Page 1 of True North
One
“Mom,” JT said, “I’m going to have to call you back.”
He watched through his kitchen window as the bear on his deck carefully hooked its claws beneath the hot tub cover and began to pry it open. Getting into his garbage was one thing, but the hot tub was where JT drew the line. He didn’t want to go for an after-dinner dip and have to strain out bear fur. Or worse. If bears shat in the woods, they might shit in hot tubs, too.
“Is something wrong?” his mom asked, with the preternatural instinct of moms everywhere for knowing when Something Was Up.
“That bear is back.” The bear had wriggled its entire paw beneath the cover and was now wedging its nose under there, too, getting the leverage to lift the cover to the side. “Looks like it wants to take a soak in my hot tub. I gotta go out there and chase it off.”
His mom made a noise that was half amused and half concerned. “You’re sure it’s a shifter? Maybe you should call animal control.”
“Well, it’s a brown bear, so. Unless it’s gotten incredibly lost, it’s definitely just some dude who’s too cheap to buy his own hot tub.”
She made another noise, this time entirely amused. “Be careful anyway. No need to call me back, just come over tomorrow around seven. You know your sister’s going to be late.”
JT grinned, still watching the bear out the window. “Eternally.”
They said their goodbyes. Despite his assurances to his mom, JT dug around in his mudroom until he found his canister of bear spray before going outside. You never really knew. He was convinced the bear was a shifter, though. He had caught it on his security cameras going through the trash cans with more discernment than an animal would display, fussily sorting through the contents and selecting only the most delectable morsels, like the remnants of a pie JT had thrown out to keep himself from eating the whole thing. He was familiar with black bear behavior from years of camping trips, and this bear didn’t act like an animal. But still: better safe than sorry.
The bear had made its first appearance a couple of weeks ago, not long after JT came home to Sault Ste. Marie for the summer. When his garbage first started getting rummaged through, he’d assumed raccoons were responsible. There were bears in the region, but they tended to stay in the woods north of the lake and steer clear of the more populated areas closer to town. But then he’d heard a can tip over early one morning and went out prepared to scare off the little ring-tailed bastards and was instead confronted with a gigantic brown bear, staring at him with its eyes gleaming in the floodlights over the garage. He’d booked it back inside, his pulse racing, and peered through the window in bewilderment until the bear went back into the woods.
Since then, he’d seen the bear a few times a week, either in person or on the security footage, and he’d cleaned up a lot of scattered garbage. Soaking in the hot tub was a new behavior, though.
The afternoon was fading into evening. JT stepped through the sliding doors from the kitchen onto his deck. Any other day, he would have paused a moment to enjoy the warm summer air and the golden light shining over the lake from the west. Right now, though, he had a bear to deal with.
The bear was by now sitting upright in the hot tub like a person would, submerged to its waist as it gazed out toward the lake. “Hey,” JT said sharply, and the bear’s head turned. Its shoulders hunched as its eyes landed on JT, like a sheepish human caught doing something they weren’t supposed to. But it didn’t make any moves to leave the hot tub.
JT took a step closer. “Come on, buddy. I know it’s a great view, but you’re trespassing.”
The bear lowered its head and swung it from side to side. It went down on all fours in the tub, somehow managing to wedge its entire massive body in the steaming water.
For Christ’s sake. “Look, I’ll call animal control if you don’t leave, and they’ll show up with a tranquilizer gun. Sounds embarrassing, right? You probably want to get out of here before that happens.”
The bear kept staring at him. JT sidled closer, wondering if hewaswrong, if this was somehow an actual grizzly bear that had—what, wandered the two thousand kilometers from northern Manitoba and somehow found its way to JT’s yard? Not likely.
On closer examination, the bear didn’t look great: scrawny and shabby, skinnier than even a wild bear should be by the middle of May. Its fur was matted and dingy, and one of its ears was ragged. JT frowned. Something wasn’t right. Maybe the bear was sick?
Just as he decided that he probably ought to go inside and call animal control after all, the bear heaved a great sigh and hauled itself out of the water. It shook itself like a dog, spraying JT with a thorough coating of water droplets, making him swear and take a step back. Finally, with a baleful look in JT’s direction, the bear lumbered off into the trees.
“And stay out of my garbage,” JT muttered before he replaced the hot tub cover and went back into the house. With any luck, that would be the end of that.
* * *
Naturally, that wasn’t the end of it.
In addition to the security cameras around the house, JT had set up a couple of wildlife camera traps because he was curious about what passed through his yard. He reviewed the footage every few days. The first time he checked after the hot tub incident, the bear showed up on two separate days: once ambling along the deer track down to the lake early in the morning, another time using a big pine tree as a back scratcher. The security camera mounted above his sliding doors yielded even more damning footage: the bear sunbathing on JT’s deck while JT was in town skating, as if it werehishouse and JT hadn’t explicitly told him he was trespassing.
“What the fuck,” JT muttered to himself as he watched the bear lazily roll onto its back and scratch its belly. This was too much.
The next time he checked the security footage, he was treated to a full half an hour of the bear soaking in the hot tub, brazenly, in the middle of the day, eyes closed in utter bliss.
Enough was enough.
He wasn’t friends with any of the shifters in town, but the Sault wasn’t a big place, and he knew how to get in touch. There was a pub on Queen Street downtown, The Ursid, that was owned by a couple of bears, and JT decided to drop in after his workout a few days later to see if he could get any information.
The Ursid was decorated to look like an old-school British pub, complete with dark wood paneling on the walls and a Union Jack hung above the bar. JT had been a few times with friends, but mostly he did his drinking elsewhere, ideally in someone’s back yard where he could avoid the autograph-seekers or—worse—the armchair GMs who wanted to tell him everything that was wrong with his team. Locals left him alone, for the most part, but tourists were always a problem in the summer.
The pub did a brisk lunch business. JT had eaten elsewhere after his workout and the rush was mostly over, but there were still enough people seated around the bar that he had to wait a few minutes to get the bartender’s attention. She came over to him at last, smiling, and said, “Thanks for waiting. What can I get for you?”