Emory’s Gift by W. Bruce Cameron Page B

on the first day of school. The soil was not as firm as sandstone but was packed solidly enough that when I took a stick and swiped at it I could draw a permanent mark. I made a big letter C.
    “My name is Charlie,” I told the bear. I stuck my tongue out a little as I drew my name in the dirt. When I stepped back, it was pretty easy to read: Charlie.
    “That’s how you spell it,” I told him. “See? Charlie.”
    The bear looked at the marks I’d made as if trying to read them. He lumbered up to the bank, taking a closer look. Then he moved off down the bank a ways, where I hadn’t yet written anything.
    I cocked my head, regarding my artwork. Should I write loves Kay after my name? Or turn it around: Kay loves Charlie. Maybe Sergeant Lunkhead would come across it, think he’d lost her, and abandon Selkirk River forever. Or maybe he’d get in a big fight with Kay, acting all jealous, and then I’d show up to save her. I’d have the bear with me, which would sort of stack the odds in my favor, even if Lunkhead had military training.
    I looked down at my feet and saw a small painted turtle crawling glumly among the rocks. I almost shouted, turtle! at the bear but then bit my lip. The bear would probably just eat the thing, and I didn’t want to have that on my conscience.
    I glanced up, but the bear wasn’t paying attention to me. He was digging at the soft soil of the bank with a single paw, a small trickle of dirt pyramiding at his feet. I frowned. What was he doing?
    With a huff, the bear backed away from the bank, and now I could clearly see that he’d made his own marks in the smooth soil.
    He’d written his own word, plain as day, easy to read.
    EMORY.
    “Oh boy,” I said.

chapter
    TWELVE
    THE first psychiatrist I was sent to, the one I never liked, spent very little time getting to know me before he asked, “At what time did you become convinced the bear was trying to communicate with you?”
    That one didn’t take much thought. “When he wrote his name in the sand,” I said simply.
    The psychiatrist gave me a long, frozen, unamused look before speaking. “And then you took the bear to your house.”
    “To the pole barn, yes. Not inside the house or anything.”
    “And what were you thinking at that moment?”
    That question again. Why did everyone expect me to be doing so much thinking all the time? How much thinking did they do at thirteen?
    To this day, I can’t really explain what I felt as I looked at the word “Emory” carved in the riverbank, nor why my only reaction was to say, “Hi, Emory.” You don’t shake hands with an animal with four-inch claws, so we sort of looked at each other for a minute, and then I said, “I’ve got some more food in the freezer.”
    Probably I just thought it was cool that someone had trained him to write his name. I’d heard of a horse who could do simple arithmetic, so why not this? I say “probably” because I can’t look back at my first thoughts without filtering them through all of the events that transpired later. Asking me to isolate one single memory at the start of it all is just asking too much.
    “What would you think?” I challenged the psychiatrist the second or third time he asked me about that day. He didn’t respond, of course, because he didn’t believe any of it happened.
    That day in the woods it seemed as if the birds and all other creatures went quiet at the sight of a thirteen-year-old boy walking alongside a grizzly bear. The breeze died down, even, as if stilled in awe. I couldn’t keep the grin off my face at the sheer mass of him moving next to me. Emory the bear.
    I raised the big roll-up door to the pole barn and Emory watched it go up as if trying to figure out how it worked. “See, we have this big sink in here for water,” I said, showing the place off like a Realtor. In the back was a big couch, too big for the living room, still wrapped in plastic from the move. I attacked the plastic, pulling it off as