The Bears Took My Sleeping Mound

I was on "getaway" in a cabin that my family newly discovered it owned. It was dilapidated a bit, a very gray wood that had dried and splintered by way of old weather. The screen to the porch was definitely torn at the upper corners. By raccoons? It seemed originally it was only two rooms (living room, one bedroom) and kitchen. Latrine was outside. Little rectangular slab with a hole for your buns and an open tank into the dug up ground. I met an old cousin whose name I forgot. He lived as a spirited loafer, often poking around the woods shirtless. Did I mention this cabin stood lonesome in the woods of Colorado? At the base of a rocky upheaval of mountains. We ate our meals outdoors, on a slanted and rotting picnic table. My cousin insisted that I take the bedroom. He slept on a heap of blankets in the living, as though one who tended to dose watching television on the couch, although there was no television, no glistening manifestation to proclaim the flow of electricity. The mattress was so goddamn damp though and he was so friendly in his offering up his bed that I felt weird giving it back to him during the middle of the night. I did spot a sort of hatch in the ceiling which I poked around at, revealing an opening onto the roof and the piny canopy. I crawled out and walked around in the chirruping night in only my boxers and savored the freshness of the air. A drastic improvement from leaning face first into the musty mattress. I gravitated against the slope and felt plucked by curiosity to scope out the mountain that reached up into jagged gnarles of land. The trees thinned and it was an open, grassy slant. A few buffalos grazed and the moon made everything look blue. I walked, barefooted into dewey grass and the loose grass stuck between my toes in little balls. I hiked up and found a nook of grassy brush resting on a tuck of cliff face, which I climed and looked down at even more buffalo in the far valley below. Here I rested. Fatigue caught up with me and dissolved the second wind of curiosity. I awoke once before sun up and though to make my way back to the cabin and climbed a little pine and hopped back onto the roof and descended back into the bedroom. With my nose mashed into the sick smell of the once white (now charcoal black) mattress I thought about returning to my little spot, my found nest in the open of a refreshing nature, but the sun began to peak through some trees and I could hear my cousin stirring.

The next night arrived and my cousin snored from the floor of the living room. I could easily have exited the front screen door through the porch with saggy holes in the floor boards, but I enjoyed the process of sneaking up onto the roof and out. I enjoyed the jump from the smoothed out panels and into the moist ground made of old leaves. I enjoyed sinking to my shins and pulling my legs forth, streaked with wet dirt. I read once that the elements in dirt can revive certain mental abilities and I admit I felt a tad more open minded. Well, a better way to put it would be "open sensing." Everything felt clear, sounds were crisper and my pupils seemed to dilate and gulped the blue/dark world before. I walked up the slope again, anxious to claim my little open aired nest to sleep below the stars. The buffalo grazed and from the distance their shapes triggered thoughts of old friends.

Upon arriving at my nest from the night prior, the buffalo which I had assumed, was actually a bear, a big black bear which roared at me and I stood very still. I cannot tell you what I did from there or what he attempted to do to me, because I awoke mid morning, unscathed, laying on the roof, looking up at the tall length of trees. Noises pounded from the canopy, and as my eyes adjusted to the light poking through (it was noon) I could see the figures of construction men with hard hats, clinging to the trees by rubber saddles and laying the foundation of an elaborate tree fort.