluggish, find hose. Soak her till she earns her keep. Bookkeeping: Unscrew peanut-butter jar. Profit Management: Buy booze. Security: Put jar, basket and rifle in old Coke cooler with the bait. Look for the GD keys. Employee Benefits: Don’t be a retard. It’s a bear. Big live bait for big fat fish. Health and Safety: Frogs on the doughnuts? Scrape ’em off. Year End: Never. Sell Christmas trees. Tell ’em Yogi likes snow.
I can’t forget the butter tarts. Kronk called them homemade, declared them his and Yogi’s favourite. It was half true: Yogi loved them and Kronk loved to show off how he’d trained her to appreciate them. He’d stand beside the cage, swinging the box back and forth. Pendulum arms, with his flat round face as the clock. She’d match him, moaning, tossing her snout in anticipatory pleasure. Rifle cocked between his knees, he’d unlock the padlock, stand in the doorway, raise his arms and twist the box around in the air, ‘Dance for it, baby girl! Dance for it!’ An obedient if ungainly ballerina, Yogi would rise up, clasp claws overhead and stomp in circles. You could all but see the tutu. I’m sure Kronk saw it. He drooled. At his drunkest it slid out in one wet slur, ‘Dansfuritgurlie! Dansfurit!’ When he tired of her, he tossed the gooey mess in her face.
Now, I grew up watching Dancing Bear on Captain Kangaroo and never once asked myself why a kidnapped, captive bear would want to dance. Today I wonder what kind of sadist looked at the muzzled and starving and saw entertainment for toddlers. Today, at the sight or scent of butter tarts, my stomach heaves. You can’t blame Yogi. Sweet and syrupy, they were as close to honey as she was ever going to get. You can’t really blame Kronk. Yogi got him as close to the big-city gravy train as he’d ever get. ‘So who is to blame?’ you ask. Good one. That’s your Seminal Question. Remember it. If you don’t, who will?
The March clan certainly didn’t. We took our lead from the three monkeys: what evil? Our Yogi didn’t even have a cautious Boo Boo sidekick to keep her from hoovering every goodie in sight, let alone a Mr. Ranger to step in and take it away from her. Even Grayden quickly forfeited his in loco parentis status. For a summer or two, he exercised his visitation rights. He went right into the cage to play. When baby gave her daddy a bear hug that broke ribs and ripped an incision down his back that sent him into Fenelon for twenty stitches, Grayden became a deadbeat dad. No one admonished him. Not word one.
Now in her sixth year, our teddy bear on permanent picnic barely resembled her cute baby self. Bored and bloated, she wept from a permanent sore on her left eye, one inhabited by flies. Did this stop the tourists? Give those turdists a moment’s cause for pause? Of course not. When preconceptions rule, human eyes don’t stand a chance. They couldn’t see what they were looking at: a sick, sad, overfed, aging bear, one trapped in permanent babyhood in a glorified playpen. No one saw bloody footprints. They saw ‘a real live bear!’ They said, ‘He’s sooo cute!’ Do bears get cavities? Do bears on a Ding Dong diet become diabetic? I don’t know. I know she got lethargic. She learned to snarl. She abandoned her swing and cowered, rubbing her weeping eye against the wire, making it worse, perhaps deliberately so.
Why did no one come to her rescue? Even Mr. Ranger is always more concerned with the property of tourists than the well-being of one he has sworn an oath to protect. MC would say: Once a thief always a thief. Little beggars don’t choose their own nourishment. (You march, March! You shut up, suck it up and be grateful that you’re fed!) As Yogi’s Mr. Ranger, Kronk viewed his charge likewise, saw himself as her benefactor, noblesse oblige. In the wee hours he’d sprawl over the picnic table, munching tarts and lullabying at the top of liquored-up lungs: ‘Now if I had the wings of an angel, over these prison walls I would fly! I’d fly to the arms of my poor darlin’, and there I’d be willing to die.’ Sometimes persons unknown called the police. When the local constabulatory arrived, they found no crime beyond country music and lawn vomit – both of which should be indictable offences, but sadly are not.
In typical March, the last word got rendered without words, with family, tourists, locals and the law complicit: Kronk had saved a motherless child. He could raise her or kill her as he pleased. Only you can prevent forest hires, and back then we didn’t even try. Back then the almighty tourist dollar turned more than one wild beast into a sideshow attraction. Take Overall Boy, a case in point. He was a local and our neighbour, one of farmer Hezzy’s sons, not the one who delivered the mail, but the one we called OB for reasons obvious. He bred a whole hockey team of coons. Kept them in a roadside pen at the Fenelon turnoff.
When a car pulled over and a window rolled down, OB tapped his chest until a kit poked her nose out of the big front flap of his greasy overalls – a trick that wowed ’em every time. He sold those babies down the river or anywhere else, no questions asked or offered, five bucks a pop. Canada’s first drive-thru, eons before Tim Hortons. If the new owners drowned the kits next week or put them down once they got uncute or bit little Janie, so what? Plenty-twenty where they came from. Last summer, at Jordan’s insistence, we’d turned one of our Saturday morning meanders through Fenelon into a forced march, hoofing it all the way from the dairy, over the canal, past Hanley’s Lumber, to the Rosedale-Fenelon turnoff, all to ask OB to stop.
‘But city pissers like it,’ he’d grinned with brown teeth, ‘and I doan like them.’ When Jordan looked dubious, he moved his plug from left cheek to right and frowned. ‘Lookit, girlie. Us locals have a right to make a buck offa tourists. Yer daddy’d agree. Ask him.’ When Jordan shook her head he spat over it. Spittle showered her hair. When she suggested raccoons had rights too, a brown blob grazed her cheek. ‘What are ya anyway, one’a them there hippie tree huggers?’ When Jordan said maybe, he spat on her shoes. ‘Git lost, girlie. Now! Unlest y’want me to whistle for m’dog. His name’s Calvin and he doan like yellow.’
So we were used to cages and all they stood for, and specifically used to all manner of sounds both ursine and human being broadcast from the top of our road. But that first Sunday afternoon the hullabaloo was neither tourist nor intoxicated, at least not on booze. It was a greener version of Gray: his youngest brother, cousin Derwood. Our feet built little speed on the fresh gravel, but crunching round the last bend we saw him, still in church clothes, crouched prostrate and preying: firing handfuls of gravel bullets scatter-force into the cage. Most found their mark: Yogi, curled in fetal whimpering, little black-gloved fists clenched into her eyes.
Jordan’s wish? It cuts near the wood: ‘I’d give everything I am to free her!’
I lost mine by yelling it: ‘You dirty little bastard! I’m gonna shove you in that cage!’
It only alerted him. Proving what Grandma often said in his direction, that a bully is only as brave as his unfair advantage, Derwood dropped his free ammo and took off, quickly gaining a safe lead on the all-too-public asphalt. He turned. Running on the spot, he stuck his thumbs in his ears, wiggled his fingers, jiggled his bum and stuck out his tongue. ‘Na-na-na-na-naaa-na!’ Such a juvenile asswipe.
Then he leaned toward my sister and did something far worse. He smiled.
GET BACK
You are maybe three years old. You have two sets of pyjamas. They stay the same, even when The House and The Family don’t. When they’re going to move you, they iron your yellow dress stiff, snap the silver locket around your neck and the silver lock on your red suitcase. For now it’s empty, stashed under This Crib, and waiting for next time. Your pyjamas have lived here, safe in a drawer in This House, for more than seven sleeps: your soft green nightie with the bunny rabbit, your thick winter sleeper with snaps. It’s yellow too. Tonight you are wearing it. Good. Sometimes snaps confuse him. Smile at the bluebird. She’s how you know you’re not in the hospital. She’s like This Crib, baby blue. Hospital cribs are metal. This one has a happy picture pasted on its wooden head. This Lady has made it herself, a birdie cut from a magazine, perched in apple blossoms, bursting pink. Happy notes come chirping out of her tiny beak.
