I'm With the Bears by Mark Martin Page A

carelessness. The punctures were not deep and did not require stitches; he slathered them in antibiotic ointment and left it at that.
    So that no one would notice the marks he ran his half-marathons in long pants; should anyone ask, he was rock climbing, in the mountains and at the gym. Thence came the battered kneecaps, the scrapes on his elbows and knuckles and cuts on his fingertips.
    At the beginning he was afraid of the predators, and though he chose with great care, avoiding animals known to be highly territorial or prone to aggression, he was still wary. They were not pets. But he soon lost this novice fear. It was not his habit to stalk the animals, merely to enter their enclosures and sit in one place to observe them. So he waited for each animal to show itself, and over time he grew tired, then bored; he was amazed at the depth and reach of his boredom, the way minutes and hours wore on uneventfully. For the animals too the greater part of captivity was waiting: when their food was delivered the last animals fed, slept and briefly forgot, he believed, the urgency of hunger. Then they awoke and the waiting started again.
    He wished he knew if they got impatient. Expectation struck him as a human impulse, but then he thought of his dog. Her days were entirely given over to expectation, it seemed to him.
    Waiting for a feeding the animals paced or swam or leapt from branch to branch, as their natures dictated, with a bat now and then at a so-called enrichment tool or a peck at an errant insect. Their lives were simple monotony. They slept to use up time; this was how their days were spent, the last sons and daughters.
    In the wild, he thought, there would be almost no waiting. Waiting was what happened to you when you lost control, when events were out of your hands or your freedom was taken from you; but in the wild there would always be trying. In the wild there must be trying and trying, he thought, and no waiting at all. Waiting was a position of dependency. Not that animals in the wild were not watchful, did not have to freeze in place, alert and unmoving—they must do so often—but it would hardly be waiting then. It would be more like pausing.
    Time must run more quickly there, matching heat and cold to the light of day and the dark of night. Familiarity with this pace would spin out through long days, as though it would never change: now and then would come quick fear or a close call, but mostly the ease of doing what had always been done. For a second a prey animal might grow complacent, and then in a rush the end came. As the animal moved where it had always moved, a scent on the wind might stop it. The last surge of adrenaline, the lightheadedness of a bloodletting: sleep again in the fade, in the warm ground of home. And how different could it be when the death was a last death? Say an individual was the very last of its kind. Say it was small—one of the kangaroo rats for instance—and ran from a young fox through a hardscrabble field, towering clouds casting long shadows over the grass. The run lasted a few seconds only; no one was watching, no one at all because there was no one for miles around, no one but insects and worms and a jet passing high overhead. Say neither of them knew either, the fox or the rat, that the rat was the last, that no rat like him would ever be born again. Was it different then? Did the world feel the loss? The field stayed a field, the sky remained blue. Any pause that occurred as the action unfurled, any split-second shifting of the vast tableau would have to be imagined by an onlooker who did not exist. The fox started to run again, looking for his next quarry since the last animal had been barely a mouthful. And yet a particular way of existence was gone, a whole volume in the library of being. Others were sure to fall afterward—a long fly with iridescent wings that lived only in the nest of this single rat, say; a parasite that lived under the wing of