Nowella and Uncle Threadbear
Part 2 – Nowhere Fast
By Oren Pierce, B.A, B.S. M.S.G.
As you may know, our small Bear Nowella is the off-white off-spring of a Black BEAR and White MAN … whereas according to Mother Bear, Nowella’s father (whose name she fiercely insisted she would never utter) had been a POLAR BEAR: a performer with Missy Hoolihan’s Tall Animal Revue, whose act consisted of juggling several fish while balancing on a beach ball and smoking a pipe. To further complicate this misinformation, Mother Bear had said that, after their very brief marriage and without a honeymoon, Father Bear had returned to his native South Pole … although you and I know, and Nowella had to learn, Polar Bears are present only at the NORTH Pole.
In addition to being disasterously misinformed, Nowella was directionally challanged - constantly getting lost, going in circles, and getting nowhere … at the end of the day, sometimes arriving at the very point from which she had started that morning. This may have been because her small black eyes, so sharp they were nearly pointed, could only see things if they were very close or if they were very far away, but everything in between those extremes was open to interpretation.
She was nearly blinded by the light of day, and she got lost in the Great Far Off at night, so wether she traveled by night or by day, she mostly followed her nose. It was a very good nose, but of limited use in long distance travel … and so her trail tended to loops … in loops which rounded to nearly perfect circles, which ended exactly where they began.
In this way, she got nowhere fast.
.
In her youth, her way of dealing with this problem was to try going FASTER… which as one might predict, only got her nowhere faster.
It was a long erratic trip, but after many years of global confusion, and despite her directional handicaps, one day while swimming from sea-island to sea-island, Nowella knew by the occasional chunks of drifting ice, that she was not far from the South Pole.
She climbed aboard an ice chunk about the size of a garbage can. A cake of ice is in itself not very fast vehicle, so, to bring up the speed as she neared the goal, Nowella plucked some tail feathers from a deceased Albatross and stuck a fan of them upright in the snow. This must have speeded her up some and the wind may even have been blowing her in the right direction, but that was hard to determine, because the gentle tail wind soon became an out-right white-out blizzard.
She was moving very fast when her ice chunk collided with a whale, which she could not have seen in that blizzard, because it was a WHITE whale, and she would never have known it was a whale at all, had not the collision caused the whale to vomit some ambergris (that sought after substance from which a perfume base is manufactured).
Nowella bashed her head on something in the accident, but was just present minded enough that she was able to climb up on the ambergris before she passed out.
For a time measureless to Bears, our Bear Nowella lay in a coma.
She woke inside the dome of an igloo-like hovel of rocks that she at first thought to be the inside of her head. By the light of a fire in a tin can stove, a small man with a big chest and wide nostrils gathered raisin-sized pellets from the floor and dropped them into a wide brim hat of hammered copper. The little man fed the pellets to the stove, then put the copper hat on the ground, and sat on the crown.
Now and then a few round-faced rodents the size of a small cats chased across the floor.
Copper Man talked to the rodents when they appeared, and sometimes the rodents stopped to listen. He gestured in great detail, and with a martial crispness, with gestures so elaborate and so many as to be words themselves. He talked and gestured to himself when the rodents were not there and to places in the stone dome where no one was, and sometimes to Nowella. His voice was not loud, but it rang like a marble rolling around in a stone bowl.
Meanwhile, Nowella was passing in and out of time. At some points when she happened to be in, the copper man was siting on the hat, other times he was wearing it, and at times it was jammed up into the smoke hole at the top of the dome. Some times the copper man was gone and so was the hat, as if she might be just alone in her head again.
It’s hard for a Bear to know how much time goes by when she is passing in and out of her senses, up and down the storeys of consciousness … but she was long enough lying there, a witness to all the mutterings and mumblings and addresses to the Rodents, to the Invisibles, and to her, that she just about learned to understand, if not to speak, Copper Man’s language
She would never learn his name; but for convenience, we will call him Copernicus.
Suspended from a tripod over the tin can stove, Copernicus kept a pot (copper) of soup made with salt water, sea weed, and small whole rodents like tea bags.
When Nowella was able to sit up, Copernicus, served her some of his famous soup in a bowl, also of copper. Nowellae drank the soup, but left the tea bags. When at last Nowella felt fit to resume her searching journey, she asked Copernicus (in her own mother tongue but with a great deal of gesturing and hoping for the best) if he might direct her to a certain Polar Bear, who might have been observed balancing on a beach ball while juggling fish and smoking a Meerschaum pipe, which (she believed she remembered her mother to have said) was carved in the shape of a man’s head. Also she for some reason thought that this Bear might be wearing a red vest … at least, that is how she pictured him.
Copernicus not only understood what she was saying, but was able to indicate (in so many words of his own ringing sort, and with even more gestures) that he had seen no such bear; and he very gently advised her that Polar bears were NOT native to or present at the South Pole, but rather, were limited to the NORTH Pole … from which she was just about as far as a Bear could be.
Nowella groaned and words failed her for an almost unbearably long time … but finally the power of speech returned and she was able to explain her directional disability, the whole global disorientation thing, the not knowing right from left much of the time, other times barely up from down, her near sightedness, her far sighted ness, her dark sightedness, and her understandable confusion.
Copernicus allowed a long silence, and then, in his most ringing voice, assured her that it it would be easy enough to find her way North if she would follow the spine of the mountains, but beyond the mountains, he let her know, there is a vast jungle where air and water are equals, and everything is green. There she would need a copper hat and a viewing crystal, such as he was prepared to supply. He personally would go nowhere without both, but he was going nowhere, so she could have his, and he could always hammer out more.
According to Copernicus, the very special Salt Crystal would help her locate the sun on a cloudy day or in the dim understory of the rainforest ahead, and then she only need to recall whether the sun is rising or setting, so as to be able to tell wether to strike right or left from the path of the sun … but Nowella already had trouble following all of this.
Most importantly, Copernicus added, she must take care to keep the Special Salt Crystal dry under the hat, because (being a salt) it could dissolve in an unannounced deluge.
So, willingly suspending an instinctive disbelief, she put the copper hat on over the special crystal and set off on foot along the rising, Northering ridge of the Andes mountain range
.
At first - with the ridge to follow - the sun-locator crystal was not required. And the hat itself gave some protection in the rain, but it could get very hot and awfully cold very fast, and in a real thunder storm, she had to shelter at least fifty feet AWAY from the hat, because it attracted lightning.
The locator crystal first became necessary, as did that hard hat, when she descended into the VAST Amazon basin, where she had to force her way through the thickety understory and never saw direct sunlight, even on a clear day. But, in the intense humidity of that rain forest, as she bulled, copper helmeted through the tangled understory, the somewhat magic salt crystal dissolved and ran down her face like tears
Nevertheless, that Copper Hared Hat must have saved her eyes from a thousand thorns and fangs, and will be needed in the next chapter.
The Red Hand
There is something about a bear that wants to go over a hill, but when she is long lost and cannot tell North from South or left from right, and maybe even up from down, that bear will sooner or later follow flowing water, because surely the water will be going down and that will be getting SOMEWHERE
.
And so, bewildered in the jungle, plowing head-down through vines and vipers and snake grass, Nowella eventually followed a brook to a creek, and the creek to a river, where she climbed aboard a log and floated on down to a larger river and thence into bay studded with docks, cranes, and many smelly, hustling humans.
Nowella, being generally hominidaphobic, (she had a horror of Chimps and Gorillas, though she only has a strong distaste for most humans) stayed hid in a stack of crates until the Longshoremen went home for the day.
Then she climbed through a port hole into the dark hold of a fruit boat, where she curled up among the green bananas.
That boat soon sailed, and very shortly rocked and rolled Nowella into a long Bear Nap … which is longer and deeper than a Cat Nap or your normal sleep, and, much later, as Nowella slowly emerged from that state, she found herself staring at something in the half dark for quite a while again, before she quite realized she was awake or staring at a Conch shell - oddly out of place among the green bananas.
That was odd enough, but odder yet… f i n g e r s emerged from the mouth of the Conch.
HUMAN fingers like yours or mine, only rougher, and red as boiled lobster.
.
Extended, the fingers reared and swayed like so many Pit Vipers searching for the body heat of a potential prey.
The the fingers … the Conch … the Hand went up on its finger tips, conch held high, and began a slow yet jerky dance-in-place, which just grew slower and jerkier; until Nowella fell back into a sort of sleep. When she woke, the Hand was atop the banana pile, and it was wearing the copper hat. For yet another period of uncertain duration, but surely a long one, Nowella sat silent and free of all thoughts.
Then she thought she would just let the Hand wear the heavy hat. She no longer had the crystal it was meant to shelter, she was safely out of the jungle where it had been valuable protection, and although she had at first found that when she sat on a rock wearing it, it helped her collect her thoughts and her wits, its being a lightning attractor kind of ruined that, and It had become more of a burden then a practical travel hat. Anyway, and most importantly Nowella was and is a kindly, peaceable bear, so she let the Hand have the hat.
And, judging by the way the hand strutted about, occasionally kicking up at the copper brim with a bony knuckle, it was clear he hoped that the hat made the man. Maybe the hat doesn’t make a man, but It was remarkable how much the Hand could do unasisted by an opposite hand, and how much it could convey with its fingers - how much information and confidentiality would pass between them during that long voyage of the fruit boat …. but a much longer time would go by before the hand learned penmanship, and wrote his famous memoir, Audobography of a Red Hand, which you may have read.
Anyway, the Hand was “born” many years ago,when several Irish Clan Chiefs were racing in Coracles (which are a round basket boat) across a channel of the North Sea.
Seeing that the Kennedy Coracle, or whatever Coracle it was, was about to reach the shore before his own the Oneil Chief, dropped his paddle, drew his sword, lopped of his left hand , and threw it ahead so that it reached the shore before the coracles with all hands aboard. So the Oneil’s won that race; but the more important fact here is that the hand tumbled down off the rocks into the green breathing sea, where it lay for a good long time, absorbing oxygen by osmosis through its skin … steeping in that amniotic
environment for untold years … until it developed or regained the power of movement, and eventually went crawling across the ocean floor, sheltering in conch shells, traveling like a barnacle on whale fins and boat hulls. Traveling the world like a pirate.
As I was saying … before the interruption about Oneil’s background and family history … although they developed a good rapport very quickly on that voyage aboard the fruit boat, it would be a long time before Nowella learned all that much about the Hand or even that Oneil was his name.
So when they were off-loaded in Boston,via separate nets, she didn’t expect to see him again. Nor was she too concerned about that. Being a small white bear in the Big City, Nowella was every bit as confused as a small white bear in the jungle, and didn’t even think of the Hand while sneaking through the streets and back yards, looking for trees she could examine to find out which side the moss grew on. When she finally did reach some forest land, the moss was growing, not just on the North, but on ALL sides of the trees.
That same day (or some later day, Nowella doesn’t know) she came across a set of tracks in the mud of a brook-side and she saw that they were her own tracks.
Of course the same exact thing had t happened many times before, but it was especially dispiriting on this occasion, and so she gave up for the day, washed her face in the brook, and lay out in the leafy shade of a Locust grove.
After time had lapsed and been forgotten once again in the near death that is the sleep of bears, Nowella awoke thinking of the Red Hand for the first time since they had been loaded off the boat.
An, if seeing is believing, there he WAS, in a crotch of the Locust tree, as if in a thought bubble right over her head. Maybe she had dreamt of him because he was there … or maybe he was there because she had dreamt of him; or, on a third hand, maybe she saw him simply because she was looking for him.
Nowella may never know, but so far as SHE is concerned, it doesn’t really matter which.
The hand was most definitely wearing the copper hat that was formerly hers; the copper crown gleamed and glimmered in the dappling shade, as if he had shined it up some to catch her eye. The Hand was pointing in the direction of what she was sure must be north, which it was.
And so she started off walking rapidly in that direction, and lumbered on for as long as she could keep going straight. Not too very long.
After bearly an hour, somewhere in a deep valley, she lost her momentum and directional certitude.
This time she did not panic and speed up, but instead, stopped very deliberately and looked about her for the Hand.
And once again there it was up on a rock, pointing the way North. So off she went. In the following months or years, she continued to get lost at least once a day, but then she would always stop where she was and look around her for the hand, and there on a rock, in a tree, on a hillock up ahead, the copper glint of the hat, and the Proud Hand, always pointing the way. Or usually pointing the way.
Sometimes the finger bent or pointed down, maybe because it was asleep, or maybe to indicate something, but regardless, she generally made camp on the spot. The had proved to be more than just a living sign post, He literally took a hand in building shelters for the night which is a great help to a bear, because bears have no thumbs.
The hand could spin rope out of rushes,cottonwood fluff, or spider webs, and could tie knots in it that no hand, even it, could untie.
In later days the Oneil has been known to do some of his Roping and Writing tricks on stage with the Tall Animal Revue, so there is a chance that you may someday see and meet him.
And if ever you DO meet our Oneil , do NOT make the common mistake of trying to shake his hand.
Oneil takes such a move as an aggressive insult. And be warned: Oneil has the family strength of pure determination, concentrated all in one member. He could squeeze blood out of a brass ball.
So when you are introduced … No Hand-Shaking ... just salute him or tip your hat and say something appreciative about his own.
Mostly by hand and foot, sometimes on Boats of Opportunity,Nowella and the Hand traveled North up the Continental waterways … on past the Great Lakes, past Great Bear, Great Scott, and Great Slave Lakes, inquiring along the way wether anyone had seen a Polar Bear with several gold teeth, who wore a red vest, and smoked cherry flavoured tobacco in a Meerschaum pipe with its bowl carved in the shape of a bearded head with red rhinestones for eyes which glowed when smoke puffed out of the turban.
Some of the details were her mother’s original lies, and some were added later by Nowella’s own struggling memory, but she got no real positive response from any bear, squirrel, hawk, or gossipy Chicadee: mostly skeptical, sidewise looks.
Though she had gotten very good at imagining her Polar Bear father Nowella herself came to suspect that he had never existed.
She decided to go and confront Mother Bear about the truth of her paternity . ….if in fact, Mother Bear was still alive after all those uncounted years.
In time, and with the good Hand’s help, Nowella found the way to her native Bonaparte Cave State Forest.
The fact is that, happily or not, Mother Bear WAS alive and had long thought that NOWELLA was dead.
It was a very emotional, if not a tearful reunion.
Bears do not cry tears, so much as they simply howl.
We are not speaking here about roaring or growling, but about savage howling so horrible that we can skip that scene…..only to say that in the end, they reached a reconciliation of sorts during which Mother Bear finally broke down and told the truth: that Nowella’s father was not a Polar Bear, but a White Man. It became known to the author shortly before the publication of this story, that Nowella’s biological father died in a snowmobile accident in nineteen eighty two, but do not bother to mention him to Nowella. At this point in her life, Nowella is no more interested in that man than in the invented father. She had never known either of them; they and were equally irrelevant and without influence in her life; they had very little to recommend them anyway and … come to think about it ... she would not much care to meet either of them.
That father search stuff was now quite out of her system. She must have been thirty or forty Bear Years old by then. So then Nowella went off...
searching for HERSELF.
Seeing as she was searching for herself, there was no place in particular for her to look except in mirrors, and it is well known that all mirrors are all liars, so she just wandered locally, only to ease her mind Direction was not a problem.
Going nowhere, and no longer needing the Hand for guidance, she seldom thought of him. And with the Hand, out of mind is out of sight.
She had still not yet found herself, whatever that might mean, but the new millennium found Nowella living from rough shelter to shelter (built without hand or thumb) here in the Finger Lakes area, half way between North and South, shoeless and wearing a hat and vest made of burdocks.
from
In addition to being disasterously misinformed, Nowella was directionally challanged - constantly getting lost, going in circles, and getting nowhere … at the end of the day, sometimes arriving at the very point from which she had started that morning. This may have been because her small black eyes, so sharp they were nearly pointed, could only see things if they were very close or if they were very far away, but everything in between those extremes was open to interpretation.
She was nearly blinded by the light of day, and she got lost in the Great Far Off at night, so wether she traveled by night or by day, she mostly followed her nose. It was a very good nose, but of limited use in long distance travel … and so her trail tended to loops … in loops which rounded to nearly perfect circles, which ended exactly where they began.
In this way, she got nowhere fast.
.
In her youth, her way of dealing with this problem was to try going FASTER… which as one might predict, only got her nowhere faster.
It was a long erratic trip, but after many years of global confusion, and despite her directional handicaps, one day while swimming from sea-island to sea-island, Nowella knew by the occasional chunks of drifting ice, that she was not far from the South Pole.
She climbed aboard an ice chunk about the size of a garbage can. A cake of ice is in itself not very fast vehicle, so, to bring up the speed as she neared the goal, Nowella plucked some tail feathers from a deceased Albatross and stuck a fan of them upright in the snow. This must have speeded her up some and the wind may even have been blowing her in the right direction, but that was hard to determine, because the gentle tail wind soon became an out-right white-out blizzard.
She was moving very fast when her ice chunk collided with a whale, which she could not have seen in that blizzard, because it was a WHITE whale, and she would never have known it was a whale at all, had not the collision caused the whale to vomit some ambergris (that sought after substance from which a perfume base is manufactured).
Nowella bashed her head on something in the accident, but was just present minded enough that she was able to climb up on the ambergris before she passed out.
For a time measureless to Bears, our Bear Nowella lay in a coma.
She woke inside the dome of an igloo-like hovel of rocks that she at first thought to be the inside of her head. By the light of a fire in a tin can stove, a small man with a big chest and wide nostrils gathered raisin-sized pellets from the floor and dropped them into a wide brim hat of hammered copper. The little man fed the pellets to the stove, then put the copper hat on the ground, and sat on the crown.
Now and then a few round-faced rodents the size of a small cats chased across the floor.
Copper Man talked to the rodents when they appeared, and sometimes the rodents stopped to listen. He gestured in great detail, and with a martial crispness, with gestures so elaborate and so many as to be words themselves. He talked and gestured to himself when the rodents were not there and to places in the stone dome where no one was, and sometimes to Nowella. His voice was not loud, but it rang like a marble rolling around in a stone bowl.
Meanwhile, Nowella was passing in and out of time. At some points when she happened to be in, the copper man was siting on the hat, other times he was wearing it, and at times it was jammed up into the smoke hole at the top of the dome. Some times the copper man was gone and so was the hat, as if she might be just alone in her head again.
It’s hard for a Bear to know how much time goes by when she is passing in and out of her senses, up and down the storeys of consciousness … but she was long enough lying there, a witness to all the mutterings and mumblings and addresses to the Rodents, to the Invisibles, and to her, that she just about learned to understand, if not to speak, Copper Man’s language
She would never learn his name; but for convenience, we will call him Copernicus.
Suspended from a tripod over the tin can stove, Copernicus kept a pot (copper) of soup made with salt water, sea weed, and small whole rodents like tea bags.
When Nowella was able to sit up, Copernicus, served her some of his famous soup in a bowl, also of copper. Nowellae drank the soup, but left the tea bags. When at last Nowella felt fit to resume her searching journey, she asked Copernicus (in her own mother tongue but with a great deal of gesturing and hoping for the best) if he might direct her to a certain Polar Bear, who might have been observed balancing on a beach ball while juggling fish and smoking a Meerschaum pipe, which (she believed she remembered her mother to have said) was carved in the shape of a man’s head. Also she for some reason thought that this Bear might be wearing a red vest … at least, that is how she pictured him.
Copernicus not only understood what she was saying, but was able to indicate (in so many words of his own ringing sort, and with even more gestures) that he had seen no such bear; and he very gently advised her that Polar bears were NOT native to or present at the South Pole, but rather, were limited to the NORTH Pole … from which she was just about as far as a Bear could be.
Nowella groaned and words failed her for an almost unbearably long time … but finally the power of speech returned and she was able to explain her directional disability, the whole global disorientation thing, the not knowing right from left much of the time, other times barely up from down, her near sightedness, her far sighted ness, her dark sightedness, and her understandable confusion.
Copernicus allowed a long silence, and then, in his most ringing voice, assured her that it it would be easy enough to find her way North if she would follow the spine of the mountains, but beyond the mountains, he let her know, there is a vast jungle where air and water are equals, and everything is green. There she would need a copper hat and a viewing crystal, such as he was prepared to supply. He personally would go nowhere without both, but he was going nowhere, so she could have his, and he could always hammer out more.
According to Copernicus, the very special Salt Crystal would help her locate the sun on a cloudy day or in the dim understory of the rainforest ahead, and then she only need to recall whether the sun is rising or setting, so as to be able to tell wether to strike right or left from the path of the sun … but Nowella already had trouble following all of this.
Most importantly, Copernicus added, she must take care to keep the Special Salt Crystal dry under the hat, because (being a salt) it could dissolve in an unannounced deluge.
So, willingly suspending an instinctive disbelief, she put the copper hat on over the special crystal and set off on foot along the rising, Northering ridge of the Andes mountain range
.
At first - with the ridge to follow - the sun-locator crystal was not required. And the hat itself gave some protection in the rain, but it could get very hot and awfully cold very fast, and in a real thunder storm, she had to shelter at least fifty feet AWAY from the hat, because it attracted lightning.
The locator crystal first became necessary, as did that hard hat, when she descended into the VAST Amazon basin, where she had to force her way through the thickety understory and never saw direct sunlight, even on a clear day. But, in the intense humidity of that rain forest, as she bulled, copper helmeted through the tangled understory, the somewhat magic salt crystal dissolved and ran down her face like tears
Nevertheless, that Copper Hared Hat must have saved her eyes from a thousand thorns and fangs, and will be needed in the next chapter.
The Red Hand
There is something about a bear that wants to go over a hill, but when she is long lost and cannot tell North from South or left from right, and maybe even up from down, that bear will sooner or later follow flowing water, because surely the water will be going down and that will be getting SOMEWHERE
.
And so, bewildered in the jungle, plowing head-down through vines and vipers and snake grass, Nowella eventually followed a brook to a creek, and the creek to a river, where she climbed aboard a log and floated on down to a larger river and thence into bay studded with docks, cranes, and many smelly, hustling humans.
Nowella, being generally hominidaphobic, (she had a horror of Chimps and Gorillas, though she only has a strong distaste for most humans) stayed hid in a stack of crates until the Longshoremen went home for the day.
Then she climbed through a port hole into the dark hold of a fruit boat, where she curled up among the green bananas.
That boat soon sailed, and very shortly rocked and rolled Nowella into a long Bear Nap … which is longer and deeper than a Cat Nap or your normal sleep, and, much later, as Nowella slowly emerged from that state, she found herself staring at something in the half dark for quite a while again, before she quite realized she was awake or staring at a Conch shell - oddly out of place among the green bananas.
That was odd enough, but odder yet… f i n g e r s emerged from the mouth of the Conch.
HUMAN fingers like yours or mine, only rougher, and red as boiled lobster.
.
Extended, the fingers reared and swayed like so many Pit Vipers searching for the body heat of a potential prey.
The the fingers … the Conch … the Hand went up on its finger tips, conch held high, and began a slow yet jerky dance-in-place, which just grew slower and jerkier; until Nowella fell back into a sort of sleep. When she woke, the Hand was atop the banana pile, and it was wearing the copper hat. For yet another period of uncertain duration, but surely a long one, Nowella sat silent and free of all thoughts.
Then she thought she would just let the Hand wear the heavy hat. She no longer had the crystal it was meant to shelter, she was safely out of the jungle where it had been valuable protection, and although she had at first found that when she sat on a rock wearing it, it helped her collect her thoughts and her wits, its being a lightning attractor kind of ruined that, and It had become more of a burden then a practical travel hat. Anyway, and most importantly Nowella was and is a kindly, peaceable bear, so she let the Hand have the hat.
And, judging by the way the hand strutted about, occasionally kicking up at the copper brim with a bony knuckle, it was clear he hoped that the hat made the man. Maybe the hat doesn’t make a man, but It was remarkable how much the Hand could do unasisted by an opposite hand, and how much it could convey with its fingers - how much information and confidentiality would pass between them during that long voyage of the fruit boat …. but a much longer time would go by before the hand learned penmanship, and wrote his famous memoir, Audobography of a Red Hand, which you may have read.
Anyway, the Hand was “born” many years ago,when several Irish Clan Chiefs were racing in Coracles (which are a round basket boat) across a channel of the North Sea.
Seeing that the Kennedy Coracle, or whatever Coracle it was, was about to reach the shore before his own the Oneil Chief, dropped his paddle, drew his sword, lopped of his left hand , and threw it ahead so that it reached the shore before the coracles with all hands aboard. So the Oneil’s won that race; but the more important fact here is that the hand tumbled down off the rocks into the green breathing sea, where it lay for a good long time, absorbing oxygen by osmosis through its skin … steeping in that amniotic
environment for untold years … until it developed or regained the power of movement, and eventually went crawling across the ocean floor, sheltering in conch shells, traveling like a barnacle on whale fins and boat hulls. Traveling the world like a pirate.
As I was saying … before the interruption about Oneil’s background and family history … although they developed a good rapport very quickly on that voyage aboard the fruit boat, it would be a long time before Nowella learned all that much about the Hand or even that Oneil was his name.
So when they were off-loaded in Boston,via separate nets, she didn’t expect to see him again. Nor was she too concerned about that. Being a small white bear in the Big City, Nowella was every bit as confused as a small white bear in the jungle, and didn’t even think of the Hand while sneaking through the streets and back yards, looking for trees she could examine to find out which side the moss grew on. When she finally did reach some forest land, the moss was growing, not just on the North, but on ALL sides of the trees.
That same day (or some later day, Nowella doesn’t know) she came across a set of tracks in the mud of a brook-side and she saw that they were her own tracks.
Of course the same exact thing had t happened many times before, but it was especially dispiriting on this occasion, and so she gave up for the day, washed her face in the brook, and lay out in the leafy shade of a Locust grove.
After time had lapsed and been forgotten once again in the near death that is the sleep of bears, Nowella awoke thinking of the Red Hand for the first time since they had been loaded off the boat.
An, if seeing is believing, there he WAS, in a crotch of the Locust tree, as if in a thought bubble right over her head. Maybe she had dreamt of him because he was there … or maybe he was there because she had dreamt of him; or, on a third hand, maybe she saw him simply because she was looking for him.
Nowella may never know, but so far as SHE is concerned, it doesn’t really matter which.
The hand was most definitely wearing the copper hat that was formerly hers; the copper crown gleamed and glimmered in the dappling shade, as if he had shined it up some to catch her eye. The Hand was pointing in the direction of what she was sure must be north, which it was.
And so she started off walking rapidly in that direction, and lumbered on for as long as she could keep going straight. Not too very long.
After bearly an hour, somewhere in a deep valley, she lost her momentum and directional certitude.
This time she did not panic and speed up, but instead, stopped very deliberately and looked about her for the Hand.
And once again there it was up on a rock, pointing the way North. So off she went. In the following months or years, she continued to get lost at least once a day, but then she would always stop where she was and look around her for the hand, and there on a rock, in a tree, on a hillock up ahead, the copper glint of the hat, and the Proud Hand, always pointing the way. Or usually pointing the way.
Sometimes the finger bent or pointed down, maybe because it was asleep, or maybe to indicate something, but regardless, she generally made camp on the spot. The had proved to be more than just a living sign post, He literally took a hand in building shelters for the night which is a great help to a bear, because bears have no thumbs.
The hand could spin rope out of rushes,cottonwood fluff, or spider webs, and could tie knots in it that no hand, even it, could untie.
In later days the Oneil has been known to do some of his Roping and Writing tricks on stage with the Tall Animal Revue, so there is a chance that you may someday see and meet him.
And if ever you DO meet our Oneil , do NOT make the common mistake of trying to shake his hand.
Oneil takes such a move as an aggressive insult. And be warned: Oneil has the family strength of pure determination, concentrated all in one member. He could squeeze blood out of a brass ball.
So when you are introduced … No Hand-Shaking ... just salute him or tip your hat and say something appreciative about his own.
Mostly by hand and foot, sometimes on Boats of Opportunity,Nowella and the Hand traveled North up the Continental waterways … on past the Great Lakes, past Great Bear, Great Scott, and Great Slave Lakes, inquiring along the way wether anyone had seen a Polar Bear with several gold teeth, who wore a red vest, and smoked cherry flavoured tobacco in a Meerschaum pipe with its bowl carved in the shape of a bearded head with red rhinestones for eyes which glowed when smoke puffed out of the turban.
Some of the details were her mother’s original lies, and some were added later by Nowella’s own struggling memory, but she got no real positive response from any bear, squirrel, hawk, or gossipy Chicadee: mostly skeptical, sidewise looks.
Though she had gotten very good at imagining her Polar Bear father Nowella herself came to suspect that he had never existed.
She decided to go and confront Mother Bear about the truth of her paternity . ….if in fact, Mother Bear was still alive after all those uncounted years.
In time, and with the good Hand’s help, Nowella found the way to her native Bonaparte Cave State Forest.
The fact is that, happily or not, Mother Bear WAS alive and had long thought that NOWELLA was dead.
It was a very emotional, if not a tearful reunion.
Bears do not cry tears, so much as they simply howl.
We are not speaking here about roaring or growling, but about savage howling so horrible that we can skip that scene…..only to say that in the end, they reached a reconciliation of sorts during which Mother Bear finally broke down and told the truth: that Nowella’s father was not a Polar Bear, but a White Man. It became known to the author shortly before the publication of this story, that Nowella’s biological father died in a snowmobile accident in nineteen eighty two, but do not bother to mention him to Nowella. At this point in her life, Nowella is no more interested in that man than in the invented father. She had never known either of them; they and were equally irrelevant and without influence in her life; they had very little to recommend them anyway and … come to think about it ... she would not much care to meet either of them.
That father search stuff was now quite out of her system. She must have been thirty or forty Bear Years old by then. So then Nowella went off...
searching for HERSELF.
Seeing as she was searching for herself, there was no place in particular for her to look except in mirrors, and it is well known that all mirrors are all liars, so she just wandered locally, only to ease her mind Direction was not a problem.
Going nowhere, and no longer needing the Hand for guidance, she seldom thought of him. And with the Hand, out of mind is out of sight.
She had still not yet found herself, whatever that might mean, but the new millennium found Nowella living from rough shelter to shelter (built without hand or thumb) here in the Finger Lakes area, half way between North and South, shoeless and wearing a hat and vest made of burdocks.
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