Mrs. Danson had been a devout diarist, writing about the day she married her husband Rugs, all the way ‘til the end when she wrote about romantic evenings and tiresome days, uneventful afternoons and mornings at the house. When Rugs got back from digging her grave, the first thing he did was put her green jade jewelry and wedding band away in the box marked ‘sell’, her diary, mawkish poetry scrawlings and gifted rayon scarves into the ‘burn’. Rugs Danson was seventy-three years old. He had no children and had never wanted any. The amber sky lit up Rugs’s stuttering hands through the dirt pane window.  The half-knit hat grew steadily as the evening rode by. Rugs slowly taught himself to knit with a trembling hank and pull motion of wool so he wouldn’t freeze in the winter, having burned all his old hand-knit hats.

He didn’t plan a funeral. He got money to, but paid only for her permanent place in hell. He spent the rest on poultry equipment to move his life up north. Was a spelunker before he met her, then settled into keeping chickens, making little money, but keeping busy. Mixing mayonnaise with a longer shelf life and better flavour. Cracking devilled eggs with perfectly seasoned taste. Pickled. She had been a business woman, always secretive about her working life but putting food on the table with money to spare.

There was a knock on the door. A holler from outside warned him that the cottage was being entered. Rugs put the half-knit hat on his head and crammed the rest of the wool in the rim to prevent unraveling. 

“I heard you brought those little egg makers up,” Casey said, his beard growing in for the coming winter. Casey Dumott was a hunter, and a ripe one at that. The man was sixty-seven and still as sharp as the day he shot two bucks with one bullet, through the bits of one into the eye of the other. Mating season.

“Yes, sir. We’re movin’ up here for good. Just gotta sell the old place. Louie Lake is home now.”

“Rugsy, it’s too damn cold up here this time of year for chickens. You know that? How you gonna manage?”

“I got some stuff with the money Maud left me. The best stuff money could buy. They’ll be fine and I got a grocer who is gonna pay me nicely to let him sell the egg stuff in town.”

Casey’s face went pale and he pulled off his gloves, reaching for Rugs’s hand with a firm look of sincerity. “I’m real sorry to hear about the missus. I know you loved her.”
 

“Ach, don’t give me that. You guys up here were always callin’ her things behind our backs. Harpy and witch and such. Don’t give me that poutin’ lip.”
 

“Heck, I said I know you loved her, not that she was a catch. All of Louie and the next lake over knows any bass is a catch in comparison.”
 

“You here to buy eggs or something?” Rugs spat, opening the fridge in the kitchen.
 

“A jar a’ may, plus a dozen. I’ll pay you for a batch of devilled too if you want to bring ‘em by tomorrow for brunch. Some folks coming 'round before everyone closes up their places for the season. Cheese and crackers kind of deal. We’d like it if you joined.”
 

Rugs boxed the stuff up and pushed the sharpshooter out the door. “Give me the money tomorrow,” he said in response to the invitation.
 

The sun went with Casey. Rugs lit a few candles but struggled to see his knitting in the dimness of the flame. It wasn’t ten minutes later that he put the hat down, popped his dentures in a cup and went off to bed. The sound of cooing chickens helped him fall asleep as fast as their squawking woke him up just a few hours later. He ran to the dormer window that looked out to his newly installed chicken coop, forcing his stiff, sleep-weakened legs into his pajamas. He could see his money being torn apart and eaten from the safety of his home. Nothin’ to do but flick the outdoor lights on and off until the beast left off, he thought. Its one ursine eye reflected in the night like a red-eyed photograph. The other was a pit of blackness surrounded by torn flesh and pus-filled abscesses. Louie Lake called it the half-faced bear, courtesy of Casey Dumott, who made a habit of shooting eyes out. They all thought it’d been long dead.
 

In the morning Rugs woke up in a heat of sweat. He was used to it. It happened so often that it had become like the compulsory layer of dew on springtime flowers. Stiffly, he held the hand rail and walked down the stairs, well aware of the sanguinary mess he’d have to clean now that any hope he’d had of a decent life was well digested and ready to crap out. He tried not to think about the mornings that Maud would cook him French toast on the stovetop. He exited the cottage and the wind tore open his house coat. He tried to forget the freckle above her lip, the way her hair touched the ground when it was freed from its braid, her hatred for the catheter at the end of her life, the hanging bag of urine that was often brown and red. He turned around, put on some coveralls and went outside again, following the air of poultry carcasses. He had spat on her grave when he finally found out about her.
 

Covered in a thin, chill-white blanket, the grass tucked in. The flakes licked and kissed the bottom of Rugs’s trousers as if in season’s greetings. Rugs grabbed the hose and washed away the beginnings of snow cover with the chicken gore. With gloved fingers, he collected the wood and threw it into a heap in the fire pit, he tossed feathers into a bag, added it to the pile of metal in his truck for a later trip to the dump. When he was done, he went back to the cottage carrying some of the wood in for his fireplace. Cluck. One chicken following.
 

Bernie, he called her. She must have run off when the bear ripped through. She must’ve hid under the house. He changed his clothes, whipped up a batch of devilled eggs, shaved his face, made a makeshift chicken leash out of some rope and an old cat collar, walked Bernie to the Dumott place for brunch. Thank God for Bernie.
 

“Casey, you sonofabitch,” he roared, trailing his last chicken into the cottage. A few children came up to pet her but were quickly shooed away. “Not now kids, she’s been through a trauma.”
 

“What happened?” Casey said, pulling himself to the front of the group.
 

“That goddamn half-face bear. You couldn’t have shot him dead when you had the chance? That damn thing near killed all my chickens. Thank God for Bernie or I’d be out on my ass. Thank God for Bernie.”
 

“Ah, shit Rugsy. I told you not to keep them chickens up here. Louie’s no good for chickens.”
 

“I’m gonna kill that bear if it’s the last thing I do. I swear.” Rugs put the devilled eggs on the breakfast nook, his jacket on the hook, his boots on the mat, his half-knit cap and wool ball on the free-standing freezer. “Maud says I'm boring in that diary of hers, that she wants to see some excitement in me, some life. Died before she could see it, had to find her own excitement while she was still alive. 'A girl’s gotta have something to write about,' she said. That’s what she wrote in that damn book of hers.”
 

“Shit, Rugs, I’m sorry. I didn’t know she was like that.” Rugs felt the itch of prying eyes against his skin and looked around Casey to the room of waiting company. He saw the lips moving, the children being directed away, the nervous fingers pulling at cotton sweaters and denim bottoms. He swallowed and cleared his throat.
 

“Alright, alright,” he coughed, walking with his open palm out towards Casey. “I brought you your egg products, now you give me the change so I can go. I got me a face to finish off.” Casey grabbed the man’s shoulder and pulled him closer to the door, and away from the whisper of the cottage company.
 

“Did you hear about Maud,” whispered Donna Shaw.
 

“That poor man,” came Rodney Balkovec in a hush. “He was crazy ‘bout her.”
 

“Rest her soul, rest her soul.”
 

Donna’s youngest pulled away from his mother’s gripping hands and pulled the sleeve of Rugs’s sweater. “You’re not gonna kill it are you, Mr. Danson,” he said, tears forming in his eyes. Rugs didn’t know what to say. Looked to Donna.
 

“Let’s leave Mr.Danson alone now, Kyle.” She wrapped her arms around him.
 

“You can’t kill it. It didn’t know they were your chickens,” he called, the whole room looking. “Promise you won’t kill it. You have to promise.” Rugs met the young boy’s eyes, but didn’t move or speak. The boy could see the bags under his eyes, the sagging of his jowls, pulled away from his mother’s fingers.
 

“Come on now, Kyle.”
 

“You have to promise, mister.” Kyle said in a grave tone well beyond his years. Rugs nodded slightly and Kyle grabbed his mother’s hand, leading her back to the group of cottagers in the living room.
 

Casey pulled Rugs closer to the door and spoke in a hush.
 

“You’re not gonna kill it, then?”
 

“’Course I’m gonna kill it. It ruined me,” Rugs spat, his eye twitching. He struggled to keep his voice low. “I won’t be making enough of those eggs now to warrant selling them in town, already called the guy. I’ve got food up here for a month or two before I needa get to the grocers and nothing to do ‘cept take care of Bernie. Not a lot of work in just one chicken.” He curled his fingers around the money as soon as Casey placed it in his hand, noticing the way the cash moistened in his palm.
 

“You’re gonna kill yourself, you know that? Louie’s more winter than you’ve ever seen come December. Bears hibernate, Rugsy. You’re crazy to stay up here and no one’s gonna be around to save you.” Rugs turned firm on his heel, pushing his feet into his boots again, grabbing his hat and jacket and storming out of the cottage.
Rugs pulled Bernie the short distance home like a dumb log. 
 

“Hurry up, ya damn chicken.”
 

The sun withdrew early that day, the sunset reflecting in the lake and sitting like vivid red lipstick on the black, tree lined horizon, drinking up the water. Licks of lightning in the distance made it clear that cottagers should pack up and head back to civil Ontario. And they did, save for Rugs, Bernie and the wild half-face. A week later, the storms started up. Soft falling snow flakes eased into squalls and then fist-sized hail and by mid-November, Rugs was snowed in. There would be no trips to town. It took nearly all his strength to trudge down to the Dumott place through the slanting blizzard and break the shotgun and bullets out from the locked cottage cabinet, going out at first light and back -putting on the kettle and undressing in front of the fire- by seven o’clock. He barely even got the front door shut again with all the ice.
 

The real estate agent called. He gave a low figure but urged Rugs to take it. Rugs told him to go to hell and slammed the phone down. He noticed some crystalline snowflakes blowing a calm and easy note through the side door frame by the telephone table. And quickly shoved a sock in it.
 

The days passed in cycles. In the mornings he would put on as much clothing as he could manage (“I’ll be back soon”) and chip away at the thicket by his house, the thinnest trunks bowing in with each blow of his ax and plume of huffing breath. He’d tap the maple trees and hear the soft lull of dribbling, seeping liquid as it slid free of its pained and mossy vessel like a blue-green-algae-covered woman lying stark and mutely stagnant in a frozen winter heap. Panged when it hit the metal bucket. He’d set the traps that wouldn’t catch and never wonder why. (“You’ll never believe the day I had”) In the sundown he would wrap up in a blanket with the radio playing static set precisely to thirty-three percent volume and cover up the whistling breeze, the untiring rattle of windows, the quiet moaning calls of the frozen forest leaves covered in frozen spider webs like children’s hair. The patient, waning moon bulging against the thickly clouded sky. Chickens keep laying eggs when they know don’t know it’s winter. He would knit, play solitaire, eat little but a fried egg. With lights on fourteen hours a day and the windows covered, he had taken to conversing with Bernie. He had begun to tell her of the old days when he was young and rich with inheritance and travelled the world’s caves. He told her about the Chinhoyi Caves in Zimbabwe and the Carmel Caves in Israel, places she would never go and he would never go again. He told her about the Neanderthal woman preserved in the silt and clay of the Tabun, the graves of sacrificed children in Skhul, the Cave of the Kids. He read to her from his late wife’s diary, tearing each page out and burning it in the fire after he read it. Bernie didn’t like her. Bernie was honest and faithful and Rugs cherished that. (“Goodnight, little lady”) And woke in a film of sweat.
 

For Christmas he had put bells on Bernie’s collar and knit her a sweater with a supposed-to-be-reindeer on the front and she pecked it to shreds, leaving white feathers to poke and show through the brown woolen face of the animal. The year earlier, Maud had been off tanning in Costa Rica, maybe Punta Cana.
 

For New Years, Rugs and Bernie had listened to a radio broadcast from Bracebridge and he had eaten frittata with green onion as a treat. Bernie pecked through the radio’s cord at twenty to midnight and Rugs kissed the top of her head and went to bed early. Two years before, Maud had come home from the office party with Kahlua–filled chocolates and the makings for a hangover. Rugs had kissed the top of her hair.
 

Snow plows came a week later in an attempt to carve roads from the paleness. Their tires getting caught up between the ice and overworking the engine. Two men were airlifted out in hypothermic condition, the windshield wipers thumping back and forth and struggling to keep up with the opaque wall of snow on the abraded cockpit window. The pilot just barely made it through the blizzard in time to save the snow plowers’ loved ones from funeral costs.
 

Aware only of the road in front of his property, Rugs started with the shovel. His front door far off and his body too thin and weak to stay out laboring more than an hour or two a day, he quit early. His arthritis was acting up. His hands were ripped and bloody from the harsh wind and from the constant washing of his sweat-stained sheets. His face, increasingly pallid. He didn’t know if it was dodders or his constant chill that had him shaking more than usual.
 

He had only a few days’ worth of food left -no meat-: celery, cheese spread, peanut butter, English breakfast tea, apples, eggs, two jars of mayonnaise, soy sauce, rice, elbow macaroni. Bernie began laying eggs less frequently. She knew it was winter and Rugs couldn’t pretend it wasn’t anymore by tricks of lightbulbs and curtains. He gave up on it, took the curtains down and took the candles out of the utility closet.
 

He kept the fire going, feeding it with things from the box marked ‘burn’, including whatever he hadn’t already burned up from the diary that revealed everything. He noticed one from decades earlier. Picked it up and scanned the pages to find something of interest. A man’s name riddled the pages. The man before him. The poet and army man who took to rising in the ranks over staying in the country. He had come to their wedding and several notable events in Maud’s life. He wasn’t around otherwise and Rugs had never bothered to get to know him. He guessed that the man had never married.
 

He was surprised to feel a sense of thankfulness when he heard the skidoo coming down the lane and onto his property, glazing over the densely packed snow of the yard. Casey with a trailer on ski’s behind him, full and covered with a tarp.
 

“You broke into my place and stole my gun, didn’t you?” Casey breathed, not so much angry as annoyed.  Rugs felt a dull pain in his chest. Casey loosened the scarf on his face as he forced the words from his lips, not stopping to let Rugs answer, motioning back towards his cottage with his hand instead. “You damn left the door open and that two-faced sonofabitch ate all the cereal. He even brought the damn box of Lucky Charms down with him in case he needed a snack. I told you. I told you that you shouldn’t’ve brought those chickens up, that you shouldn’t try to kill the bear. I shouldn’t have to tell you not to break into my place and steal a weapon you don’t even know how to use.” Rugs opened the door for him, but he didn’t enter, an expression of disbelief on the hunter’s face. “Go grab the gun, you idiot, I might’ve woken it.”
 

“What, the bear?” Rugs choked, unable to wrap his spinning head around the image.
 

“Of course, the damn bear! He’s sleeping in my goddamn cellar ‘cause you left the damn door open.” Casey threw his boots off and grabbed a jacket from the closet, tossing it towards Rugs. “Where’s my gun?” Rugs sputtered a response and in a minute they were on the skidoo with the shotgun, making their way to the Dumott cottage.
 

The lights weren’t on. The blinds weren’t drawn up to show the interior. The door, as promised, wasn’t closed.
 

“If I die ‘cause of you, I swear to God,” Casey mumbled, keeping his voice to a hush, turning his face towards Rugs but keeping his eyes on the door.
 

“He’s really in there, huh?”
 

“’Course he’s damn in there you ol’ bat.” They starred for a minute, neither one of them able to move from their straddling positions. “It’s been a real pleasure, Rugsy. These last twenty years. A real pleasure.”
 

“Horseshoes started in summer of seventy-eight. Been nineteen years come August,” Rugs corrected.
 

The two men dismounted the skidoo and crept towards the cottage, snow crunching under their boots as they held one anothers’ jacket fabric in tense, clenched fists.

 

The hunter went first with the gun, slipping his hand between the door and its frame and widening the gap. Rugs’s eyes met the trail of Lucky Charms. He stifled a gasp.
The couch was pushed towards the wall opposite them and the coffee table was broken in two. There were several cabinets splintered with their doors lying broken on the torn up linoleum floor. Casey crept in and headed towards the open cellar door. Rugs shuffled in slowly behind him, legs shaking as he avoided anything with the potential to crunch.
 

Using the nose of the gun, Casey pried the door open and extended the metal arm that locked the door open at the top of the frame. And there he was, only a dark pitted face visible. Casey passed the gun to Rugs, whose thin lips wavered, feeble knees shook. Through his translucent skin, Casey could see the blood pumping in the old man’s jugular. Taking the gun in his hands, Rugs pressed his fingers onto the cold metal casing until they turned snow-white, ready to cock and shoot the sleeping beast. Casey backed off, took a step backward, thinking of what Rugs had read of his late-wife’s diary, ‘A girl’s gotta have something to write about’.
 

It wasn’t like in the movies. It didn’t happen in slow-motion with the camera pulled in close to show the detail and shine of the beads of sweat that coated his brow or his tongue dry and licking his wind-chapped lips. It happened in real time and lacked thought. He didn’t think about how good it would feel to kill the beast before it could wake. He had thought before that ending the thing that had nearly consumed him would release him from anxiety and force a false dental grin onto his face, but now the adrenaline was near crippling. He didn’t think about his desire to prove something to a corpse and he didn’t realize that it wasn’t about her anymore. He merely wondered how Casey would feel if the bear spent the rest of his winter here in the basement cellar. He could only feel that he did not want to shoot the bear and that his hands were quivering.
 

He took a long, strained breath and heard the sound of his eyelids blinking. His palms began to sweat and he grasped the gun harder for fear of it slipping out and going off. He felt his friend’s reassuring hand on his shoulder and his eyes widened.
 

The two men walked out of the cottage, leaving the front door ajar. They didn’t speak and they made no attempt to read each other’s expressions. When they had made it back to Rugs’s, Casey forced himself to speak.
 

“So uh… there’s a bear in my place and I got food up here for a week.”
 

“You’ll stay with me. Whole mess is my fault anyways.” 
 

“Nah, it’s just as much my fault and I won’t hear another blaming word,” Casey said, pulling the tarp off of the trailer, revealing three coolers packed with food.
 

“I’ll help ya to fix any damages come springtime.”
 

“You’re not strong enough, you gotta get strong or else I’ll get someone else and put you in a home.”
 

“Alright then, a man’s gotta eat if he wants to get strong. What’s in that trailer of yours? what’s for dinner?”
 

“Protein,” the hunter smiled.  “I got a whole chicken. We can shove some herbs in her and mash some potatoes.”
 

“Alright, but we’ll have to hide Bernie. She’s a sensitive lady.”
 

Squawk.