Help! A Bear Is Eating Me! by Mykle Hansen Page A

the mud and grime off the axle. Luckily, these Rangers were accompanied by a team of Search & Rescue field neurosurgeons who fit me with a remarkable pair of self-tightening “smart tourniquets”, the newest thing from Japan. They stemmed the loss of blood while preventing gangrene and gently massaging my raw, exposed neurons.
    “Oh Marv, you’re so brave!” oozed Marcia from Product Dialogue, looking succulent in a tight halter-top and shorts. She wore a dainty clothespin over her nose. “I just can’t stand the stench of those nasty evil bears! They swarmed over camp like bees! They ate Edna, they ate Harvey and Jim and the others, oh gosh it was awful! Hold me, Marv!”
    So I held her, and she felt good, damn good, her warm, heaving bosom, her trembling chin. I kissed her, and squeezed her ample posterior. “If I hadn’t been fixing my makeup in the truck,” she trembled, “they would have got me too! So I asked myself, what would Marv do? And I decided to drive back to the ranger station, and I brought the best Search & Rescue team in all Alaska! I can’t live without you, Marv, and neither can Image Team!”
    As Marcia clutched my hand in hers, the SWAT Rangers and their neurosurgical attaché lifted me onto a sumptuously upholstered stretcher and carried me over to have a look at Mister Bear. There, lifeless in the mud, lay my tormentor, the killing spark snuffed from him. This crumpled ball of meat and insulation had for nearly a week toyed with my life, my being, my very existence as a small Papillon dog might toy with a goat tendon. And yet, I felt no hatred, no anger. I felt only the soothing rush of relief and the bracing flush … of Victory.
    “Violence begets violence, my ursine friend,” I said. Then I borrowed a Benelli M2 semiautomatic shotgun from one of the Rangers and pumped a few more rounds into his lifeless body, while they took pictures.
    The doctors gave me an injection, a fundamentally excellent injection, an injection of pure health and restitution, pain relief and succor. Then the loud chopping of a Red Cross SWAT Ranger Search & Rescue helicopter began to macerate the air around us as its gleaming white belly of aerospace aluminum floated overhead. A life-saving hook was winched down to us, and the SWAT Ranger medics carefully secured my stretcher to it.
    “Thank you brave sirs,” I screamed over the howl of the chopper blades, “but what about those killer bears? Something must be done! They’re a menace to peaceful humans like us.”
    “You’re quite right, Mr. Pushkin,” replied bald, rippling, mustachioed, ex-Marine looking SWAT Ranger Jock Thrustsworth — ten year veteran of the Alaskan Bear Wars. “We’ve tried to live in balance with nature long enough. This time, nature went too far . As soon as you and your fiancé are safely out of here, I’m calling in an air strike to napalm this whole forest.”
    I agreed it was the humane thing to do. He signaled the chopper to raise the winch, but just then Marcia threw her warm, supple, heaving body on top of mine. “Oh Marv, I want to go with you! I hate this place!” she sobbed.
    “Be brave, baby. I need you to skin and clean that bear before this whole forest goes up in well-deserved flames. Here, you’ll need my Leatherman Super Tool.”
    “Oh Marv … I’m so hot for you!” she moaned, grinding against me passionately.
    “But Marcia … could you ever love a man with no feet?”
    “Darling, you’re in luck! A white male college basketball player died of food poisoning in Anchorage just a few hours ago. They’re saving the feet for you!”
    “See you at the office, butterbuns!” I held her tongue in mine, and then she let go and the winch lifted me higher and higher up into the beautiful blue Alaskan sky, up into the clouds. And then I knew, finally, that my ordeal was over and everything was going to be fine. Sure, I had grown and changed, learned some important lessons about life, had an “arc” … but