Sci Fi Story

Hmmm, its been a while, so I will repeat the start of the Legend...I'm trying to not make the entries too long, so let me know about the length of it.

"There was a man that came across a bear many years ago. The bear was looking for something to eat and the man just happened to be in the same valley. This was before the men could communicate with bears. The man turned to get away from the bear, but the bear kept approaching, faster and faster until the man could hear the heavy footsteps rapidly approaching. The man slipped and fell cutting his knee on the rocks. He looked around and found several trees that had piled up into a deadfall. He scrambled as quickly as he could. When the bear came to the spot where the man fell, it licked his blood on the rocks, and roared loudly then sat there. The man cowered deeper under the logs, and stayed quiet, fearful even of breathing. The bear sat, and would not move. It soon began to howl up at the moon as it came out above the mountains and between the tall lodgepole pines as they swayed in the wind.

The man although frightened could see that the bear was troubled, and he decided to try to discover the reason the bear was so sad. The whole night passed with the bear growling and howling at the moon, but somehow the young man managed to fall asleep listening to this. When he awoke, the bear was gone, but footprints were all around the ground just feet away from where the man lay. He hurried off to distance himself from the bear."

The entire time the man was swiftly leaving the woods, he could not stop thinking about the majestic bear. How it roared...How it chased him... and especially how the bear howled up at the moon. By the time the man had left the woods, returned to his pick up and begun to drive back to his cabin the bear was all that he could think about. The man slept that night, and in his dream he encountered the bear. The bear was sitting in the woods, the man dreamed that he walked up to the bear, and sat down beside it. The bear was motionless for a while, but when the full moon poked out from betweeen the clouds, the bear howled with a lonesome melancholy moan. They sat this way in the dream, watching the full moon cross the sky, and the bear spoke. This scared the man so much, that the man awoke immediately without listening to what the bear had said. The man was sweating and breathing hard, the dream was exhilerating, yet the man was confused and intrigued by the dream. He had always known his dreams to explain the real world around him, but bears did not speak in the real world. No other animals had spoken, with the exception of the occassional pet parrot, or the chimpanzee that "knew" sign language. The man had come to a crossroads. He could find out what the bear said in his dream, or choose to ignore it. The man chose to listen to the bear...but he could not recall what the bear had said to him. Although he tried very hard to sleep, the dream would not reoccur to him. The man gave it one week, and decided he should learn more about that bear.

The man packed up his camping gear, and several small tools he liked to take with him. He loaded up the gear in his truck, and drove back to the trail head where he had first met the bear. He parked, leaving a note in the windshield of his truck. The note said only, "Gone to find that bear, back in a week or two." No name, only a date scrawled in the lower corner. The man lived in a place where people didn't know other peoples names, or sometimes they knew only their first names. Everyone in the region knew what the other people drove, as that was usually the only time they would see each other...at the gas station, the store, on the road passing each other.

The man followed the trail, and eventhough he wanted to find the bear, he didn't want to scare the bear on the trail. The man sang as he hiked, hoping that the bear would hear him and move away from the sound of people as bears are known to do. The trail climbed slowly with a rocky mountain stream splashing alongside it. Sometimes the trail crossed the stream, and sometimes the stream crossed the trail until it eventually ended up in a large U-shaped valley with a lake in the bottom of it. The lake was the source of the stream, and was clear and deep. The man set up camp on the side of the lake, and spent the rest of the day making the camp his home.

The man slept that night and dreamed about the bear. The bear came out of the woods, and sat across the lake from the man staring at him. It was motionless. It sat that way for what seemed like hours in his dream, until he awoke. When he woke up, he looked accross the lake, to see if the bear was there. It was not, and the man slowly drifted back to sleep.

The morning sun seemed to take a long time to reach the man's camp, and he awoke in the shade of the mountains, as the sun had not raised itself high enough to shine down on the little lake. The man watched a light fog that hovered over the lake and the surrounding forest. The man cleaned up camp, and set out for a day hike, to the peaks surrounding this little valley. The hike was off trail, and strenuous as their was no easy way to go up the side of the mountain. The man came to a section of trees that had been knocked over by winter avalanches. The treetops were all pointed towards the lake, and the roots were pointing up to the mountain ridge. The man sat there looking at this obstacle, approached it, and then began to climb up the trunks of the trees. This was easier, and the man rapidly ascended the slope. He sat down and surveyed the valley when he got to the top. Searching for the bear, but only a couple of elk, a marten, and some ravens were to be found. He passed his day sitting in the pleasant sunshine, whittling on a piece of wood, or scrounging for berries or mushrooms to eat.

The man watched the sunset over the far side of the valleys mountain tops. He then proceeded to retrace his steps back down the mountain to the valley floor. When he got back to the camp, he sat down and proceeded to make a small campfire. Once the fire was going, the man went to the lake to try to catch a fish for supper. While sitting on the water's edge, the man noticed that there accross the lake, exactly where it appeared in his dream sat the Grizzly bear. He got up slowly and walked back to the fire without catching a fish for dinner. The whole night long, he kept wood on the fire and one eye on the bear, and the bear didn't move until the sun began to lighten the sky at dawn.

to be continued....