The gun. It's always the gun.
I'm 16, so I can't legally carry a gun unless I have to. That's supposed to mean when the stars fall from the sky and angry werewolves attack the president. But often times, I can't wait that long. I would die if I did. I'm a ranger. Sort of. All I wanted to do on that not-so-fateful day was go through the usual routine and then take some knock-your-socks-off pictures of deer. No angry werewolves attacking the president, so I couldn't take dad's gun.
You know how the movie characters are always so wrong? Well, it turns out the stars decided to fall to see if gravity really worked. And to spite me. In other words, I should've brought dad's gun.
When I got to the site where I work as a ranger, I parked my car in the usual gravelly rectangle. I don't know who chose it as the parking space, but it had to be someone who had no depth perception to joke about.
Through the usual routine I went, taking care of a few barely-injured-but-very-loud animals, looking for signs of rabid wolves or coyotes or foxes. Why didn't I take the gun, you ask? Because there have never been any rabid wolves or coyotes or foxes. And if there were, I could use my hawk. Or my knife, which is better than any knife you'll ever see. But I digress.
It went wrong when I walked halfway down the steepest hill - more of a mountain - in the property. I looked down at Ol' Robert's cave through my binoculars, and saw no signs of a recent exit.
Ol' Robert was a grizzly who was once in some kind of mining accident, they say. His brain's messed up, but he's still alive. He'll attack anything that moves, and forgets when grizzlies are supposed to hibernate. So he sleeps most of the time. It's when he's awake that he's dangerous.
Seeing no signs of an exit, I walked back to my tree house and set up the camera to take pictures of the deer that would come through soon. It took me at least twenty minutes, but I finally had it just right. It would look amazing, and I could make some good money selling the pics to the right people. They were going to be one in a thousand, maybe even in a million. The landscape was better than a fried apple pie dipped in dutch chocolate, and the camera did it all justice. It was going to be a new car, if I could get it right.
I waited. For at least an hour, I sat motionless, the tree house lights off, terrified that I would scare off the timid deer if I moved so much as a few inches. At one point I resolved to sit for another hour. That was when I heard the unmistakable grunt of Robert.
I knew I had to scare him off, but I didn't really want to shoot blanks into the silent midday air. If I fired a shot, the deer could be off and running, and I would never see them. On the other hand, Robert could try to eat one of them. There wasn't really much of a choice.
And suddenly I remembered I hadn't brought the gun.
I want to say I panicked, but I didn't. I was in a state of utter shock and confusion that I sat for thirty seconds before I even got up. The lights were still off, but Robert could definitely smell me. He didn't hate me, but the two things he likes most are sleeping and eating. And I was the easiest thing he could kill, because he could also smell that I didn't have the hated gun. In other words, I was as dead as a cow. That was dead. (Seriously, there doesn't need to be a simile for death. Everybody understands it.)
I snatched up my binoculars and ran to the window from the direction I had heard the grunt. Robert was about a tenth of a mile away. He could get to me in about a minute, at the very most. I closed the curtain over the window and thought.
The car was much, much further away than a tenth of a mile. I didn't have any bear spray, and even if I did, I doubt it would have worked. I still don't know how messed up Robert's brain is. There was no way I could escape unless Robert wanted to kill something else. And that was unlikely.
What did I do? I would like to say I took everything I had learned from my extensive research and training to attack Ol' Robert, or at least confront him. But I was too scared of the outcome. My chance of life was, in every possible situation, about the same as the chance of Congress sticking to the Constitution.
As the weak sun trickled through the gaps in the curtain, I closed my eyes and sighed. I flipped open my phone to call my mom and tell her she would probably never see me again. And then I heard a bang that sounded about the size of the mountains where I worked.
I jerked open the door and looked out to see my dad. I didn't wonder how he came, or why he was there. I just waved and clapped like a stupid seal. Dad didn't notice, and instead fired another round. Grumpy Grizzly had had enough, so he galloped off.
"Why are you here?" I shouted. Dad looked up at me and waved. I waved back, still waiting for his answer. He put his backpack back on, picked up the things that had fallen off, and walked towards the treehouse. I lowered the rope ladder and helped him up. "Well?" I asked again when he was inside.
"I wanted to go camping out here in these woods," he said. "We didn't have a lot of things that we needed, so I went out and bought them. That's why I wasn't there in the morning. You could have asked your mother for the gun, you know."
I rolled my eyes, but didn't comment. He knew that I hadn't been expecting the grizzly. Remembering that Robert could still be roaming around, I asked dad for the handgun and trotted away to look for Robert. It took about half an hour, but I made sure he wouldn't be able to leave the area around his cave without my noticing.
Much later that day, dad and I were sitting as still as an old cassette player in the tree house, waiting for the deer. I was uncomfortably aware of how unnecessary it was, seeing that the deer had probably all run away, but I said nothing. Just in case.
Finally, at about eight o'clock, the deer came. Dad and I had gotten tired, and were playing card games, when dad looked out the window and noticed a few of them wandering out into the open (ish) fields.
I dashed to my camera and spent the next arduous half hour taking the fantasized photos. They turned out well enough, but not as well as I had hoped. The gunshots had scared most of them off. So much for that new car.
That night, dad and I determined that he would leave the handgun in the tree house. If I ever used it I had to write down the reason. I objected, but eventually I had to give in. It would have been much more interesting if we had just left it the way it was.
Ol' Robert would agree.
