During dinner, a storm had come up that valley and washed over them with a few impressive thunder cracks and a sudden gushing of rain from the tin roof. Clear air had blown in behind it, and the sun had come out and made a rainbow that seemed to plunge down into the valley. The scent of rain-washed cedars came in through the screen porch. Jacob spread honey on homemade bread that Elizabeth had pulled from the oven an hour ago. Life was suddenly good. He asked her about how the journey was going and what plans she had for her new life in Seattle and what sorts of things she liked to do in her spare time. She mentioned a number of activities that seemed, since they were sort of urban and high-tech, to go in one of Jacob’s ears and out the other. She also mentioned camping. Not that she was really all that interested in camping. She had done it in Girl Scouts and on family trips. It seemed almost obligatory for a healthy young person moving to Seattle to claim that she was interested in camping. That stirred his interest, anyway, and they talked about that for a little bit, just circling the black hole that was sitting there waiting patiently for them, and then, of course, they were talking about bears. Jacob mentioned that there were very few places left in the Lower Forty-Eight that still harbored grizzly, as opposed to black, bears and that northern Idaho was one of them; they were connected, by the Selkirks and the Purcells, to a vastly larger reservoir of grizzles that ran all the way up the Canadian Rockies into Alaska. Jacob dwelled, a little more than Zula was really comfortable with, on the idea that bears were attracted to menstruating women and that Zula really should not go camping in bear country when she was having her period. The modern feminist college-girl part of her thinking it was all just deeply wrong and inappropriate, the refugee/orphan/Forthrast taking a somewhat more pragmatic view.
It sounded like folklore to her. Not that this would get her anywhere in an argument with Jacob; a
All of which was easy for her. She had been dealing with men like this ever since she had come to Iowa. Men wanted to be strong. One way to be strong was to be knowledgeable. In so many areas, it was not possible to be knowledgeable without getting a Ph.D. and doing a postdoc. Guns and hunting provided an out for men who wanted to be know-it-alls but who couldn’t afford to spend the first three decades of their lives getting up to speed on quantum mechanics or oncology. You simply couldn’t go to a gun range without being cornered by a man who wanted to talk to you for hours about the ballistics of the .308 round or the relative merits of side-by-side versus over-and-under shotguns. If you couldn’t stand that heat, you needed to stay out of that kitchen, and Zula had walked right into it by crossing the threshold of Jacob and Elizabeth’s house. She smiled and nodded and pretended to be interested in Uncle Jacob’s bear lore until Aunt Elizabeth finished putting the boys to bed and came and rescued her.
Anyway, she had looked it up on the Internet (of course) when she had reached Seattle and found much (of course) conflicting information posted by people with varying levels of scientific credibility. She had ended up knowing no more about it, really, than she had before the conversation with Uncle Jacob. And yet the connection to menstrual blood struck heavy psychic resonances (which was, of course, why the myth was so widespread in the first place), and so, that early morning when she was chained to the trailer hitch under the pickup truck and she realized that the thing sniffing and pawing around was a bear, her brain went straight to her uterus and she asked herself whether she might have lost count of the days and started having her period in the middle of the night. Certainly didn’t feel that way. It was funny how the brain worked; she even permitted herself a brief excursion into meta/ironical land wondering if anyone else in the world—in
