Two young boys, Henry and Teddy, aspired to tree climbing. Henry asked his mother for permission to play in the woods behind the house.
“Of course,” Mother said. “But stay nearby. Teddy’s father should be here soon and I don’t want to go looking for you.”
The boys hustled into the woods to climb Henry’s favorite tree. On the lower branches, Henry’s father had started the floor of a treehouse.
Teddy reached for a limb. Then the boys heard leaves crunch behind them, and when they turned they saw a bear emerge from the bushes and sit down and watch them with small back eyes.
“Henry,” Teddy said. “Henry.”
“Did you hear that?” Henry said.
“What?” Teddy said, frozen.
“You didn’t hear him say that?”
“Say what? Let’s run Henry.”
“He says we need to follow him or he’ll kill us.”
Teddy started to cry. Ice cubes hung from Henry’s wrists. “He says if you don’t stop crying, he’ll eat you up.”
Teddy’s stopped crying.
The bear rose and made his way into the woods. Teddy and Henry followed; they didn’t want to be eaten.
Sometimes the bear stopped and looked back, made sure. Henry and Teddy followed the bear by a glade where a leaning shed rotted. They followed the bear into trees whose trunks were as wide as cars. They heard a waterfall. When they came to the top of a ridge, they looked onto the earth and felt they would fall into mist.
In the morning, they found a pile of nuts and berries for breakfast. “The bear says we should eat,” Henry said, sniffing.
“I wanna go home,” Teddy said.
“Me too,” Henry said. “But the bear says he’ll eat us of we don’t do what he says.”
“I don’t care. I want to go home. Why does he want us to follow him?”
In the afternoon, they came to a valley filled with children, tiny children, obviously carried here by teeth, and older children who’d grown up in the valley. The children had made tree houses. They ate nuts and berries and sometimes caught and cooked squirrels. The bears oversaw it all, laughing at the smoke of the cook fires.
“They want us to take care of you two,” said two older boys to Teddy and Henry.
“I wanna to go home,” Teddy said. “I want my father.”
“We’ll take care of you,” the boys said.
“They look hungry?” a girl said.
Days later, gathering berries, Henry fell and gave himself painful skins. The older boys felt around Henry’s knees other, deeper injuries. Henry’s little knees, his blood, made one of the older boy’s cry.
“What’s the matter with you,” an older girl said, angry.
“Look at his little knees,” the weeping boy said. “They remind me of fragile things.”
On a night white with moon swell, Henry and Teddy sat with other children. One of the boys, whose hair had grown to his knees, shushed them all with a finger. “Teddy and Henry have reminded us of our parents. I came here because I got angry one day and ran away. I followed the bear. But now I want to go home, too. We’re going home.”
“How?” said another boy.
“We’ve been building weapons. We have bows and arrows, spears and clubs. We’re ready.”
“But the bears bring us food,” said a boy. “We can’t just kill them all.”
“I don’t remember how I got here,” someone said.
“The bears’ll be asleep soon. We move then, all of us together in a long line going south.”
Henry and Teddy grasped clubs, which was a new sensation. They’d never used clubs. They’d never killed anything. But Henry wanted to go home. He wondered what his mother was doing, thinking. He imagined she must be in enormous pain. The boy who led them made a signal in the dark.
The children heard a roar and some of them scattered. Henry saw a black shape leap at a girl and wrap its mouth around her arm. Two girls drove into the side of the bear with sharpened sticks. Some of these children had been with the bears for years and had become as strong as the bears themselves.
It was almost instantaneous. Henry swung his club at a noise. He felt a painful thump. He crouched. He and three others took their clubs to a bear until it lay eyeless in the moonlight. Henry and his companions felt no need to run. Teddy’s head dripped with animal blood. Soon they were attacked by a giant bear who came at them with an arrow in his eye. Ten children clubbed at the bear’s legs until it bellowed and ran to save its life.
Later the next day, Henry and Teddy drank water from the stream. They washed the blood from their bodies in the waterfall. They ate a lunch of berries. They felt a presence in the thick bowled trees and paused to watch as the shed slowly rotted into the ground.
Somewhat clean and very tired from walking, they emerged from the woods to find empty space where Henry’s house used to be. The remnants of plumbing stood like crooked writing. Into the distance, house after house, city after city–all had been wiped from the face of the earth–
or
Somewhat clean and very tired from walking, they emerged from the woods to hear his Henry’s mother calling out: “Teddy, You’re father’s here.”
or
Somewhat clean and very tired from walking, they emerged from the woods and entered Henry’s house by the back porch.
“Mama,” Henry said. “I’m home. We’re home. You shoulda seen it.”
In the living room, Henry’s mother watched them race down the hall. “Mama,” he said. “Mama.”
“Who are you,” she said. “I don’t know you any more.”
