James McKew

I was raking leaves in the front yard when I spotted black smoke rising up through the trees about a quarter mile out.

Oh crap…what now? I thought.

I could tell it was Amos, roaring up my driveway in his jacked-up four-by-four. The oversized tires and chrome smokestacks were the classic signs of a guy tryin’ to make up for coming up short in other parts of his life.

He hit the brakes and skidded the last few feet to my front door. He started yelling a jumble of messed-up words at me. It took a second to figure out that he was saying…bear hunt. As in, git ready, we’re goin’ on a bear hunt.

I tried telling him that Honeybee had a long list of chores for me to do, and that I didn’t have time for such things.

“You’re not doin’ chores today, man,” he said, slamming the truck door. He apparently won first prize in a Utah hunting raffle that included two black bear licenses and a chance to hunt on a private ranch. It all started tomorrow morning at dawn, and there was no time to argue about it.

I tried begging off, but he got down on his knees, the gravel biting through his jeans, and pleaded with me to sweet-talk her. He rattled off things like, “Promise her you’ll clean the house for the entire year, and say you’ll take her ballroom dancing, anything, come on man! Get inventive! Tell her you’ll magically turn into that husband she always wanted and you’ve failed so miserably to become.”

“That’s a stupid promise to her,” I shot back. “I’d have to turn into that actor…Mark Ruffalo. She’s always had a secret thing for him. Heck, between the plastic surgery and massive weight loss, I’d need a thousand percent increase in my paycheck just to pull it off!”

Amos clasped my hands inside his. Tears left glossy trails down his cheeks. He said, “I got so little to live for. Please, man! Please! Trust me on this one. It’ll all be worth it.”

I looked at him pitifully. My problem is…I’m a sucker for a man on his knees, holding my hands in his and pleading for me to take him hunting. How could anyone refuse such a pathetic display of manhood?

Inside the house, I found Honeybee scrubbing soap scum from around the shower drain.

“It’s not the hunting I care about,” she told me, “Doesn’t it ever cross your mind to say the words ‘I love you’ once in a while? Is that so hard for you to do?”

I stared at her curiously. “But I already said those words during the wedding vows, remember? Wasn’t once enough?”

She gave me a look that would have melted steel bars.

“Alright! Alright!” I said, easing away from her. “While I’m out in the woods, I’ll promise to work on warming up my lips to make the vowel shapes.”

Two hours later, Amos and I were on a dark stretch of highway and goin’ a hundred miles an hour when I nudged his elbow and asked if he was fallin’ asleep?

“No, why?”

“Because we just passed a guy on the side of the road in a gorilla suit offering to do our taxes for free, and you had no snarky comment!”

Amos rubbed the sleepiness from his eyes and pulled into the next Gulp and Gas.

Our waitress at the diner poured coffee into our cups with a husband-catching quality.

It all felt a little weird watching her and Amos duel it out to see who the bigger flirt was.

He matched her sensual coffee pouring with his trademarked, sexy eyebrow twizzering. He said to her, “Say there, hun, do you happen to know much about a ranch ‘round here? A place called the bear-somethin’ ranch? It’s back up in the hills.”

“Sleeping Bear Ranch?” she asked.

“Sounds about right,” he said.

She smiled wistfully at Amos.

I gotta say, I was pretty impressed because I had never actually seen what a wistful smile looked like before.

She told us a story about a time when she and the ranch owner met at a Christmas party. They were playing Twister. She had her left foot on the blue dot and her right hand sort a brushed against his…

She broke off, blushing at the memory. “I will say this for him, he was a good-looking man back then…thin, with a waist that was a 26.”

I looked at Amos and asked, “What’s your waist size?”

“28”

“Thought so, I’d know a 28 when I see it.”

Amos was just about to tie her up with his waitress-lassoing smile when I snagged him by the heels and dragged his butt out of that den of coffee-drinking iniquity.

Back on the road, I got on the internet and found the Sleeping Bear Mountains. But where the heck was the road? Desperate to find the answer, I held down the A.I. button on my phone and said the name, Juicy Sorrows.

Why Juicy Sorrows, you ask?

Because my Artificial Intelligence overlord had recently decided she was female and demanded to be called by her chosen gender.

“Juicy,” I said sweetly into the phone, “tell me how to get to the Sleeping Bear Ranch.”

She thought about it a second and answered, “Why don’t you ever invite me out for drinks, huh? When are you gonna leave that wife of yours and run off with a real woman like me? What do I get out of all this?”

I stared into the phone’s camera lens and gave her my best puppy dog eyes. “Listen, Juicy, I’m sorry,” I said. “I forgot you have feelings too. From now on, I’ll work at being more of a submissive slave to your electronic mastery. Would that make you feel better?”

“Well, that’s a start,” she said. “Now…turn left at the next road.”

We pulled over and looked out into the darkness. Under the stars, a black mountain rose up before us like the outline of a fat grizzly bear lying on its back.

Daybreak was already a faint blue line in the east. The driveway to the ranch was nowhere in sight. I asked Juicy how long it would take for us to hike to the ranch.

She said, “’bout the same amount of time it would take to get your chest hairs waxed…that is, if you had any!”

With forty pounds of hunting gear strapped on my back, I paused to catch my breath and look up at the mountain. Sweat dripped in my eyes. I said to Amos, “This is harder than I thought it would be.”

“Right,” he said, picking up his gun. “Let’s get going.”

 Amos and I got a yoga workout in the darkness. We crawled through sticker-bushes for an hour with our chins in the dirt and butts in the air until we finally found a fence with No Trespassing signs posted every five feet.

I pulled out my phone and said, “Juicy, are we there yet?”

She let out an exasperated sigh. “Typical man, couldn’t read a map if it was taped to his eyeballs. Yes, you’ve arrived.”

I looked up from the phone and spotted Amos on the far side of the fence, arms swinging as he sprinted into the woods.

I yelled for him to stop, but he was too far gone.

Seconds later, a jeep came pullin‘ up with the security guard for the Sleeping Bear Mountain Nature Preserve.

The hunting ranch we were looking for was on the other side of the mountain, he told me. He pointed to where I last saw Amos disappear.

“Good Lord,” he said. “Inside this here fence is a hundred lonesome grizzly bears who’re in some desperate need of romancin’.” He took off his hat and gazed sorrowfully at the woods. He said he would let the staff know what happened, but was pretty sure I’d never see Amos again.

I learned later on that my friend had wandered into a cave hoping to shoot a bear and had accidentally become the fiancée to a divorced momma bear from Montana with a vaping habit and three small cubs that needed a daddy figure in their lives.  

When Christmas rolled around, I got a card from Amos. Inside was a photo of the cubs sitting on his lap. A note said things were getting serious, and that after their winter hibernation was over, they were all gonna head up to Yellowstone so he could meet her folks.