The campsite had been telling him about bears all day. Signs posted at the turns, at the board, at the sites themselves. Straps cinched over the dumpster lids — the kind of hardware that exists only because something large and intelligent has repeatedly gotten into what it wasn't supposed to. rswfire had taken all of it in and set it where he sets things, into the working awareness he carries as a matter of course, and then he had gone about the ordinary business of getting ready to sleep. He knew where the bear spray was. He knew what the straps meant.
The alcove was his own construction, a small sleeping space built into the RV, sized to the body rather than to comfort. The cat had opinions about it. He was all over the place, moving through the bed and the cab and back again, doing what cats do at the hour when the human wants stillness. rswfire was working around him, negotiating sleep against a moving animal in a confined space, and by one in the morning he had gotten most of the way there — not fully under, but close, the edge where the body has released and the mind has not entirely followed.
Then noise from the cab. Sudden, loud, unaccounted for.
He was upright on the bed before the thought had finished forming. The thought was: bear. And in the same instant, without deliberation, the sequence began — rock the RV. Make the vehicle move, make it loud, make it obviously occupied. His mind located the bear spray, exactly where he had left it, retrievable. He registered that he would need to make a lot of noise. He registered that he needed to know where the bear was. Assess the situation. All of it arrived compressed into a single moment, in order, without a gap where hesitation would have gone.
He describes feeling the adrenaline move through his body. He describes feeling fear. He is precise about what kind: not paralyzing. The surge went into action rather than into freezing. His system had a protocol and it ran, and he was, as he puts it, ready to do battle with this bear — a thing he had never had occasion to find out about himself, tested here at one in the morning by a cat in the cab of an RV parked in bear-posted territory.
The bear was never there. What was there was the answer to a question he hadn't asked. rswfire states that in that one instant he learned a great deal about himself: that if he would respond that way to a bear, he can handle anything. He records it as something he did not know until this moment, and then he says it plainly, at one in the morning, with the cat still moving through the dark and the alcove still holding him — the field had supplied the test, the system had answered, and the finding was his.