Dreaming the Bear Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2016 by Mimi Thebo

  Cover design and illustration copyright by Leo Nickells

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Wendy Lamb Books, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in the UK by Oxford University Press in 2016.

  Wendy Lamb Books and the colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! randomhouseteens.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Thebo, Mimi, author.

  Title: Dreaming the bear / Mimi Thebo.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Wendy Lamb Books, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, [2017] | Originally published: Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2016. | Summary: “Set in Yellowstone National Park, teenager Darcy has moved with her family from England to the U.S. She’s been sick and has strange dreams/visions. Then she finds an injured bear. The bear and Darcy need each other. But is Darcy well enough to take care of the bear, let alone herself?”— Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016011178 (print) | LCCN 2016038643 (ebook) | ISBN 978-0-399-55750-7 (trade) | ISBN 978-0-399-55751-4 (lib. bdg.) | ISBN 978-0-399-55753-8 (pbk.) | ISBN 978-0-399-55752-1 (eBook)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Grizzly bear—Fiction. | Bears—Fiction. | Human-animal relationships—Fiction. | Sick—Fiction. | British—United States—Fiction. | Yellowstone National Park—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.T448 Dr 2017 (print) | LCC PZ7.1.T448 (ebook) | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  Ebook ISBN 9780399557521

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For Andy and Libs (with thanks also to Courtney, Izzy, Molly, Sophia, Foyle, and Bear 134)

  Chapter One

  Everything is quiet. I can hear my raspy breath getting rougher with every step of these stupid snowshoes. Then I hear something else—a bird, maybe. But I can’t see where it is. All I see is pine trees in every direction. And snow, of course.

  I wonder when I can go back. How long has it been? But I don’t want to peel down my warm, padded mitten to look at my watch. The cold air attacks any little weakness, like a bare wrist. It seems like it’s trying to get at you. As if it’s personal.

  And anyway, it’s only been about five minutes since the last time I looked.

  I’m supposed to be out here for two to four hours every day, to build up my lungs. The doctor said cold won’t do me any harm, if I’m dressed for it. He said I should take care not to get wet.

  There’s a hill I haven’t been up. I’ve always taken the ways that go around it. Today I am so bored, I’ll try to go uphill and see if there’s anything interesting up there. I know I shouldn’t go uphill, but I do it anyway. If my muscles really start hurting, I’ll stop, right?

  My dad spends all day out in the cold, and even some nights. When he talks about his fieldwork, I don’t listen. Evidently, finding out about deer populations with natural predators is so important that we had to move to the middle of a giant wilderness. Nothing is that important. It wasn’t worth it.

  If I was home, I could walk to the library. I could wander through our little town’s high street, looking in all the junk shops. I could go swimming— No, I couldn’t, because I’m not supposed to get wet.

  But if I was home, I could get wet, because I wouldn’t have gotten pneumonia in the first place. I wouldn’t have been in the hospital for three weeks. I wouldn’t be all skinny and run-down and weak. I’d be at a real school, with people who actually like me. I’d be with my friends.

  I wouldn’t be with gung-ho lunatics like Susan Hackmeyer, who thinks she knows everything. She doesn’t. She only knows stuff about being here. She couldn’t find her way across London by Tube, like I had to do last year. She couldn’t spot the next big hit song. Just because I can’t tell the difference between deer poo and elk poo, she tried to make me look stupid in front of Tony Infante.

  As if I needed any help to look stupid in front of Tony Infante.

  I get so upset thinking about all this that I am halfway up the hill, which was a lot steeper than it looked, before my lungs hurt and I notice my breath has gone all noisy and harsh. I really need to stop walking uphill. My legs are burning. But then I see where I am.

  I can’t stop. If I stop, I’ll fall about thirty feet, straight down.

  You shoe up steep hills sideways, kind of like making stairs for yourself in the snow. It’s hard. Stopping means balancing, and that’s tricky. I have poles to help, but I haven’t been taking them lately. They seem heavy.

  My poles are still on the porch of the cabin.

  I’ve just been cutting into this hill, letting my anger carry me up. And now, when I need one of the millions and trillions of pine trees in this stupid wilderness, there’s not a single one I can actually reach and hold on to so that I can rest. I have to keep moving or I’ll fall.

  All the time I’m thinking about this, my feet keep on cutting little steps and I keep huffing up the hill.

  It hurts so bad that my lungs start to ache, too.

  All my big muscles are burning now—not just my legs, but my bottom and my arms and back too. The doctor explained why this happens. Muscles need oxygen to flush out the lactic acid that builds up when I exercise. Since my lungs are still crinkly and wet, I’m not making enough oxygen to flush them.

  Which is why I’m not supposed to go uphill.

  It doesn’t help that my lungs are used to being at sea level and I’m living at more than six thousand feet above it. That’s one of the reasons I got pneumonia in the first place. I’m not adjusting well to the altitude. And it doesn’t help to think of this about a million times a day and get angry at my dad every time, either. Emotional upset isn’t good for my breathing, apparently.

  I’m hurting really badly, and the brow of the hill is twenty steps away. I glance, and it’s a long way down. I wish I hadn’t glanced.

  I’m getting black spots in front of my eyes. I’m fighting off weird thoughts—like maybe I could roll back down. Or that it would be nice to just die and not hurt anymore.

  —

  It was so stupid to try to climb this hill.

  And then I get the faraway thing again, when I’m kind of outside me and looking down. As if I’m up somewhere civilized, like a space station, and I’m zooming in on Earth and America and Montana and the wilderness and the park and zooming, zooming right in to our area, and our cabin and me, halfway up this horrible hill.

  I’m like a black-and-red dot moving up a white page. As soon as you can tell it’s a person, you can tell I’m a girl. Even in my padded
clothes, I’m thin. My shining brown ponytail trembles with every movement.

  I waver. My knees sink, and for a moment I look as though I might fall. But then I half climb, half stagger to the brow of the hill and then collapse into the snow.

  What do bears dream? What do they want?

  The bear dreams of her cubs. They sleep against her, in the long time of dark and cold. In her sleep she moves her great arm to gather them close.

  Somewhere in her mind a deep reflex: they are not there. The cubs are not where they should be. There is cold where there should be warmth.

  She swims up from her heaviness. She feels the dryness of her mouth and opens one eye.

  She remembers the last time she saw the cubs. The things the men did. She feels the memory in the pain of her shoulder. Would the thought of leaving her cubs hurt, too? Maybe more? She closes her eye and groans, rolling on her back to her other side, away from the cave’s opening and the place her cubs used to lie.

  —

  Snow begins to fall.

  I lie in the snow for a long time, long enough for the thick white flakes to cover the red patches of my coat.

  When I sit up, I look at my watch, but I don’t see it. I still see me, from a long way away. I am shivering. I crawl to the brow of the hill and look down the steep slope. Part of me notices how far it is, and part of me watches me noticing.

  I try to get to my feet, but I am shaking. My knees fold underneath me, and I sit down, hard. My ponytail is dark with melted snow.

  Wet, I notice. I got wet. I’m not supposed to get wet.

  I look the other way and see a shelter of sorts—a low cave in the rocks of the hill. I crawl inside.

  It is dark, and I shiver hard. One of my snowshoes drags behind me, half off my boot. My eyes are pulling shut when I sense warmth and lean my back into it.

  The bear half wakes again. Someone is there. Her sensitive nose tells her immediately that it is not her cubs, that it is not another bear. But under the perfumed shampoo and soap and deodorant, she smells another animal. Whatever it is, it is alive. And it is small and cold.

  She rolls again, flings out her great arm, and drags the thing to her chest. She feels it warming beneath her touch.

  Chapter Two

  I close the door behind me super, super quietly and strip off my coat and overalls, shoving them straight into the washing machine. That’s when I realize I’ve lost my hat.

  My mother is at the big table, surrounded by books and papers. She’s meant to finish her PhD in the two years we’re in Montana, and my illness has disrupted everything. She missed a conference, and she had an important tutorial scheduled at the conference. Now she’s getting ready to go to another conference, but she’s behind on her research.

  She says snowmobiling to Mammoth every time she needs WiFi is what’s slowing her down, but really, it’s been looking after me.

  Her hair is standing on end, and she has a pencil between her teeth longways, pushing against the corners of her mouth. She keeps her eyes on her screen and says, “Igo woowy oo go…,” and then realizes she’s not making any sense and takes out the pencil.

  “I was worried about you in this snow. It’s been nearly four hours! I was scared you’d get wet.” She looks up and finally sees me, and her eyebrows fly up in line with her fair hair. “You did get wet! Darcy!” The way she says my name, you’d think I’d murdered somebody.

  I shrug. “I lost my hat,” I say, trying to act like it’s no big deal. We do that a lot in our family.

  She stands up and feels me all over. “Go use the hair dryer immediately,” she scolds. “And then eat some soup.”

  And now that I’m in my bedroom, blow-drying, I know I’m not going to say anything about what happened. My dad would go ballistic if he knew I’d cuddled up to a hibernating grizzly. If I even did. If it wasn’t a dream or some kind of hallucination. That whole seeing-myself-from-a-distance thing that happens lately when I’m feeling sick…that’s a bit weird.

  So it’s not like I can trust my own mind. This place has driven me completely insane.

  If my mum knew I’d nearly killed myself with overexertion and hypothermia, she’d kill me. Her catch-up conference is in Chicago next week. It’s only just now that I realize how selfish it was to go up that hill.

  I’ll just keep my little adventure to myself.

  I go back downstairs. The soup is wonderful. A tomatoey something or other that Mum has made. I sit on the sofa with my legs up, under the green woolly blanket, drinking my soup and watching the little window in the woodburning stove dance with flame.

  The next thing I know, my dad’s rough hand is on my forehead. “She’s fine,” I hear him say. I keep my eyes shut. I don’t want to talk to my dad.

  “Oh, I know she’s fine now….” Mum’s voice doesn’t sound convinced.

  “Pack,” Dad says. “The snow coach driver has promised to come down the access road and pick you up here, but you have to be ready at dawn. If you don’t get out before this storm, you won’t get out at all.”

  I can feel my mother’s eyes on me, and I try to look asleep. Inside, though, my heart begins to pound, and I can feel sweat starting up under my arms.

  I’m not really ready for Mum to leave me. I don’t trust Dad to look after me, I start to think, but then I stop myself.

  That isn’t fair. It’s not Dad I don’t trust, it’s me.

  “I’ll be around,” Dad says. “I won’t just ski off for twelve hours. I won’t forget that I’m holding the fort. And Jem will come home straight after school, too, instead of the observation hut or the office.”

  I can feel my mother’s silence. It has objections in it that she’s said too many times to have to say now. I’m not like my older brother, Jem. Dad can’t treat me as if I’m a new recruit to his army unit. I’m not fitting in here. I need friends and television and radio and a phone signal and WiFi. Mum always says my natural habitat is the shopping mall and the multiplex. Dad used to laugh when she said it. And then we came here, and he didn’t laugh anymore.

  She just says my name. “Darcy…” And it has all that other stuff inside it.

  And he says, “I know.” And then he says, “Maybe…” And I know what’s in that, too. I know he hopes I’ll come around. That I’ll suddenly enjoy the wilderness. That I’ll stop being so inconveniently ill and unhappy and let him get on with his life.

  Mum sighs. She says, “I wouldn’t get my hopes up, Marcus.”

  I can sleep forever these days. It’s all I want to do. I’ve only been pretending to sleep on the sofa, but I forget and go to sleep for real. The next thing I know, Mum is bumping her suitcase down the stairs.

  I get up and help her. It weighs a ton.

  She says, “There’s a storm coming. If I don’t get out this morning, the snowcoach won’t be able to take me tomorrow.” The snowcoach is what you’d get if a bus mated with a tank. It’s got seats inside and places for luggage, but it’s also got big tracks instead of wheels.

  Her hair is all clean and shiny and straight. Mum looks ready to go, but her eyes look worried behind her glasses.

  I say, “I know.” And when she hugs me, I say, “I’ll be all right.” That’s what all of us say in my family, no matter what’s actually happening: I’ll be all right, it’ll be fine.

  In our family, we don’t cling to our mother and whimper and beg her to give up on her work so that we won’t have to be sick without her. So when I say, “I’ll be all right,” it’s not because it’s true, it’s because I don’t know what else there is to say. I haven’t been taught any other words.

  She’s telling me something about a big quiche she made for me last night and how it will be nice warmed up for breakfast when I hear the snowcoach coming. Jem runs down the stairs in a T-shirt and boxer shorts, and jams on a polar fleece and his Sorel boots to take her suitcase out to it. She keeps hugging me. I have to push her away and out the door. I can see the driver getting tense, waiting, and Jem’s out the
re, practically naked in the cold, standing next to the big tanklike track-wheels. Tourists are looking out curiously.

  I promise I’ll eat. I promise I’ll be careful. I promise I’ll do my best to get on with Dad and Jem. Someone called Nancy is coming around to do some housework. The phone numbers are by Mum’s bed. I’m to call the doctor if I feel even the least bit sick.

  I stand in the doorway and nod and nod and promise. And then I wave and wave and smile and wave. And then I pull Jem past the door.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” I tell him. “You’ll get pneumonia.”

  —

  Dad is pacing around the room. It’s not even ten a.m. His work is spread out on the table—laptop, external hard drive, and pages and pages of observation notes. But he keeps looking out the window.

  “How’s your book?” he asks.

  It would be better if I could read it in peace, I think. “Fine,” I say.

  “Do you want another cup of tea?”

  “No.” Then I remember that one of my promises was to be nice to Dad. “Thanks.”

  He looks out the window again. “I think the storm is going to hold off until this afternoon. Jem will probably be able to stay at school the whole day.” He clears his throat. “It looks like we’ve got lots of time before it hits.”

  I am reading. This is a book here. And I am reading it. I say nothing.

  He says, “Darcy?”

  Here it comes. “Yes?”

  “When are you going to take your air?”

  I look at him. I don’t need to say how little I want to go and take my air. I guess I have things in my silences too. I’d never really thought about it before.

  He sighs. He says, “Darcy. It’s important.”

  I hedge a bit. “Do you really think the storm will hold off?”

  “There’s blue skies.”