Help! A Bear Is Eating Me! by Mykle Hansen

feel bad, I’ll take some more.
    Meanwhile: the bear, he sleeps tonight. Ever since the big match he’s been curled up next to the car. He spent a couple hours licking himself earlier, that was sure something to see. It’s like the Nature Channel under here. I actually think he’s warming me up a bit with his body heat. Small consolation for what he smells like.
    A little-known bear fact: they reek! Somehow in all my research I never uncovered this salient info. They reek like giant sweaty socks full of pustulous ingrown toes, their piss smells like rotten vegetables and sulphur, they’ve got fish breath and their feet are caked with feces. I can’t believe I was going to eat one. As it is, I think we’re going to have to wrap up this bear in Dub-L-Tuf plastic garbage bags for the ride home if we don’t want to get pulled over for stinking. I sure hope Javier and his cute little kids can get the bear stench off my car. When I get home, when I get rescued …
    What is the holdup with that, anyway? Okay, thinking opti-pessimistically, suppose Baumer led Image Team out into the forest to look for me, and they were all eaten by bears. Suppose that happened yesterday. Still, Marcia and Edna would have stayed back at camp to pout and seethe. And being women, they would be cowering in a car, where I hope they’d have the brains to shut the windows and try not to smell like bear food. But at what point do they decide, when nobody comes back because bears have feasted upon their weak, indecisive entrails, at what point will they figure out the thing to do is to go get proper HELP? Search & Rescue, have you heard of them? Do you have any idea what they do? They search! And then they rescue! What idiot would undertake to search for and rescue me without the aid of Search & Rescue? Let’s say the girls wait for a whole day and then they finally go get HELP. So tomorrow will be the day, tomorrow morning, the sky will be full of HELP in helicopters and seaplanes, searching for me and my car. HELP has infra-red SUV detectors! HELP has smart binoculars! HELP has upholstery-sniffing basset hounds! I’m not even hard to find, just follow the tire tracks from camp to my car. There’s not even any searching involved, just follow the line in the mud.
    Oh look, it’s starting to rain.



7
    BIGGER THAN BEARS: The Marv Pushkin Story!
Chapter Seven: RESCUE AT LAST!
    The next morning as the first stinging rays of the Alaskan sun found me bravely dying beneath my mighty Rover, despairing of seeing ever again my sweet, loving office or feeling the warm embrace of my condominium, as I held back a mighty tsunami of tears with the last strength in my desperate eyelids, clinging boldly to my dwindling rations of hope … all at once I heard a sound, the sweetest sound I’d ever known: the sound of my own name, shouted out in the forest. A search party! Using a combination of loud coughs and elaborate beer can rapping, I announced myself to the Alaskan Forest SWAT Ranger Search & Rescue team. But as these brave men approached my position, I warned them (via morse code) that my ferocious captor would not easily offer up his trophy. Indeed, just then, from out of nowhere, the crazed predator I’d come to know as Mister Bear charged furiously at the phalanx of rescue professionals, his muscular thighs pumping with ursine fury, an ancient battle-snarl echoing from his inhuman, animal, mammalian, beary snout!
    They mowed him down instantly in a blistering hail of high-powered ammunition. “Don’t worry. Mr. Pushkin,” the bald-headed mustachioed Ranger-in-chief told me as he stuck his head under the car to survey my wounds, “the bear’s head is still intact, and I’m sure your Seattle taxidermists can patch up the pelt.”
    Then as the Forest SWAT Ranger Squadron Leader called back to base on his high-powered two-way radio, the other SWAT Rangers jacked up my Rover with military precision, being very respectful of the paint, and polished