Bearing Read online

  Bearing

  Amber Foxx

  Published by Amber Foxx, 2015.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  BEARING

  First edition. October 22, 2015.

  Copyright © 2015 Amber Foxx.

  ISBN: 978-1519911643

  Written by Amber Foxx.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Bearing

  Author’s Notes

  About the Author

  Sign up for Amber Foxx's Mailing List

  Further Reading: The Calling

  Also By Amber Foxx

  Bearing

  Long ago, when The People were still new, some children were playing at a distance from their camp. One girl dug a hole and crawled in. A few minutes later, she came out roaring and pretending she was a bear. The others squealed and ran as she chased them. When she went back in the hole, the children came back to the edge and teased, “Bear, bear, bet you can’t catch us.”

  She ran out again and chased them, growling like a bear. This time she had claws, and her teeth had grown bigger, but the little ones were so wrapped up in their play they thought it was part of their imaginings. She went back in the hole. They came to the edge and taunted her again. “You can’t catch us, bear!” This time when she came out and chased them, she was covered with fur, but they still perceived it as part of the game.

  She was almost a bear. Only her heart was still a little girl’s, and that stopped her from hurting them. She went back in the hole, and they teased her once more. When she came out the fourth time, her child’s heart was gone and she was fully a bear, and she killed all of them and ate them except her little sister.

  The little sister ran back to the camp and hid under a big basket, but the bear found her. The child begged, “Please spare me, I’m your sister. I’ll help you.” So the bear took her to the hole in the ground and kept her as a servant, making her serve her food and drink in the skulls of the other children.

  The little sister took care of the bear so it would sleep and stay in the den and not hurt people. She knew her father and five other men were out hunting nearby and wanted them to be safe. When the bear was asleep, she came out and found them and warned them. The men built a fire at the mouth of the bear’s den. The smoke woke it and made it angry. The bear came out, but the men threw burning fat from a deer they had butchered onto its face. Enraged, the bear backed into its hole again, and the hunters built the fire bigger and ran. They prayed and the wind helped them. They ran to the top of the sacred mountain in the east, and the wind brought them a cloud which carried them up into the sky. The little girl and her father and the other five hunters are the Pleiades. If ever only six of those seven stars show, it means that bears have become the enemies of humans again.

  The big Cree man danced the men’s traditional style with a stately grace that fascinated Mikayla. He stood upright and raised his knees only a few inches, but with such precision and power he compelled her attention as much as the bare-chested, barelegged youths crouching and mock-hunting in breechcloths and paint. His coloring suggested he had some Anglo blood, but he looked at home in his buckskin shirt and leggings, and his dark brown hair hung long and free down his back. A fur-tipped staff in one hand and some small thing she couldn’t see clutched in his other, he followed the sun-wise circle in the dance arena under the bare blue sky.

  He’d been at the powwow the year before with Janelle Enjady. She wasn’t there this summer. A lot of Apaches from off the reservation, like Mikayla’s family, came every year, but the Mescalero powwow wasn’t one of the big intertribal events like Gathering of Nations, where Janelle had met him, so it seemed odd that the Canadian Cree man had come this year without his Apache girlfriend.

  “Refugio Baca is the best dancer,” Mikayla’s thirteen-year-old sister Suzi whispered, leaning forward to eat a Navajo taco. Green chile, beans, and mutton dripped off the folded frybread onto the paper plate and onto the aluminum floor of the bleachers. “What do you think?”

  “He looks best, that’s for sure. But he’s kind of show-offy. That Cree guy’s more dignified.” He was probably in his mid-thirties and nowhere near as good-looking as Refugio, who was eighteen like Mikayla, but the big Cree wouldn’t make a bad second choice. “Did you meet him last year, with Janelle?”

  “No, but everybody was talking about them. What was his name?” Suzi licked green chile off her fingers. “It sounded like a sneeze.”

  “Cheechoo. I can’t remember his first name.”

  “What I remember is Mom kept saying he was so nice to Janelle even though she’d gotten so fat while she was pregnant. He still treated her like she was just as pretty as she used to be.”

  “For how long, though? He’s here without her now.” Mikayla couldn’t resist a poke at the absent Janelle, a conceited girl with whom she had never gotten along. “He probably got fed up.”

  Suzi groaned.

  The drum stopped with a single loud thump and the dancers stopped with it. The Cree man froze in mid-step, his staff upraised, his deep-set eyes fixed on Mikayla. Refugio’s pose on one knee, bent over the ground as if tracking, revealed every inch of his lean, sculpted leg up to the hip.

  Suzi whispered, “I wonder what he’s got on under that breechcloth?”

  Mikayla gently kicked her in the ankle. “I don’t want to hear you asking questions like that.” She stood up and grinned. “But I’ll let you know what he says.”

  The emcee said over the loudspeaker, “Thank you, men’s traditional dancers.” The men began leaving the arena while women in cotton or buckskin dresses trickled toward it, carrying feather fans. “Women’s traditional, are you ready?”

  The big Cree man was still gazing at Mikayla. His long, broad nose and full lips gave him a strange look, almost too familiar, though she’d only met him for a few minutes last year. Mikayla made a cross-eyed, scrunchy-nosed face at him and started down the bleachers. She liked his dancing, but not that hungry stare.

  Her parents and the smaller children were on their way up. “Where are you going?” her father asked.

  To chase Refugio. “To get a drink.”

  “Don’t go far. I want you to take your little sisters out to that park in Ruidoso. They need to let off some steam.”

  Mikayla’s smaller siblings surrounded her, yipping like little animals and yanking on her hands. Her dad was right to want to get them off the ceremonial grounds for a while, but she had other plans. She watched Refugio’s slender yet muscular bare back disappearing through the crowds toward the vendors’ stands.

  “Are you listening to me?

  “Sorry. Yes, I was.” She looked down at the pointy faces and big dark eyes of two four-year-olds, one six-year-old, and two seven-and-a-half-year-olds. Someone should have warned her parents that the odds of twins went up with age. “Give me the keys.” Mikayla sighed. If all those children wore her out, she knew what it had to do to her mom and dad. “I’ll take them.”

  “Thank you.” Her mother gave her a quick squeeze. “You’re a good girl.”

  Mikayla hadn’t felt like being good, and now she’d lost sight of Refugio. She herded her siblings down the rest of the steps, past the big tipi for the night’s ceremonies, out among vendors, and toward the gate to the parking lot.

  Feeling eyes on her back, she glanced around. The Cheechoo man raised his fur-tipped staff, smiled, and turned down a row of booths. His voice was deep and rumbling as he spoke to the first jewelry vendor. Sexier even than Refugio’s lithe, near-naked body, the vibration of that voice unexpectedly touched Mikayla like a single stroking finger. Her feet rooted to the spot.

  “M’ka—ylaaa.” Small hands
patted her legs and squeezed her thumbs. “Come on.”

  She broke her trance and let her sisters pull her along, but not before the big Cree turned halfway and gave her a long, heavy-lidded look. His lips sucked in over his teeth and then released into a smile, as if he’d just tasted something good.

  The playground in the park in Ruidoso swarmed with children, mostly Apache. Every motel in town was full with other visiting families who’d come for the midsummer ceremonial and powwow in Mescalero. The swings were all taken. A pushy boy kept hogging the slide. Two other boys held a mock sword fight on the bridge in the middle of the plastic climbing structure, feinting and jumping so that the whole thing shook.

  The younger twins, Ally and Ursula, began to fuss over wanting to get on the slide, but the pushy boy ran back up to the top on the slide itself instead of using the stairs, his sneakers hammering on the metal, and slid down again, hollering, “It’s all mine!”

  Mikayla knelt to calm the little ones down, and the older twins, Geri and Frida, took off at a run. “Let’s play in the woods.”

  The younger ones brightened. Six-year-old Helen asked, “Should we, M’kayla?”

  “Sure. It’s cooler. But don’t get far from me, and watch out for snakes.”

  Helen clung to her hand as they headed up the broad path along the river. “M’kay—la? Is it true you can get snake sickness if you touch a snake?”

  “I don’t think so. Those old stories are ways of explaining diseases our ancestors didn’t understand. If you lay around all tired and gained weight, it was ‘bear sickness,’ but it was probably depression. If you got sick with something that made you skinny like a snake, maybe cancer, it was ‘snake sickness.’ They just thought it was because you touched a bear or a snake.”

  “Nobody touches snakes,” Geri hollered back. “You can’t.”

  “The Hopis do,” Mikayla said. “They dance with them.”

  Ally’s shoelace came untied. Mikayla halted all the girls and told them to wait while she redid it. Not that they listened. When she looked up, she saw them running up the slope into the evergreens and hoped she hadn’t planted the idea of dancing with snakes. Helen was the only one who wouldn’t try it.

  Mikayla finished Ally’s shoelace and they hurried to catch up with their sisters, who had gathered at the edge of a cavity left by the fall of a massive old tree. Its roots hung out like a heart ripped from the earth with veins and arteries dangling. Ursula peered under them into the deep, dark space. “I wonder if something lives in here.”

  Frida wiggled a dangling root at her. “How about ssssnakes?” Ursula jumped back with a shrill cry. Frida hooted. “Silly. This hole’s too big for snakes. It’s the right size for ...” She paused, and then shouted, “a bear.”

  The other girls giggled with the nervous pleasure of children who enjoyed being scared.

  Mikayla crouched and reached her hand into the hole. “You know, this is the right size for a bear.” The earth was moist and rich-smelling, full of hair-like roots that tickled her arm. “For a little girl bear.”

  Her sisters’ shudders and appreciative oohs told her they remembered the story their grandmother told about the girl who turned into a bear. Mikayla stuck her head and shoulders into the hole. She was small, only five foot two and an even hundred pounds. There was room for her entire body.

  Helen’s voice trembled. “Grandma said the moral of that story is ‘don’t ever crawl in a hole and play bear—’ ”

  “Or you’ll turn into one.”

  Mikayla scrambled all the way in and turned around. She growled, the children shrieked, and she lunged out of the hole to chase them, roaring and clawing the air, getting just close enough to each one that they all got a chance to scream and escape. Laughing, she returned to the hole. The girls sneaked up to the edge, and Helen whispered, “Is she really a bear?”

  With a snarl Mikayla scrabbled out and began to chase them again. As the children scattered squealing in all directions, she was startled to see the big Cree man watching from between two trees. He wore jeans and a T-shirt now, but he looked almost as imposing as he had in his dance regalia. His slow, appreciative smile warmed his face. “Go on. Bear Woman.”

  His voice made her legs so weak she didn’t have to pretend not to catch the children—she could barely keep them in sight until she recovered from him. When she went back inside the hole, he followed her and sat at the edge. Set in silver and semi-precious stones, on a leather cord around his neck hung a bear claw.

  Her sisters approached the hole, but this time they screamed before she even crawled out. Their screams were different—real, not play screams. The expressions on their faces, eyes wide, mouths open, staring before they ran, frightened Mikayla. She wanted to look for a snake, something that could have caused that terror, but she didn’t dare move. Whatever it was, it had to be right near her. She whispered to the Cree man, “Is there something in here that’s gonna bite me?”

  He laughed and reached over to move a strand of hair from her face. “No. What makes you think that?”

  “My sisters—”

  “Shush.” It sounded like the Apache word for bear. Shash. “It’s all in their game.”

  “No, they looked really scared.” Of what? Mikayla’s heart began to race. This enormous man was blocking her way out of the hole. He seemed gentle, but she hardly knew him. “I need to go see if they’re okay. They still ran and I’m not even chasing them anymore.”

  “They don’t know you’re not going to. Relax.”

  She crawled to the rim of her lair. Her hands were so close to his massive thigh she could feel his body heat. She needed to go find her sisters, but she was afraid of what this big man might do if she pushed past him. Trying not to seem scared, she began to babble small talk. “You were with Janelle Enjady at the feast last year. I can’t remember your first name. Somebody Cheechoo.”

  “Angus.”

  “What? Seriously?” Her anxiety dissolved into a giggle. “That’s a kind of cow.”

  He had a deep belly laugh. “It’s a Scottish name. From that part of my family. And in case Janelle is why you’re so uncomfortable, I’m not with her now.”

  Mikayla listened for her sisters. They weren’t screaming anymore, and this was a public park, full of other families. Nothing bad could have happened to them. Maybe Angus was right, and they simply had taken the game too seriously. She began to relax a little. “You mean you broke up, or you just came without her?”

  Somehow, he crept into the hole with her. Her nerves tightened again. There shouldn’t have been room and yet there was. His breath smelled like berries. “We broke up.”

  “How come?”

  “You’re a nosy little thing.” He chuckled, and then grew serious, leaning back against the earth wall, stretching his legs out in front of him. “She had a hard decision to make, and ...” One eyebrow went up, and he shrugged. “She didn’t choose me.”

  He hadn’t dumped her, and he wasn’t talking bad about her. That was good, but coming here alone was still strange. “And then you came all the way from Canada for our ceremonies? I mean, this isn’t a big powwow—”

  “Shush.” He slipped his arm around her, a big arm, strong and yet soft, as if he had a subtle layer of fat over all his muscles. It made him comforting, easy to lean on. Against her will almost, her body began to let go into his. While her heart held back in a thin shell of fear, the place between her thighs grew moist and tender. He said, “I didn’t come from Canada this year. Janelle and I had a place in the woods here. You didn’t know?”

  “No. We’re not from here. We just come for the powwow and the ceremonies.”

  She thought he should have asked where she was from—it would have been better manners—but he said, “It’s a nice little place. I still live there,” and cuddled her closer.

  She let out all her tension. She couldn’t help it. There was something deeply, sensually, entrancing about him. Her mind wanted to ask more questions, about hi
s family and what he did for work. She also knew she ought to say she had to go catch up with the children. However, she had split in some bewildering way. Her body didn’t care, didn’t listen to her head or her heart, not even when she heard her sisters call her name. “M’ka—ylaa!”

  Angus slipped his shirt off and drew her to him again. His broad chest was furred and so was his belly, the hair tapering to a point at his belt line, the hirsute body of a full-blooded white man but brown enough to still look Indian. Mikayla touched the deep fluff between his pectorals, and was surprised that she liked it. He lay on his back, pulling her on top of him.

  Outside the hole, the children argued in an undertone among themselves and then called again. Mikayla, atop Angus, felt his hardness press against her in just the right spot. She wanted to answer her sisters, but not a sound came out of her other than a sleepy, purring moan. Even for her, this was happening fast, and yet she couldn’t stop herself.

  The older twins’ voices grew louder, closer. They sounded frightened.

  “Why won’t she come out?”

  “A bear got her.”

  “No, she turned into one.”

  “People don’t turn into bears.”

  “Then why didn’t she scream, if a bear got her?”

  “It sat on her.”

  Their mixture of sadness and terror should have outweighed the comedy of their words, but it didn’t. They would laugh about this for weeks to come—a bear sat on her—if Mikayla could just make herself move toward the opening of the hole, get out, and reassure them. She couldn’t.

  Angus whispered, unzipping his fly and then hers. “No, it didn’t. She sat on the bear.”

  He undressed her and licked her breasts and belly, then drew her small hips over his face. His tongue was as big and powerful as the rest of him. It caressed her, opened her, penetrated her, and exhausted her. When she thought she couldn’t rise to such pleasure again, he slid her back down to his pelvis and plunged inside her, bringing her ecstasy back for an encore, his timing so tuned to her rhythms she never wanted him to stop.