The Bear Suit. Marta Maretich

and more cars. Rollo’s town now had the worst air quality of any town in the whole United States! He had read that in a magazine, but he could have guessed it. When he rode his bike on days when the air was bad, his lungs burned like they were on fire.

      Rollo knew he wasn’t the only one who thought about these problems. Some people marched in the streets about them. Some people signed petitions. Some people went to the state capital or to Washington, D.C., and held demonstrations. Rollo thought all that was a total waste of time. He would never join any group or sign any petition. Human beings would never stop being greedy and selfish, no matter what he did. His answer was to turn his back on the whole human mess and lose himself in the mountains.

      The trouble was, he had never found a way to do it permanently. He wanted to arrange things so he didn’t have to come back.

      * * *

      Dried noodles, powdered milk, granola: Rollo started making the list of food to take on his summer hiking trip.

      Making this list always frustrated him. Food was Rollo’s weakness. No matter how carefully he planned or packed, he could never carry enough to last him more than a few weeks. He ate very little and always lost a lot of weight during his trips. Sooner or later, though, the food always ran out.

      When this happened, he’d live off nuts for a few days, eating them straight out of his greasy pockets. Sometimes he’d try eating plants and roots he found by the trail, but these always gave him a stomachache. Once he tried eating a caterpillar, but it tasted so bitter he had to spit it out. When he gave up on finding food in the wild, he’d go without eating for as long as possible. Five days was his record. But eventually, hunger and weakness would force him down into one of the tourist towns.

      These towns lived off the summer vacation traffic to the mountains. After the silence of the high trails, they felt busy and noisy. They were full of revving motorcycles and giant, square white camper vans and whining, sunburned children. They made Rollo feel rattled. He walked through them with a scowl on his face, cursing the crowds of tourists, the fake log-cabin gift shops, the trash cans brimming with sticky paper plates. He’d grit his teeth and head straight for the local store, desperate to get his shopping over with and to escape back into the wild.

      Usually, there was only one grocery in town, set up like an old-fashioned general store you’d see in a Western movie. These shops had a little bit of everything. They were the only places in town to buy food, so prices were sky-high. You could pay five dollars for a package of cheese, three for a box of crackers! This made Rollo mad. He sullenly gathered his food and paid in silence, only grunting when the cashier tried to talk to him.

      Rollo felt defeated every time this happened. He had given in to his hungry, human side again and broken the magic spell of the mountains.

      But that would never happen again, Rollo thought. He had dreamed of the bearskin, so it was all going to be different from now on. The dream had given him a brilliant idea.

      THREE

      The man at the costume rental company gave him funny looks when he went to rent the bear suit. He stared at Rollo, seeming to size him up. He asked him questions. He checked his ID.

      “Is there a problem?” Rollo asked finally. “Do you have a bear costume I can rent or not? Should I go somewhere else?”

      “No, no,” the man said quickly. He was old and bald. His narrow shop was crammed with racks of colorful costumes. He turned and went into the back of the shop and returned with a furry brown shape on a hanger. The sight of it, empty and waiting, gave Rollo shivers.

      The man said, “It’s just that you don’t strike me as the kind of person who’d go to a party dressed as a bear.”

      “What makes you say that?” Rollo asked, feeling offended.

      The man shrugged and handed Rollo the costume.

      Rollo tried it on in the curtained changing booth. It was heavy and made out of artificial dark brown hair. Like everything in the old man’s shop, the bear suit had been used for many years. Its seams were worn, and it looked like some patches of fur had been gnawed by moths. There were places where the dark coating had rubbed off the claws, revealing the white plastic underneath. The costume had a strange smell that was

      like a mix of dry-cleaning chemicals, peanuts, and stale sweat. Rollo lowered the hollow bear head over his own and looked out through the bear’s open mouth.

      He studied his reflection in the mirror. His worst fear was that he’d look like a cute teddy bear in the suit. That would be embarrassing. But he thought he looked all right. “Raar,” he said quietly, taking a swipe at the mirror with one paw.

      “Excuse me?” asked the shopkeeper, from the other side of the curtain.

      “I said, I’ll take it,” Rollo said. His voice echoed in the bear head and sounded loud in his own ears.

      The last thing his mother said to him before he left for the mountains was, “Whether you like it or not, son, I’m moving to the beach.”