Sample from Julia and the Sea Bear - WHAT THE LIZARD SAID

Julia and the Sea Bear

Nels Hanson / Art by Mandana Talieh

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TO ALL THE LITTLE CUBS OUT THERE

“Julia and the Sea Bear” was originally published as a short story in Among Animals 2, Ashland Creek Press, Ashland, Oregon, 2016.

Perhaps if you live in California cliffs beside the road you saw a strange creature walking alone along the distant beach.

That stretch of coast and the Sea Bear’s beach lie between two cities, San Luis Obispo to the south and Monterey to the north. If you were very lucky, you might have stopped outside the little town called Blue Cove and seen the Sea Bear.

That’s where he lived for five years, until one early morning a few months ago, when the Sea Bear disappeared and everyone wondered where he had gone.

The Sea Bear was famous, and tourists used to stop their cars in the special turnout by the cliffs above his beach. The coastal park rangers had installed several telescopes you could look through for fifty cents. You could watch the brown, full-grown Sea Bear sleep outside his cave in the warm sand or walk on all fours along the surf .

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line with his nose to the moist, dark sand at low tide. On foggy, disappointing days, he still might appear—suddenly, out of nowhere, like a dream creature emerging from an ancient mist.

At morning and evening, the Sea Bear approached the breaking waves on two legs and waded out into the ocean for his breakfast and dinner. With his right paw, he caught silver, black striped perch and other small fish that came close to land. He saw them shining in the surf as they darted through the salt water the Sea Bear never drank. He drank only from a pure stream that made a little pool in the far back corner of his stone cave.

In the early days of the Sea Bear’s appearance, there wasn’t a fence along the cliffs, and people could walk right up to the edge and drop things to the Sea Bear. Sometimes parents and children dropped sandwiches or bags of potato chips or apples and oranges for the Sea Bear to eat. The cliffs were almost three hundred feet high, and the snacks that friendly tourists tossed to the

Nels Hanson

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Sea Bear were smashed and covered with fine sand when they landed.

Often children wrote notes to the Sea Bear, tied them to pebbles, and threw them over the cliff for the Sea Bear to read. One day a boy and a girl each dropped a message to the Sea Bear with a blank page attached and a little pencil taped to the paper for the Sea Bear to write them back.

But the Sea Bear couldn’t read or write. He walked from his cave and sniffed the letters and pencils. He looked up at the high cliffs and saw the boy and the girl waving, and then without raising a paw he turned and walked toward the sea for his early evening meal.

The boy was especially disappointed, but his mother asked him to think how the Sea Bear could have returned the boy’s note to the high cliff.

“Maybe he could find an old bottle washed up on shore and put his letter into the bottle and find a cork to keep the water out,”

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the boy answered. “He could throw the bottle into the sea, and maybe later someone might find it on some beach and send it to me.”

“I don’t think it would matter,” the boy’s mother answered. “The Sea Bear can’t speak or write human words to answer his friends, even if he could take the letter to the post office.”

“How do you know the Sea Bear can’t talk or write to humans?” the boy answered. “Have you talked to him or asked him to read to you from a book? No one has because we’re up here, and the Sea Bear is way down there.”

That was before the rangers put up the high fence and the signs warning tourists not to throw food or paper or blankets down to the Sea Bear.

The rangers were worried the Sea Bear might get sick from eating unfamiliar food. The Sea Bear already had several beach blankets and striped towels that people had seen him drag into his cave to make a bed. He didn’t need any more warm covers, and the rangers didn’t want the Sea Bear’s beach to become littered. The Sea Bear’s private beach was surrounded on three sides by the cliffs that were almost impossible to climb. Only a champion mountaineer might have climbed down the tall walls of rock. Yellow signs warned climbers not to try to descend the cliffs and bother the Sea Bear, who could only run into his cave or swim out into the ocean to escape intruders. The fine for trespassing on the Sea Bear’s home ground was $10,000.

The only access to the Sea Bear’s beach was by the ocean, but it was against the law to land a boat on the beach or to approach any closer than 500 yards. Sometimes motorboats and sailboats zigzagged back and forth, trying to catch a glimpse of the Sea Bear. Each day the rangers’ bright white boat, flying the California state flag with its brown grizzly bear, patrolled the waters and protected the Sea Bear’s shore. If airplanes or helicopters flew lower than 2,000 feet above the Sea Bear’s portion of coastline, the rangers turned in the law-breaking pilots to the Civil Air Patrol.

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Once a diver in a black rubber suit and goggles surfaced in a wave, and in his flippers he began walking toward the dry sand. Tourists on the cliff saw the Sea Bear run from his cave and hurry toward the diver, who quickly turned and dived back into the surf.

Did the Sea Bear think the man in his dark suit and his mask was another bear and ran to meet him?

Was the Sea Bear hungry and thought the man might be good to eat, a nice switch from the silvery fish he always ate? No one was sure. An amateur birdwatcher shot a video of the Sea Bear and the frightened human diver, and it played on the TV news. Worried fans of the Sea Bear called the station and then wrote letters to the newspaper, filling a whole page with the same message: Leave our Sea Bear alone!

The sudden trespassing on the Sea Bear’s beach gained a lot of attention, and the newspaper ran old stories of the Sea Bear’s first appearance and his life on the beach by the gray sandstone cliffs. The stories quoted the opinions of scientists who were experts on

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bears, and of marine biologists who knew all about the animals who lived in and beside the sea.

Still, five years after the Sea Bear had first been seen on the isolated beach, no one had learned where he had come from or how, and almost no one agreed about the Sea Bear’s original home.

One boy who wrote a letter to the paper thought the Sea Bear had been captured up in Canada for a zoo. As the zoo ship passed with many animals in their cages, the Sea Bear, who was very strong, bent open the bars of his jail and dived into the ocean and swam to the beach, vowing that he would never be recaptured alive.

A teacher at the elementary school suggested that the Sea Bear and his mother had wandered down from the Coast Range Mountains during a drought year to fish in the sea. The young bear had run ahead of his mother and fallen from the cliff. Luckily, the cub landed on a big soft pile of wet seaweed left by a recent

storm and survived. His mother couldn’t reach him but at least she knew he was all right. Finally, as night came on, she had re-crossed the busy road and climbed back into the mountains without her cub, who from then on was the Sea Bear.

A local palm reader who wore a swami’s blue satin turban with a big red rhinestone at the front insisted the Sea Bear had once been a man, a pioneer who had been a cruel hunter. After he died and spent more than a hundred years as windblown dust, the hunter had been reborn as the lonely Sea Bear to learn his lesson, “to walk in someone else’s paws,” as Madame Zorra explained.

An old man who had been a sailor and fisherman claimed he knew how the Sea Bear had arrived on the beach. As a young man on a fishing trawler off the coast of Oregon, he had seen a brown bear cub clinging to a floating log that had washed down a raging river from the forest. The fisherman wanted to rescue the cub, but the captain said he didn’t want any animals on his boat except for flopping fish. The little bear cried helplessly as the current took his log farther out to sea, but all the worried fisherman could do was throw the cub a red salmon, which he caught in his paws. The old fisherman always felt guilty about not saving the baby bear. He said that the Sea Bear was the cub who had survived when his one-log raft washed up near Blue Cove.

A husband and wife who made a good living selling Sea Bear items from their gift shop just north of the cliffs had their own idea. They said the Sea Bear only appeared now and then, like Tinker Bell in “Peter Pan.” If good children wished for him before they went to sleep, they would see him the next day when they went with their parents to the cliffs above his beach. That’s how the Sea Bear had first arrived. Children’s wishes had brought him to Blue Cove.

No one—not fortunetellers or scientists or rangers or old fishermen or gift-shop owners or anyone else—could prove where the Sea Bear came from. Most who read the newspaper or watched the news on TV decided that the story of the Sea Bear’s earliest years would always remain a mystery.

The important thing was that the Sea Bear lived undisturbed on his beach. When they saw him from the cliffs, or saw a picture a photographer had taken with a telescopic lens, local residents felt a strong affection for their Sea Bear and wondered what his life alone on the beach was really like.

Was the Sea Bear happy?
Did he have enough to eat?
Did he get tired of eating fish?
If you dropped some blackberry seeds, could they grow in the sand and produce fruit the Sea Bear might like?
Did the Sea Bear get lonely for other bears?
Did the Sea Bear dream when he went to sleep?
If he did, what did he dream of?

Most people believed these questions would always remain without answers, until one day a strange thing happened. It was strange even for people who were used to living near the Sea Bear.

A girl who had just celebrated her ninth birthday passed through Blue Cove with her family. Like most other tourists, they had stopped on the cliff to see the Sea Bear, who was walking along the tideline by himself, his nose to the wet sand. Then they drove north on Highway 1 until they stopped at the Sea Bear gift shop and went inside.

The family looked at the toy Sea Bears and other things with the Sea Bear’s name and picture: coffee cups, lunch boxes, backpacks, sweatshirts, and baseball caps. There were little glazed statuettes of the Sea Bear with two crystals for his eyes, and at the center of the shop stood a five-foot statue of the Sea Bear made of bronze.

Among the hundreds of Sea Bear items, only one caught the attention of the young girl, whose name was Julia. In a locked glass cabinet just below the wood counter, in a small, open blue box, was a tuft of brown fur. The sign inside the glass case read: IS THIS THE SEA BEAR’S FUR?

The notice said that the fur had washed up a few miles down the coast and been identified by a college professor as bear fur. There hadn’t been any bears sighted along the California coast for many years, and it was highly possible that the fur belonged to the Sea Bear.

The tuft of hair might have come loose and floated away when the Sea Bear was fishing in the surf or taking a salty bath. It might have happened in the early summer, when he was shedding his winter fur.

Julia’s family was on vacation from Florida, and her mother and father walked about the large gift shop. Julia remained by the glass cabinet, staring at the little box that held the bit of brown fur. It was late in the afternoon, past time for them to continue their drive up the coast, and Julia’s parents walked up to their daughter to her if she would like one of the smaller, inexpensive brown Sea Bears with a little ribbon around its neck. It would be a special, extra birthday gift.

That’s when Julia stood on tiptoe and whispered in her mother’s ear.

Then a smiling woman behind the counter stepped over to the glass case and asked Julia’s mother if they needed help with something.

The mother frowned, then gestured for the woman who ran the gift shop to lean closer.

An interview with Among Animals 2 contributor Nels Hanson

October 24, 2016 by Midge Raymond

An interview with Nels Hanson, author of the magical story “Julia and the Sea Bear,” appearing in Among Animals 2.