Lake Wobegon Days by Garrison Keillor Page A

commentaries and writing his sermons and staring into the fire. Outside their home, she said, he was voluble and manly and kept a cheerful disposition, but once in the door, he collapsed into a dark and impenetrable mood, and whenever she spoke, he didn’t respond. He did not respond to her affections, he did not appear to recognize her. “How can you be so generous with others, even utter strangers, and here in your house with your own wife be so cold, so removed?” she wondered. “Your better nature you show to the world, and your dark nature you show to me and to me alone! All I see is darkness and brooding and silence. Have you no love left for me?” She stood over him as she spoke, and he couldn’t look at her. He said nothing. She wept, she knelt and touched his knee, then her voice turned quiet and resolute and she demanded the money—all this without a word from Henry.
    Dr. Watt’s sermon began with Christ’s suffering on the cross, and it proceeded to other suffering of those faithful to Him, of Stephen and other apostles and martyrs, and it went back to the prophets and their foreknowledge of that suffering, and to the Psalmist and the Children of Israel and to Job, and here Dr. Watt himself was exhausted but he beat on and began to talk about the bear as a messenger of God. God uses animals to work His Will, sometimes happily as with the dove of Noah and the birds who fed Elijah and the lions who proved Daniel’s faith and the swine who received the demons cast out, but also as instruments of judgment as in the case of the bear who came out of the woods to devour the children who mocked God’s servant Elisha for his baldness. As he delved into Elisha’s career, it became terribly evident to all that the President, now freed from his text and moving away from the pulpit and into the aisle and bracing himself with one hand against pew after pew and speaking thunderously, considered himself to be Elisha and was searching the chapel for those children who had mocked him in their hearts, to whom God had sent the bear as punishment. He couldn’t stop himself. He recited his many efforts in their behalf, his dedication, his hard work, and their offenses, their indolence, their unworthiness. “Why?” he shouted. “Why? Why has thou forsaken me?” Nobody made an attempt to stop him. Everyone in the room was making his own plan for escape.
    Five boys left immediately after chapel with the father of one of them, who had come in a wagon with clean laundry. Dr. Watt didn’t come out to say good-bye.
    That afternoon, fresh tracks were found by two students returning from cutting wood, and a band of five led by Mr. Reithman with a rifle marched off to find the beast’s den and to kill it. The bear was large and black, judging from the footprints and the tufts of hair found in bushes, and their long trek only determined that he had been circling the College, approaching as near as a hundred feet to Carlyle and Emerson, and that he had been joined by a second bear and perhaps a third. That night, a guard was posted in the belfry. “A sleepless night for all,” wrote Mr. Reithman, “due in some part to choruses of ursine snorts and growls which the wakeful addressed to those who slept, some of whom awoke to find tufts of bear fur on their pillows.”
    Mrs. Watt left on the 13th to spend Christmas with friends in St. Paul, four boys leaving with her. Dr. Watt explained to Mr. Reithman that she was nervous and preoccupied due to lack of feminine company, and he was sending her away lest she lose her senses. Mrs. Watt handed Mr. Reithman a note as he helped her into the sleigh. The note begged him to pray for her and to put food out for the bear. Instead, a trap baited with jelly and syrup was rigged close to the fresher circumference of tracks. It was found licked clean but unsprung on the morning of the 14th. A nearby tree showed deep claw marks to the height of ten feet.
    On the 15th, Dr. Watt announced in