The Bear Suit by Marta Maretich

Author:Marta Maretich [Maretich, Marta]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gemma Open Door
Published: 2017-03-08T07:00:00+00:00

EIGHT

The days began to blend together. Rollo could go for weeks without seeing another person. One evening when it was still light, a bear wandered into Rollo’s camp.

Rollo was resting in his tent, dressed in the bear suit and waiting to go out on a raid. He heard the bear before he saw it. It came sniffing and grunting and padding around the tent. He put on the bear head, poked it out of the flap, and called to the bear.

“Hey!” he yelled. “Hey you!”

The bear was nosing around his backpack, trying to lift it with one paw. When it heard Rollo, it raised its head and looked straight at him. It was a small bear with dark, almost black, fur. Its face was pale brown, the color of milky coffee. Its eyes were small and shiny. It looked young. When it saw Rollo, it lifted its upper lip and growled, not very seriously. Then it went back to examining his pack.

“Hey, hey!” Rollo said. “I’m talking to you.” He stepped out of the tent and stood in front of the bear with his hands on his hips. He felt no fear. “What exactly do you think you’re doing?”

The bear looked at him again. It seemed surprised to see a man dressed like a bear, but only a little. It stared at Rollo with a confused expression and growled again. It took a step backward.

“You’d better move along,” Rollo warned the bear. “This is my territory.”

A crazy idea suddenly came to him. It crossed his mind that this was not a real bear at all, but another impostor like himself. He half expected the bear to stand up, take off his head, and start telling Rollo about his own adventures pretending to be a bear. This thought struck Rollo as funny, and he began to giggle. Once he started laughing, something took hold of him and he found he couldn’t stop.

“You’re a copycat,” he said to the bear. “It was my idea first. And you’re doing a really bad job of being a bear! I mean, look at that fur! It’s much too shiny. Look at your paws! Do you wash them with soap and water? Do you use hand cream? You don’t even move like a bear, you loser. Look, you’ve got to use your back legs, really put your rear end into it.”

Rollo dropped down and started to show the bear what he meant. But the bear was already gone, running away through the trees as fast as it could go.

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