Open Door

      For Brian Bouldrey, who loves the trail and the transformation.

      PROLOGUE

      Like all gifts from the gods, the bear suit first came to Rollo in dreams. One night in the middle of winter, he dreamed of finding a black bearskin on a trail in the woods. It lay across his path, and at first he thought it was a real bear asleep on the ground. As he came closer, he saw that it was an empty skin.

      For some reason, he wasn’t sure why, Rollo walked toward it. He picked the skin up and ran his hand over the dusty, rough brown fur. Then he turned it over and looked at the raw underside. It was yellowish and dry, with the texture of beef jerky. The hide was light as a leaf, long and flat as a plank, hollow as a husk. He sniffed it and found it smelled of old muscle and the ghost of blood. It was complete: the fangs in the mouth, the claws at the ends of the paws, the round, leathery pads at the bottoms of the feet. The eyes of the bearskin were shut tight. There was no telling what was behind the lids. The black nose was hard and shriveled as a prune.

      Just add water, Rollo thought in his dream. Just add water, the spirit of the dried-out bear told him, speaking inside his mind.

      ONE

      April came. The snow was still deep in the passes of the Sierra Nevada mountains, but the foothills were covered in pale green grass. From the town where he lived down in the valley, Rollo could see the foothills on clear days. They seemed to float up from the valley floor. Behind them, like a film set, rose the high mountains with white snow capping the peaks. When Rollo looked at them he felt an ache in his heart. In his mind, he ran over his plans for escape.

      Rollo endured the winter in town because he had no choice. Living there meant living in the messed-up, manmade world like everyone else. He hated every minute of it. At twenty-seven, he still lived in the converted garage at his mother’s house and worked at a supermarket for money. He had no car, no girlfriend, and no friends, unless you counted people he knew from high school. He sometimes saw familiar faces in the mall. He rode his bike everywhere and took classes in environmental science at the junior college. School had nothing to teach Rollo. He knew everything about nature already, but taking the courses kept his mother quiet. More and more these days, she worried about his future.

      He used to tell his mother that his future was in the mountains. But then she got the idea that Rollo planned to become a park ranger. For a while, this thought made her happy, and she went around telling her friends that Rollo “had his heart set” on joining the Forest Service. She liked the idea so much that she kept bringing it up, asking him what steps he had to take to join the service, what certifications he would need. When she offered to give him money to buy his first uniform, he finally told her the truth. Angrily, he shouted that he would never in a million years want to become a park ranger. He thought park rangers were just a kind of police force for nature. He would never, ever agree to be part of anything like that.

      His mother started to cry when Rollo told her that what he really wanted was to become part of the park.

      Rollo tacked up a row of maps on the walls of his room. He placed them so they lined up perfectly and made one big, continuous map of the length of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. The maps were very detailed, the best Rollo could find. They showed all the landforms: rivers, forests, hills and valleys, lakes. They showed the steepness of the mountains using fine brown contour lines that swirled like fingerprints around the peaks. Where the lines were far apart, it meant the land rose gently. Where they were close together, it meant the grade was steep.

      Rollo stood in front of the wall of maps for hours at a time. He traced routes with his index finger and imagined hiking along them. He chose the steepest paths, the ones that cut straight up the close-packed contour lines. He could almost sense how hard those hikes would be, and how he would feel when he reached the top of the mountain and stood there, alone. He laughed loudly to himself.

      “Are you all right in there?” It was his mother, calling through his locked door. Her ears were as sensitive as a bat’s.

      Rollo didn’t bother answering her. He felt trapped. He couldn’t wait another minute to be away from here. To be in the mountains. He dragged his old green pack out from under his bed. For many seasons, that pack had been his only friend as he hiked through the wilderness. He opened the top and turned it upside down. A small pinecone and a handful of glittering mica dust fell onto his bed. He put his face inside the pack and breathed in the smell of woodsmoke and pine needles. It calmed him down. He stayed that way, with his head in the pack, until he heard his mother go away.

      TWO

      Rollo’s idea of paradise was a wilderness without people. It was the Garden of Eden after the angel with the burning sword had thrown Adam and Eve out.

      It wasn’t that he hated other human beings on a personal level. He wasn’t one of those crazy guys who showed up in public places with guns. He just didn’t see the point to people. He wished they would painlessly disappear forever. They annoyed him with their silly questions and their demands. He wasn’t interested in the things they made, like cars and computers and buildings. He had no use for the stupid gizmos, like cell phones, that they got so excited about. What good were cell phones when all you could do with them was talk to other human beings?

      But although Rollo didn’t really hate people, he did hate what they were doing to the planet. He thought about this all the time. It kept him awake at night. He followed the news about climate change and believed that human beings were causing it by burning too many fossil fuels. He knew that many animals were dying out because humans were destroying their habitats.

      All this made Rollo angry, but it didn’t surprise him one bit. It was exactly what he expected from mankind. Human beings were big fat hogs, in his opinion. There was no limit to how much of the earth they would take for themselves. They would leave nothing for plants or animals—or for people like him, who only wanted to be left alone.

      Rollo