SKINNING BEAR

I learned to dissect animals in my high school physiology class, where a dead cat changed form over the space of eight long months, reeking of formaldehyde. I wouldn't graduate if I didn't take the class, and it was one of the most important in my life. A decade later, traveling with Sun Bear, an Indian medicine man who rescued road kills, I wasn't put off by the idea, or the smells, or the sorting through injured flesh. After that journey I came to rest in a mountain town, Seeley Lake, Montana, for a few years of relatively quiet living. Hunting and trapping occupied most of the male residents, and I continued skinning: deer, elk, beaver, whatever presented itself.

It wasn't hard to find me if someone wanted something skinned. I worked days in the local cafe, and in a town of 300 word got around. One autumn, John, an old fellow, tracked me down to say he had a bear hanging in his shed. "I had to shoot it, the dogs treed it. If you don't skin it, I'm just hauling it to the dump."

I didn't believe for a minute that he had to kill it, but the chance for a bear hide couldn't be passed up."I get the skin, and you promise to eat the meat. Is it a deal?" Sun Bear trained me well: nothing goes to waste, even if parts of it end up as food for coyotes, and the six-leggeds, eventually.

I gasped when I first saw her hanging from the rafters, and I felt the tears well up. But tears and hunters don't mix, so I turned to get my knives. John left shortly, and I began my prayers to this being who was my height, had lived a good life, obviously, and was at my mercy. I called in the Medicine Bears to guide my hands, to honor her several years of roaming the Mission and Swan Mountain Ranges, smudged her with sage and started in.

John had supplied a step ladder, and before the first cut, I buried my head in her shoulder, finally getting to inhale the smell of bear. Then I began the hard work of skinning an animal I'd never touched before. She was near ready for hibernation, her pure white fat layer rolled off easily. I imagined exquisite pie crusts and set some aside for later. The process isn't all that different from one critter to the next, but how to preserve her claws? What about her nose? They were new territory. Without a taxidermist tutor, I did the best I could. No holes in the hide, lots to scrape off later. The hours slipped by with my face about a foot from her raw body.

Finally I stepped away to take a fresh breath. Another gasp arose, and the tears poured down full force. There was a human hanging there, right down to the fingers and opposable thumbs. I felt my bond to her and to all bears flowing through me, like spring runoff soaking into a parched creekbed. The Medicine Bears I had called in surrounded us, witnessing my transformation. I would carry Bear Medicine for the rest of my life, for the healing of my kind, and the wilderness we call home.