Bearwalker by Joseph Bruchac Page B

feet—“that blood, I could see from the looks on their faces that they just wanted to get as far away from all of this as they could. They were petty criminals, but they are not murderers. And then when he told us who he really was, that was the last straw for them. They turned and ran.” Mr. Mack shudders and puts a hand to his forehead. “He grinned at me when they ran. Then he pulled out that long knife of his and went after them.”
    Mr. Mack is talking louder and faster now, his hands tapping his knees as he speaks. “Eventhough they split up, they didn’t get far. Either of them. He caught them. Rounded them up. He can see in the dark like some animal. And he’s so fast, so strong. I heard their screams. They screamed and they kept screaming. I didn’t look back, though. I was running too. Running and running and running until I got back here.”
    Mr. Mack’s voice slows down and then stops like a toy whose battery has run down.
    It is more awful than I thought. Everyone is shocked.
    But Mr. Philo is not too shocked to speak. “You still didn’t answer my second question, pal. Who is he?”
    Mr. Mack whispers the name, but everyone hears it. Mrs. Philo raises both hands to her mouth. It’s a name we all know.
    â€œJason Jones.”

17
Not a Myth
    J ason Jones is real. He’s not a myth at all. Mr. Philo is shaking his head. “Of course,” he says. “I should have recognized him. But his hair was blond and crew cut when he was a boy and his eyes were blue. Why is he pretending to be an Indian?”
    Mrs. Philo pats her husband on the arm. “Hair dye,” she says. “Contact lenses. That poor boy always did go in for drama. Remember how he kept changing his name and saying he was really adopted? Can you blame him for that after how he was treated by…them? He probably does think he’s an Indian now. Poor deluded boy.”
    Mr. Philo shakes his head again. He’s holding the shotgun loosely in one hand with its barrel now pointing at the floor. “He’s not a poor boy any longer, Dora,” he says. “Even when he was fourteen he was dangerous. Howdid the state ever let him out? You know he blames us for what happened to him.”
    â€œI know,” Mrs. Philo says, taking her husband’s hand as he leans the shotgun in the corner. “I know, Wally.”
    What happened to the real Jason Jones, the one who is calling himself Walker White Bear? Mr. Wilbur doesn’t know the real story any more than I do, and we both listen as the Philos fill us in about the “poor boy” who was the son of a camp cook and caretaker here at Chuckamuck over twenty years ago. That cook and the caretaker were new and they showed up with their gangly teenage son in tow, a big boy who was withdrawn and wouldn’t make eye contact. The Philos, who had always been kindhearted, decided to let Jason take part in all the activities as if he were one of the regular campers.
    â€œWe thought it would do the lad good,” Mr. Philo says. “I come from humble beginnings myself.”
    But they’d missed two things. The first was how badly he had been abused by someone, really badly abused. They first began to realize that when they noticed the scars on his arms and legs the day Jason came for swimminglessons. Scars from burns.
    â€œAn accident,” Jason’s father said when Mr. Philo asked him about it. “The kid’s always been clumsy.” From that day on, no matter how hot it was, Jason wore long-sleeved shirts and slacks and didn’t come to any more swimming classes.
    The second thing the Philos failed to notice was that the big, shy boy’s personality was what people now call bipolar, with a good amount of paranoid schizophrenia mixed in. The other campers hadn’t tortured him or played mean tricks on him at all. He’d imagined all that and come to the Philos time after time