The Bear: A Novel by Claire Cameron Page A

pulls his body up and then falls because his head is so big like a basketball and it pulls him over all the time. The cookies go clank on the canoe and Stick’s head goes crack on the edge and I think uh-oh that’s going to be bloody. I look at the edge for the blood and I see the water is there and the fish army. There are no fish but the water is right at the edge and Stick is in a ball on the bottom and one of his legs is hooked up on the bar and the other is not. We are tipsy.
    I put both my hands out on the other side. Both my hands are on the edge of the canoe and I spread my knees wide out and hang my head over. I keep my hips still but we wiggle the other way and I lean. This is what Momma made me do when she would sit in the canoe and try to make it tipsy. I would stop it by holding still and she would try again and again and she is bigger so after a lot of times we could tipsy into the water and be wet and she grabs me and we laugh.
    “Sit, Stick,” I say in the Daddy voice and push my eyebrows in the middle.
    I look over and he is crying and still in a pile.
    “Get to the middle,” I say.
    It’s one of the biggest rules in our family. When Daddy and Momma are pushing the canoe and Momma steers from the back and Daddy is the power at the front and Stick and I have to sit in the middle. I get to sit on Coleman because I am better at not wiggling and being higher up and Stick sits on the bag with our clothes that is squishy so sometimes I wish I sat there because Stick always gets the good things. But really I like the back most times because Momma will talk to me in a quiet voice. We can have our fishing rods in the water and even I can play with Lego but there is no standing up if we want to stay in the middle.
    I lean out and look at water and then smack the water comes up to my face. I jump back and grab the other side of the edge and I put my knees out and we tipsy that way so far my fingers are in so I jump into the middle and we rock to one side and the other and I look down and away and see that Stick has rolled into the middle like a good boy. His leg is still up on the bar but he is on his back and his pj’s are all wet because now he is lying in water that got in the canoe. My face is wet too. And my fingers. I wait until the canoe isn’t tipsy.
    “Stay, Stick,” I say.
    “Okey.”
    “Good dog.”
    Stick sticks out his tongue but he doesn’t really play.
    I can see red bang on the side of Stick’s head but not blood. He has a bang and he looks sad lying on his back with his foot in the air and in the water that is on the bottom of the canoe. I keep my hands on both edges and move in to see him and the cookie tin is floating by. I grab it. The water covers my foot only and there is no tin can with the label peeled off and it used to have tomatoes that we can use to get the water out of the boat. I help Stick up and the back of his hair is sopping wet but hangs onto the water and goes like a white fin at the back of his head.
    “I am the queen and magic and you are in the fish army,” I say.
    “Fishie.”
    “Okay?”
    Stick nods and he is staring at the cookie tin and thinks I might take it away. I get my fingers on it and it is slippy and wet and I kind of wish I had claws so I could stick one in the hole that is in the top that wasn’t there before when we left the cottage. I snuck a cookie when Momma wasn’t looking. She found the lid off when I forgot to put it back because the cookie was so good I had to eat it right away. She looked at the lid off to the side and put it back. She looked at me and smiled and said “A bear must have gotten into our cookie tin.” And I smiled too and shrugged my shoulders so she wouldn’t know. I get the lid off and whoa the smell of cookies and there are chocolate chips and I stuff one into my mouth and take another and give one to Stick. Finally he is eating a cookie and he is quiet and we are sitting in ankle water in the canoe with sopping wet