Invasive Species Read Online Free PDF Page A

who already had sharper eyes than anyone else he knew, was the only one to see it.
    A bear. They’d spotted a few during this visit to Yellowstone, though Dad said that he’d seen many more—forty-eight, in fact—during a trip he’d taken here when
he
was a kid. Black bears, they were called (though one had been brownish red), with cute rounded ears and eyes like black buttons.
    â€œDon’t be fooled,” Mom had said, as they watched one scratch its back against a tree. “They can be dangerous.”
    Trey had found that hard to believe.
    Sitting as still as possible on the edge of the picnic area, Trey watched the bear move through the woods. He could tell that this one was different from the others they’d seen. Its gray-brown fur, tipped in silver, was thicker, longer. Its eyes, as it focused on Trey, were dark and deep. When it moved, the muscles rippled along its legs and its thick, humped shoulders.
    Trey stood to get a better view.
    Watching him, the bear made a low grunting noise that he could feel in his chest. He expected someone else to notice, to shout, to come running, but no one did. They were all too busy laughing and tossing peanuts to the begging chipmunks.
    The bear backed away deeper into the shadows of the pine trees. Without hesitation, Trey followed.
    Missing the caution gene. That was how his mother already described him.
    The bear grunted again as Trey came up to it. He could feel the heat radiating from its body, smell its earthy odor when it blew its breath out through strangely delicate lips.
    Then it reared up on its hind legs and peered down at him. To Trey, it seemed as tall as the pine trees, as massive as a hillside. It was unbelievably big and powerful, so Trey did what he would have done with anything whose existence he doubted, despite the evidence of his own eyes.
    He reached out and touched it.
    The bear’s fur was coarse, thick, oily but still as scratchy as his dad’s cheek when he didn’t shave for a few days. It felt hot to his touch, though Trey never knew whether the heat was the bear’s or his own.
    But mostly what he sensed was the power radiating outward from beneath the fur. The incredibly strong muscles, and beneath them, the engine, the core of the beast beneath his palm. An unharnessed energy that he’d never sensed in his family, in any person, and for the first time he realized that the world was not a pyramid, with humans sitting on top.
    The bear flinched and let out a strange, whining cry, but did not move.
    Trey closed his eyes. The pure connection between the two of them did not require vision.
    But apparently the bear’s cry had been loud enough to attract the attention of others. After that, Trey’s memories were blurred. He remembered screams, shouts, being knocked down—by human hands—his head banging against the ground. Being carried by someone running, then thrown into the backseat of the car, the feel of vinyl against his cheek.
    His mom saying, “Oh, my God, oh, my Christ,” over and over.
    Both Mom and Dad touching him, lifting his shirt, holding his hand, checking his legs, again and again, as if trying to discover wounds they’d somehow missed the first twenty times they’d inspected him.
    Or maybe they were just trying to make sure he was real, just as he’d done with the bear.
    The grizzly. That was what Christopher told him it was called. A grizzly.
    *   *   *
    IT WASN’T UNTIL years later, when he found some newspaper clippings hidden in the bottom of his father’s desk drawer, that Trey learned the fate of the giant bear.
    Turned out it already had a criminal record, that bear, having previously been convicted of wandering too close to campgrounds and picnic areas. It had never been aggressive, had done nothing more than watch, but you never could tell with grizzlies, so twice it was anesthetized and taken to more remote parts of the park