The August sky hung low, like a damp dishrag; foetid and rank with unshed rain.

Sadie felt the high drone of the cicadas as a sharp pain behind her eye. The children were hot, tired, snappish. They took out games and left them unplayed, they turned on the hose and sprayed themselves down and then left piles of wet clothing and puddles on the floor. When they finally disappeared into the basement in the early afternoon Sadie sighed with near-relief. It was still hot, but at least she was alone.

The house was intolerable.

She was tired of it all; the bathroom with its grubby sink and cracked porcelain, her cramped bedroom, with its unmade bed, rumpled and salt-stained sheets, the living room with its piles of unread books and dirty carpet, the dim kitchen its egg-crusted dishes and counter smeared with jam. The piles of children’s flotsam everywhere - single pieces of lego, tiny cars, single coins, twisted pipe cleaners, a playing card, a half-eaten cookie, a single raisin.

Sadie stood at the sink, holding a dishcloth and a damp, speckled metal bowl. The front of her t-shirt was wet where she’d leaned against the counter. As she wiped the bowl, a housefly lazily buzzed around her head and she flicked it with the dishcloth. She missed. Another fly buzzed against her ear, and she looked over and saw the screen door yawning open.

Sadie had told the children to close the screen a thousand times. Maybe more. Her words had become so automatic, even she did not hear them. Her voice was like the cicadas or the buzzing of a mosquito. Irritating but easily tuned out.

She wondered why she spoke at all, or if anyone would notice if she stopped.

***

The bear had three cubs this year. Sometimes Sadie caught glimpses of them. The broad round back of the mother. The three smaller cubs tumbling behind.

Sometimes Sadie would smell the bear but not see it. The bear’s scent, animal and rancid, like a black garbage bag left out in the August sun.

The bear nudged at the edges of their small patch of civilization. It worried at their small green rectangle of lawn. If Sadie left the garbage on the porch, she’d find the bag torn open. A trail of dirty diapers and chicken carcasses and used tissue spread across the lawn, like a foul mid-summer snow.

One spring evening, a month or two ago, Sadie and her husband had seen the bear just as the sun was setting, the mackerel clouds aglow with the vivid pink of a Barbie Dream House. The bear made its lumbering way along the lane, carrying with it its own atmosphere, as if the air around the bear was wilder, somehow. They watched it for a while, silently from the porch, and then Sadie’s husband stood, and went into the house. He came back with the shotgun they kept in the pantry, high on a shelf where the children could not reach it. The wood stock polished to a high furniture gleam. He clicked in a pair of shells.

“No, don’t.” Sadie whispered the words, unsure why she spoke so low. She didn’t want the bear dead. That wasn’t what she wanted at all.

The bear sat at the edge of the field, scenting the air. Sadie wondered what they would smell like to a bear. Irish Spring, and fabric softener and sweat and beer. The cheap scent of a perfume that was not hers that clung to her husband, sometimes, after a long day at work.

Her husband spat on the ground. Stood for a moment with the gun slung open across his hip. “I’ll shoot over it. Just scare it away, is all.” He pushed his sweat-brined hat back on his head, and took a final long swallow of his beer. His jeans rode low on his narrow hips, and Sadie saw the white of his belly as he lifted his arms and framed the bear in the gun’s sight. The hard sinews of his arm moved under his forearm as he clicked off the safety with his thumb.

“No,” she said, again as he pressed the trigger. The bear seemed to jump, a little, and then it ran. It turned back once before disappearing into the woods. Just long enough for Sadie to see the bright red of its blood, a smear of crimson against its black fur. The bear’s single, remaining eye.

***

Sadie was still holding the bowl. The dishcloth.

The side door opened onto a wide porch, flat grey boards of weathered wood. Sadie stood at the door with one bare foot over the threshold, one foot in the house. A slight breeze lifted her hair off her neck. It was almost refreshing.

Sadie stepped outside, and closed the screen door behind her. Took the two steps down from the porch onto the clover-lawn.

Sadie felt the weight of the day on her shoulders. It had been a bad summer. June had been rainy and dark, July more of the same. She’d started the summer full of plans, full of ideas of trips to the beach, picnics in the woods, crafts and games, bicycling to town, but then she’d realised that those were plans for other families. Other mothers. Sadie was happy if the children didn’t fight, didn’t hurt each other - if they survived the day without injury. She was happy if she managed to sleep, a little, at night, in their hot bedroom. She was happy if her husband came home and Sadie managed not to snap at him. If they got through the evening without an argument. Without a broken bottle. She was happy if he didn’t come home at all.

Happy.

That was the wrong word. The best Sadie had felt lately was a feeling she might have described as “slightly less numb.” Slightly more like a human. Slightly more like herself. 

Lately, Sadie found herself wondering if the fall from the high balcony of her house would kill her, or just send her to the hospital for a few weeks.

She pictured both scenarios, sometimes, in the small hours of the morning when she couldn’t sleep. She pictured the climb over the railing, the quick plummet to the ground below. The relief of blackness.

Or she pictured a sterile hospital room. The white sheets, the gentle hands of the nurses. The solitude. Meals brought to her on plastic trays; individually wrapped puddings and soda crackers stacked in twos and butter in round containers which she’d scoop out with a white plastic knife. She imagined the knife would break when she tried to use it on the hard, hospital toast, but she wouldn't care. She wouldn't have to clean it or replace it.

She imagined her husband visiting her with the children. Their scrubbed faces smiling up at her, nearly dead bouquets of wild-flowers clutched in their hands. Her husband’s whispered promises to do better, to take better care of her. To love her. Sadie would sometimes fall asleep to this image - the hospital bed, the children, the whispered promises.

And sometimes she fell asleep yearning for the darkness.    

***

The yard stretched out in front of Sadie, a yellowed stretch of grass strewn with the faded, sun bleached colours of abandoned cheap plastic toys. The clothesline at the edge of the yard listed slightly under the weight of a load of laundry. The boundaries of their small plot of land marked with a row of poplars, their leaves shimmering in the heat.

Beyond the yard was the blueberry field.

The field was horizon wide, tawny brown and red, broken by bright green new-growth saplings, and patches of switchgrass gone golden in the heat. It stretched to the woods beyond, which hung dark green at the base of the surrounding hills -  the broken fingers of the Apalachans, made soft and low by glaciation. High on the hill, against the grey sky, the crest of the hill was dappled with birch trees where the old-growth was long since logged out.

Sadie had a sudden childhood memory of a tin cup filled with blueberries, and her grandmother’s kitchen. The heat of the stove. Her grandmother, with her arms strong and sun-spotted, her broad hands coated in flour. The broken china cup she used to measure her ingredients. And a blueberry pie; thin lard pastry, sugar-crusted and scented with nutmeg. Sadie had a strong craving for that pie, and it was the first real appetite she’d felt in weeks.

Above, a vulture circled.

Sadie crossed the lawn, and pushed through the tree-border to the blueberry field. It wasn’t theirs, this field. But no one tended it. No one harvested it, anymore. So they crept at its edges. Took what they wanted. Took more for winter. No one missed a few berries. Not in the blueberry capital of Nova Scotia.

The berries hung on the low bushes in ripe clusters, purple and dark in places, powdery bright in others. Sadie ate the first handful of berries she picked. She brought her hand to her mouth and licked the blue juice. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and picked another handful.

Her world narrowed to this patch of berries, the drone of a mosquito around her ear, the plink of the berries as they hit the bottom of the bowl. She picked handful after handful. Then she sat back. Closed her eyes. Stretched her spine. She thought of the children, in the cool basement, their eyes glazed over in the blue light of the television.

They would be hungry soon.

The sun was a dim white circle in the sky, and yet when she closed her eyes she could feel it on her back, the glow of heat breaking through the low fug of cloud.

She picked on. An ant crawled across her hand and she flicked it off. A spider tried and failed to climb up the metal sides of the bowl. She wiped a rivulet of sweat from her cheek with the back of her hand.

Then she smelled the bear.

***

Sadie sat back on her heels and looked around, her heart suddenly noisy in her ears. The bear smell sat on the air, greasy and thick, unmistakable against the herbal smell of bent grass. In the distance, she saw its black form, like a small mobile hill. The bear’s black coat was sun-faded to rusted brown in places and her face was buried deep in the berry bushes. The cubs were beside her. Sadie could see the tufts of their ears above the scrub of the undergrowth, their round teddy-bear bodies tumbling on the ground.

The bear sat up. Turned her head. Scented the air, and finally, the bear caught sight of Sadie.

The bear fell forward onto its paws and began taking loping steps in Sadie’s direction. She stood, carefully, one muscle, one joint at a time, until she reached her full height. She wanted to make some noise. To yell. To warn her away. But she could not find her missing voice. She wanted to turn, to run. But her bare feet were rooted to the rough bramble beneath her.

The bear stopped finally. Not close. But not far. It sat up on its haunches. Behind it, the cubs played on, oblivious. She peered at Sadie over her long snout, with her single, bright eye.

Then she spoke.

“Your mate shot me.”

The bear’s voice was rough, as if her tongue struggled on the hard consonants of the words. 

Sadie’s heart thrummed in her ears with a oceanic roar. She shook her head slightly. She’d misheard. The sun. The heat. She was acutely aware of her bare feet, of a trickle of sweat at the back of her neck, of the still-damp patch at the front of her t-shirt. The bear tilted her head. An almost human gesture of annoyance.

“Can’t you talk?” She spoke slowly, as if to a child.

Sadie felt sweat bloom on the palms of her hands. Hearing a bear speak was one thing. But talking to a bear? Sadie clutched at the frayed edges of her sanity. If she didn't answer the bear, could she pretend that this never happened?

But the bear was still waiting for an answer, her head poised on her thick, furred neck, her black eyes observing Sadie with a shrewd expression. If a bear could be said to have an expression. Finally Sadie’s tongue loosened.

“I told him not to.” The excuse seemed lame in her mouth. The words limp. Her voice, thin. 

“Hmmpf.” The bear’s snort was dismissive. “Males are prone to violence.”The bear’s voice was without menace. Steady. Neutral. Calm, almost. The bear looked at her, her head cocked slightly to the side, as if Sadie was a disappointing child, or a misbehaving cub.

Sadie nodded slowly.  “I’m sorry.”  Sadie had hated her husband for the sudden, unnecessary unkindness of it. And it hadn’t even worked. Here was the bear, uncowed. Talking to her.

“I will live.”  She settled down, a little lower now, as if their conversation had just started. As if this were a neighbourly chat.

The silence stretched out a moment. Finally Sadie spoke. “I should go,” she said.

But the bear was not done with her. It raised a paw. “I see you. I see you and your…” the bear paused, and seemed to consider her words carefully. “Your young. They are awfully loud.”

Sadie nodded in agreement. “They are. They are very loud.”

“When will they leave?”

“Leave?” Sadie asked. “Leave where?”

“Leave your…” again the bear seemed to search for the correct word. Although, Sadie thought, the bear’s English was surprisingly good. For a bear. “Leave your territory. Find their own.”

Sadie laughed briefly, a staccato exhale, and wondered what part of her deep subconscious had dreamt up this particular hallucination. On days like today, it seemed like the years yawned out ahead of her like a great black void, filled with diapers and meals and tiny scrapes and fingernail clippings and socks with holes and being touched too much by sticky fingers. “About eighteen years, more or less.” Sadie paused. “And then again, they might come back, once they are a bit older.”

“Oh! That long?” If the bear had eyebrows, they would have certainly lifted in surprise.

“More or less.”  The bear turned around to look at her three cubs, who were playfighting behind her, their round bodies on top of each other in a mass of brown-black fur. 

“These will be gone next year,” said the bear, still watching her cubs. “Then there will be more. Then those ones will go, and more will come. It doesn’t do to get too attached,” she said, and Sadie caught a note in the bear’s voice, something that might have meant that although it wasn’t good to become attached, this bear often did.

The bear turned back to Sadie.“They are hungry all the time,” she said. 

“All the time,” Sadie agreed, and there was another silence while both females, human and ursine contemplated their young and their never ending hunger. Opposable thumbs, it seemed, were not a prerequisite for maternal connection.   

“I’d like you to stay out of my field.” The bear changed its position slightly, and Sadie was again aware of its size compared to her own. If the bear wanted to, it could kill her with a swipe or two of its paws. It could tear her limb from limb, and leave her bleeding in a crumpled pile. 

“Your field.” Sadie glanced around, at the wide expanse. The thick clusters of berries.

“Yes.” The bear lifted a paw. Proprietorily. “This is my territory. That is yours.” She gestured with her nose back towards the house. The yellowed grass, and the peeling siding.

Sadie nodded. Fair enough. She could always buy blueberries at the store. She had a thought. “And you’ll stay out of my garbage? Just to make it fair?”

“Well. No. I won’t do that.” The bear shook its head. ”I think you are mistaking this for a conversation.” Sadie had mistaken this for a conversation. It was true. “Keep out of the field, or I will eat your young. And you invest so much time in them, it seems like that would be a shame.” The bear said this matter-of-factly, as if she were telling the time or reading the news. But she followed it with a yawn, seemingly casual, but with a full display of her canine teeth, white and long against the pink cavern of her mouth.

“That would be a shame,” said Sadie, her mouth now full of cotton. She thought of her children. The tender skin at the back of their knees. The dirty dog smell of the tops of their heads. The way, even now, in the midst of this hallucination, this psychotic break, some part of her mind was on them, like a computer program running in the back of her mind, taking up bandwidth.

The bear shook its head in approximation of a nod. “I’m tired of coming to my field and finding all the berries gone. I am tired of having to hover in the forest while your young cavort and crush my food under their filthy paws.” Sadie nearly bristled at the description of her children’s “paws” but had to concede the point. Her children were often filthy.

            “No, no. I understand,” said Sadie. “We’ll stay away.” The conversation seemed to be at an end. The bear had delivered her message. Sadie turned to go, and then remembered the bowl of berries at her feet. She picked it up. “May I keep these?” Sadie rattled the berries in her bowl, a cup or two, enough for the smallest of pies.

The bear peered at her again. “Fine. Take them. And go.” Sadie nodded and turned back towards the house. When she glanced back, the bear was still watching her.

 But she didn’t speak again.

Perhaps she never had.

***

When the children emerged from the basement they were almost enraged with hunger.

By then, the pie sat cooling on the counter. Its crust was brown, and studded with sugar crystals. Purple juice oozed from the top.

The children ate it in less than five minutes, leaving plates smeared with crumbs, and their faces streaked with blue.

“Go outside,” Sadie said to them, as she looked at the empty pie plate. But the children were already gone. The screen door left open behind them. She could hear the sounds of their voices raised already in an argument.

Sadie ran one finger through the sweet blue jam that remained in the bottom of the pie plate.

She put her finger to her mouth and tasted. The blueberry juice tasted sweet and rich; tart and herbal. It tasted of the outside, of her childhood, of her grandmother’s kitchen. She closed her eyes for a moment, and savoured her one, brief taste of blueberry pie. Then her eyes opened, and she remembered.

“Don’t go into the blueberry field,” she whispered. But the children were already gone, their voices fading in the distance. Sadie caught a final glimpse of their small backs, their sun-bleached hair.

Through the window, sun glowed on the edge of the horizon, breaking through the clouds, and cast a golden light over the edges of the yard.