Lake Wobegon Days by Garrison Keillor

second day, they voted to send Weiss. He was the only volunteer. They gave him one end of a ball of twine and out he went, the wind so strong he could hardly stand. He fought his way uphill, missed the path and had to struggle through deep drifts and thick brush, where the end of the string tore from his mitted hand, and he panicked, broke into a gallop, ran into the gale so fierce he couldn’t hear himself scream, ran, fell, ran again, hit a tree, and finally ran full tilt into the porch of Main, which caught him at the knees, and dragged himself to the door and crawled in.
    He lay on the floor, too tired to move. He noticed the strange light in the cold chapel, as if he were underwater, a luminous predawn light, and saw a faint corona around the window above the pulpit. And then he heard breathing that was not his own, and stood up, and saw the bear sitting in the doorway to the gallery, and he turned away and fouled his pants and sat down.
    The bear made no movement toward him and made no sound except for its breathing, which was rough like the rasp of sandpaper. Spit fell from its mouth and froze into a pale milky beard. Its eyes were dim green coals. It was an immense bear, or seemed so to him who had never seen a bear, and staring at it, he could not move where he sat, not even to scratch his nose. The bear seemed to hold him in the power of its evil gaze and in the musky odor of bear. He sat, thinking no thought but that his death was close at hand.
    In Carlyle, when the twine went slack, the students knew he was lost and would die. Some started to go after him and had to be held back by classmates; others stood a few feet outside the door and shouted and shouted his name, “Weiss! Weiss!” The wind was so strong they couldn’t see their hands in front of their faces. Still, they took turns calling to him and whistling and clapping and beating on the eaves with a board, and others knelt in the long dark hall and wept and prayed for him, even after night fell and after they had crawled into beds together to keep warm, they prayed, and one would open the door and shout, long into the night.
    The morning of the third day, they woke up and saw the storm had blown itself out. They wasted no time; all piled out the door and climbed single-file up the path through drifts five and six feet high and broke into the chapel and found him under the pulpit, wrapped in a drape he had torn off the wall, half-frozen, wide-awake, and he told them about the bear. When they didn’t believe him, he showed them his pants.
    On December 10, the question of foreign immigration was debated by members of the Phileopolis club, the affirmative team winning 12-7, nineteen students being all who remained, the others having left. The bear in the chapel had frightened everybody, and then the bear didn’t go away even after they set off rockets and blew a bugle and banged on a drum. Its tracks were found outside Dr. Watt’s house, then on the lawn by Main, then in a circle around Emerson, and then students began to withdraw from the College, one by one, two by two, hauling their trunks to the road to hail a ride to Little Falls and the daily coach to St. Paul. Even Dr. Watt could not stop them. After the first visitation, after paths had been shoveled and the supply of firewood replenished, Dr. Watt spoke at morning chapel a marathon sermon that left his congregation as weak as if they had spent the time struggling through snowdrifts. “His opening prayer consumed twenty-six minutes,” Mr. Reithman noted, “and touched on many points of Old Testament history.”
    Though they didn’t know it, it was a desperate Henry who faced them. His wife had announced at the height of the storm her intention to return to Boston. She had announced this several times before and in better weather, and now she announced it finally and asked him forfive hundred dollars. She had suffered, she said, from his neglect. He was silent around her; he sat reading Bible