Foxworthy Pembroke or "The Bear that Went to Bremerton"
by Pete Merrill

Last week a young bear was sighted sitting in a tree in downtown Bremerton and the newspapers jumped to the conclusion that the bear walked across one of the bridges from East Bremerton or perhaps swam across Port Washington Narrows.

Neither of these suppositions is true. Any bear worth his salt knows better than to walk across a busy bridge unless he is heavily disguised and has had extensive training in walking upright like a human person. Walking like a bear on a bridge attracts unwanted attention. Bears don't much like swimming long distances either, especially in cold water, although they don't mind sitting in warm shallow ponds when the sun is out.

That bear, whose name is Foxworthy Pembroke, came into town on a train.

I'll tell you how it happened.

I

Some years ago I made the acquaintance of a couple of black bears who got me into a lot of trouble. One old boar in particular named Ralph, who has since gone on to whatever reward bears go to, kept my life in turmoil for five years.

Ralph had a grandson named Macduff who lived with him here in my rural neighborhood. Duffy (as we called him) was adopted by Ralph after Duffy's mother ran off with a disreputable old bear named Purple Lips Bartley who lived under a stump down near Kamilche. Ralph was a clever old dude who had more bad habits than the average bear but who also had a reputation as a smart, but politically incorrect curmudgeon with a strong dislike for people and the way they handle their affairs. Duffy naturally picked up a lot of Ralph's bad habits and he got into the usual adolescent mischief when he was growing up around the campground in the park. But as he matured he developed qualities seldom seen in bears -- qualities like honesty and responsibility.

Who, you ask, ever heard of a responsible bear? Well, Duffy actually saved a little girl from a forest fire once, which was written up in some of those tabloids like you get in supermarkets. I haven't time to go back and recount all this stuff again. You'll just have to take my word for it.

Imagine my surprise the other day to find a message slipped under the door of my shop. It was from my old friend Macduff Shakesbear who lives up in the Olympic Mountains. It was a long note and, like everything Duffy ever wrote, hard to read. What it said was that he had gone through here not long ago headed for the Bremerton airport with one of his juvenile relatives that I've never met before.

The young bear's name is Foxworthy (Foxy) Pembroke. Duffy said in his note that they had been down near the Staircase campground a week or two ago and overheard a couple of campers talking about how they work at a place near the Bremerton airport where they transfer lots of garbage off trucks and put it on trains and take it somewhere else where they bury it or something like that.

Anyway, one of the guys said they spill a lot of the stuff on the ground around the railroad tracks and it's too bad they don't have a bunch of goats to clean it up. Duffy said this set him to thinking: whatever a goat can do a bear can do better.

"How about I go down there and find out what this is all about - kind of a civic improvement project-maybe help keep the place tidied up?" Duffy was sure Foxy would like to go with him; he followed Duffy wherever he went anyway. The experience would do him good, sort of broaden his horizons as it were; teach him stealth and evasion skills, too, the stuff that every modern bear must master if he is to survive in the modern world. (It sounds like Duffy has opened some sort of day camp for homeless bears. He didn't put all that in his note but that's the way he talks. I've known Duffy long enough to be able to fill in the gaps in his disjointed narratives.)

Anyway, according to Duffy, Foxy Pembroke was a homeless cub, just like he had once been himself. His mother had run off with a slick-talking Black Bear named Wiley Smark who was always promising gullible female bears a fast life over on the other side of the mountains. Duffy took orphans in just because he was that kind of a bear. Old Ralph would have called him a damn fool for being such a bleeding heart, even though Ralph himself had adopted Macduff after his mother had been abducted by old P.L. Bartley way back in '96 or whenever it was. Ralph was really kind of a blowhard-not nearly as tough as he pretended to be.

I wouldn't have attached much importance to Duffy's note had it not been for the article in the Bremerton paper. I decided there must be a connection between that incident and the appearance of Duffy in the neighborhood.
I was right.

Here's the way it happened…

II

Duffy knew that empty garbage trains run down through the Kamilche Valley, his great uncle Paul Loosefoot lived down there some years ago. Old Ralph used to take Duffy along sometimes when he went down to visit Paul; they called him Percodan Paul because it seemed like he was usually souped up on some kind of personality enhancer. Old Perc had an agreement with the brush pickers in the valley who were mostly all illegals: he told them in sign language, I guess, since neither of them talked the other's language-- that he wouldn't bother them if they would just keep him supplied with whatever kind of stimulants they happened to be using at the time. The trouble was that old Perc, along with everything else, was deafer than a dumbbell and one night back in '03 he was walking along the track, didn't hear the train whistling at him and he got run over. Duffy missed the old coot because he was always full of great yarns, mostly about how he used to outwit the sharpshooters down at the Bear Stew Festival in McCleary.

Anyway, Duffy and the cub went down to the railroad junction near Kamilche one night just before the freight train came along; the one that goes down to the Navy Yard in Bremerton. It stops at the airport to switch around and drop off empty cars for the garbage that gets sorted there. The two bears got into an empty gondola car. Duffy figured they could hide in a corner and never be noticed, since nobody ever looks into the cars anyway and they were both about the same color as the inside of the car so they would blend right in. If somebody did happen to see them, they would simply act tough like bears do and scare the hell out of whoever it was that spotted them. Duffy figured that by the time the F&W dudes got there with their darts they would all be long gone into the woods. (F&W dudes are what Duffy calls the Fish and Wildlife sharpshooters who shoot bears with tranquilizers guns.) Soon they were clickitti-clacking their way down the rails to the siding at the airport.

Foxworthy was asleep when they arrived at the garbage transfer junction and there wasn't much time left before daylight so Duffy jumped off the train to check out the lay of the land without waking Foxy up. This was a big mistake, because the car they were in wasn't a garbage car after all, it was an empty gondola on its way to pick up scrap metal down at the Navy Yard. Just as Duffy had gone off snooping around looking for stuff to eat, the train took off for Bremerton.

Duffy knew there was no way he could catch it and jump aboard. Even though a bear can run 40 miles an hour in a short burst, there's no way he could catch the ladder and leap over the side of the car without ending up like Old Percodan Paul.

In fact, the truth of the matter is that Duffy had no interest in going to Bremerton anyway. The young bear was going to be on his own. This would be one of those situations that tests a young bear's mettle, thought Duffy, "If he survives it will be a good experience for him. It'll test his mettle in a car load of metal." Duffy chuckled about the contrariness of the English language as he headed back to check out the siding to see if there really was any edible garbage laying around like those campers had said. Too bad about Foxy, but Black Bears don't dwell on misfortune much. Life is full of little problems.

The whole trip had been a wild goose chase anyway. There wasn't enough garbage around the place to bother with, and since Duffy wasn't in any hurry he decided to walk home and enjoy the scenery, and that's when he left the note under my door. As it turned out, Foxy actually beat Duffy back to the park. The young cub got to ride back inside one of those barrel traps on a trailer behind a pickup truck driven by F&W dudes.

Duffy got the whole story about Foxy's adventure sometime later. Here's the way Foxy told it:

"I woke up when the train stopped and I couldn't see Duffy anywhere so I climbed over the side of the car and all of a sudden I was in the middle of hundreds of guys in overalls and funny hats all walking in the same direction carrying little buckets like they were on some kind of mission. Nobody paid any attention to me so he just joined up and walked along with them. Then I heard one of the guys say something like 'That there boilermaker's going to get in trouble if he don't get his f-kin' hard hat on."

"Then another guy hollered, 'Hey, that ain't no boilermaker, he looks like one, but, man, that's a f-kin' bear', and then everybody went crazy. Guys were running in all directions. I ran, too, but I kept bumping into fences and things. Finally I got into a big building where it was all kind of dark and stuff and I got into the back of a truck and pretty soon the truck went out and I jumped off and went up a tree and there were a lot of sirens and guys in uniforms and people with cameras and microphones and stuff and some of those F&W dudes came and shot me in the butt and that's all I remember."

As the newspaper said, "It is thought that the bear would be relocated into the Olympics."

"Returned" to the Olympics would have been more accurate.

Foxworthy summed it up: "When those F&W dudes let me out I walked back to Duffy's place. Next time he wants to go on a train ride I'm not going. My butt still hurts."

III

I asked Duffy how come this bear was named Foxworthy Pembroke. "Because Martin Chuzzlewit was already taken," he said.

Overly literate Black Bears can drive a guy nuts.

June 2006