Bearstone

At breakfast, Walter asks about Cloyd’s family. Cloyd notices that the man already seems to know a lot about him; this makes the boy uncomfortable. He asks about his chores. Walter says he’s not sure yet. They walk to the barn, which is largely empty except for dozens of swallow’s nests. Walter admits that he let the ranch go to seed over the past year as he mourned the death of his wife.

Cloyd asks if they had kids; Walter says they tried but had no luck. The two walk downstairs to a tack room filled with horse-riding equipment, including bridles and saddles. Cloyd admits he used to ride bareback and knows nothing about saddles. Walter says Cloyd can choose a horse to ride. Some are packhorses, though, meant for hauling equipment up to Walter’s gold mine.

The boy asks what became of the mine, and Walter says he gave it up when he got married because his bride feared cave-ins. He loves mining, though, and the price of gold has gone way up. Meanwhile, Walter suggests they take feed bags, go to the pasture, and pick out a horse for Cloyd. Uncomfortable, Cloyd asks again about his job, but Walter again puts off that decision.

Toting feed bags, they walk to the pasture. The horses, long unridden, are skittish. Cloyd picks out a well-muscled, blue-gray gelding and calls to it: “Hey—a, hey—a” (27). The horse, smelling the feed, ambles over, and Cloyd gives it most of the feed before gently pulling the bridle over the blue roan’s head. Walter chooses a reddish-brown mare.

They walk the horses back to the barn, then brush and saddle them. Walter teaches slowly and simply. He points out that Cloyd’s horse is smart and knows how to expand its stomach to resist the saddle cinch. Walter turns away and, when the horse relaxes, quickly tightens the cinch a bit more.

Outside, Walter tells Cloyd to show confidence and mount quickly. Cloyd does so, and the horse reacts but settles down. Walter laughs: “He really took a shine to you” (28). Cloyd asks the horse’s name, but Walter says he has none.

They ride along the river trail for miles, then climb up into the hills. Cloyd loves his surefooted horse, and he enjoys riding with Walter. High above the river gorge, with tall mountains in the distance, Cloyd feels at home. He decides to work hard for Walter, then asks him to lead them up into the high places. He names his horse “Blueboy” and promises the creature that they’ll one day reach those mountains.

On the way back, Blueboy rears at the sight of a black bear and its cub. Cloyd hangs on, and he feels delighted to see bears. Walter says they live in the area but are hard to find. They’re “born for the wild” (29).

Cloyd wakes feeling happy. He remembers the bear and cub and thinks about the coincidence of his new secret name, Lone Bear: “These things were too wonderful to be accidents” (30).

At breakfast, he asks again about the job he’s to do. Walter says he needs a fence along the river to stop a neighbor who, though unlicensed, sells hunting tours to visitors who then drive right across Walter’s land and tear up the fields. Both the sheriff and the game warden have warned the guy, but he persists.

Walter shows Cloyd how to dig postholes in the rocky ground. Shunning a hat and gloves, Cloyd puts his back into it. Over the next few days, his hands become calloused as he completes posthole after posthole. Walter, meanwhile, works the pastures. He also grows a beard, his first. Cloyd thinks it makes him look good, like an old prospector.

As he works, Cloyd imagines the mountains and riding up to them when the fence is done. The boy surprises Walter and even himself with how hard he works. In the evening, Cloyd saddles Blueboy and gallops along the river after supper. Later, Cloyd and Walter talk about the high country and its beauty. Their friendship grows.

Walter is right: The fence will take longer than Cloyd expects. The heat of summer continues unbroken. On Sundays, Walter drives to Durango for supplies while Cloyd rides Blueboy for hours.

Walter suggests that Cloyd lay off the fence job and spend more time with Blueboy. Cloyd says no. He thinks Walter is like everyone else who believes Cloyd is lazy. He means to prove them wrong. He wants to help fell the juniper trees for the posts, but Walter worries about the chainsaw: “I’ve used one for years, and I’m still scared of it” (38). Trees can fall wrong; bad things can happen. Still, Walter says Cloyd can do anything he puts his mind to, and he’s impressed by all his work so far, which pleases Cloyd.

Cloyd learns how to cut trees and trim logs. He works hard every day, resting only long enough to feed his horse, then falling asleep after dinner while watching TV. Walter wishes he understood the boy better: Cloyd clearly has a plan, but he’s not telling.

The boy finds that the hillside search for and felling of good junipers is harder than digging postholes. He suffers minor injuries from the chainsaw and finally decides to set the 57 poles he’s already cut. The last of them goes in the ground on June 29, but the fence is only half-done. Cloyd realizes he’ll never get the work done before the summer ends. He won’t make it up to the high country.

He gets a letter from his sister, but he can barely read it. He’s embarrassed to ask for help with it. He just wants to go back to White Mesa. This ranch work was a mistake.

Walter surprises Cloyd with a big turkey dinner, but the boy merely picks at his food. Needing to understand what’s bothering Cloyd, Walter asks about the letter. Cloyd angrily admits he can’t read it. Walter offers to help him learn to read, but Cloyd, humiliated and angry, stands abruptly, knocking Walter’s coffee all over the mining magazines. He shouts, “Leave me alone!” and runs to his room (43).

A group of men arrives at the ranch with packhorses. Walter greets their leader, a tall, red-headed man named Rusty. The men joke and laugh together while Cloyd observes them from behind a shed. He steps forward. Walter turns to him and says the men are going hunting, maybe to catch a bear.

He introduces Rusty to Cloyd. Rusty shakes Cloyd’s hand with a powerful grip that hurts the boy, who hides the pain. Cloyd decides Rusty disrespects him for being “only an Indian” (47). Worse, these men are hunting bear. Walter tells Rusty that Cloyd is good with horses and has bonded with the blue one. Rusty replies that horses are for work and don’t care about people the way dogs do.

When it’s time to bale hay, Cloyd walks away down to the river. His anger simmers as he thinks about how the hunters intend to kill a bear. Suddenly he feels like the bear and knows what it’s like to be hunted. He’s angry at Walter for letting the hunt happen.

Miffed that Cloyd has abandoned him, Walter spends the day bucking hay onto the tractor’s trailer. Exhausted in the evening, the old man trundles into the house, lies on his bed, and talks to the picture of his wife. He wishes she were there to help him understand the boy.

In his bedroom, Cloyd packs his duffel, expecting to be expelled from the ranch. He doesn’t care.

Walter rises late. Again, he acts as if Cloyd’s rebellion never happened. He asks the boy what he wants to do, and Cloyd suggests making more fence posts. Walter likes the idea. Cloyd takes the saw out to the hill, but he forgets oil to add to the fuel and water for himself. Already overheated, he lies down in the orchard. He resents the lush growth of peaches that put his grandmother’s orchard to shame.

The hunters return. A small dead bear lies strapped to a horse. Cloyd walks over. Ignored by the men, he examines the bear. Rusty talks about making sausage from it and giving some to Walter. Cloyd recalls the sausage he ate at Walter’s table and hurries away, planning revenge.

He grabs the chainsaw, thinking about Walter as “this fussy old white man who had a thousand times more than he needed and still had to have someone else do his work for him so he could get more” (54). Carefully, he saws most of the way through every peach tree in the orchard, so the trees will die slowly, and their fruit will shrivel.

Hating how white men put up fences everywhere, blocking freedom and restricting animals, he cuts down every post on the fence line, one each for every white man who was cruel to him at school, one for each of the bear hunters, and one for Walter. The chainsaw, lacking oil, overheats and seizes up. Cloyd throws it down and walks into the irrigation ditch to cool off.

He climbs up the hill toward where he found the bearstone but finds no solace there. Cloyd feels regret, realizing he has hurt a man who, unlike his school teachers, never made him do something he didn’t want to do: “Now everything was spoiled. He had spoiled it” (57). He decides he’ll take his punishment from Walter and then return to his home and disappear into the canyons.

Cloyd reaches the house after dark. Angry, Walter confronts him, grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking him, “Who the hell are you to come in here and ruin our peaches?” (58) Walter has seen Cloyd handle his bearstone, and he demands it. Cloyd hands it over, and Walter takes it to the machine shop, where he sets it on the anvil. Raising a hammer high above it, Walter says, “A dose of your own medicine” (59).

Noticing the stone’s shape, Walter stops and stares at it. He asks what it is; quietly, Cloyd says, “A bear.” Walter shoves the stone back into Cloyd’s pocket and tells him to pack his things.

They drive through the dark toward Durango. On the way, the truck strikes a jackrabbit. In Durango, Walter stops at a traffic light and says, “I couldn’t miss him” (60). Cloyd says the rabbit wasn’t his fault. Walter asks to look again at the bearstone. He realizes that Cloyd cut the peach trees after the bear hunters returned with their kill.

The group house, Eaglewing, is just across town. It looks like every other house in the neighborhood. Walter thinks a moment, then decides to drive Cloyd to White Mesa. Cloyd objects that Susan will simply bring him back. Walter says he won’t tell her for a week to give Cloyd some time with his family: “Maybe it’ll help you get the bee out of your bonnet” (62).

At dawn, they arrive at White Mesa. Cloyd looks out at the familiar nearby mountains and mesas, the white cliffs of the San Juan River, and the red earth of Navajo land to the south. They reach his grandmother’s house. Cloyd hops out with his duffel. Walter says a brief goodbye and drives away. Cloyd realizes he has just lost something dear to him. Tears flow down his face.

Inside the house, his grandmother, surprised to see him, asks no questions but immediately prepares him a breakfast of fruit cocktail and frybread. She asks about Walter, and Cloyd describes him as a great man. As he talks, he knows the canyons aren’t where he needs to be. She offers to go to the market 10 miles away to get food for him, but he says he has to leave right away: “Walter needs me. We have a lot of work to do” (65).