Bunny came to sit beside him and look at the illuminated computer keys. She wrapped her tail around his free wrist. She knew better than to touch the computer while the drone was flying. She had crashed several expensive models in the early days.

“I know, Bunny,” he said. “You’re tired of looking for these bears. So am I. But you know the routine. First we find the bears. Then we go look at them. Then we follow them. If they are black bears acting normal, we’ll let them be. If they are black bears hunting humans, we’re done. We’ll let the local cops know where they live and they can decide. If we find the red bears, well, then we’ll have some fun. Then we catch one. Or maybe even two. We might find a breeding pair, and save a whole species.”

Bunny pointed at the computer screen. Jeremy looked. There were three large lights moving in a V-shaped pattern. It was a hunting pattern. If they were hunting something, he couldn’t see what it was. They were near the lake, where the cliffs were. He and Bunny had been there the week before and had found four black sloth bears—a mated pair and their two half-grown cubs—rummaging through scrub brush in broad daylight. They were smallish bears and had run from Jeremy. They were definitely not the bears he was looking for. But that was on the other side of the lake, where the forest was clear.

“Those must be wolves, Bunny,” he said. “Look at the way they’re moving.” He zoomed in the thermal camera. They were awfully big to be wolves. “Strange. I don’t think those are wolves, but it’s hard to believe they’re bears. I don’t think there are wolves in India that size. The way they’re moving, they look like lions. Oh, shit,” he pointed at a new, smaller bright spot on the screen. “It picked up whatever they’re after, looks like a deer. They’re moving too fast to be sloth bears. If we drive to the base of the cliffs we can cut them off here, I bet,” he indicated another spot on the computer. “Drive over here and then hike up on foot.”

Bunny reached over and closed the computer. Jeremy grabbed it and opened it back up again. The drone was flying fine, on course.

“Bunny, you know better. That was not cool.”

Up on the ridge Jeremy spotted the three bears. He was using his night scope so he couldn’t see their colour. One of the bears was enormous, as big as a Canadian black bear or even a small grizzly, and the other two were large for sloth bears. They were no longer hunting and Jeremy supposed they were heading for home. A light rain was falling and Jeremy wiped the sight on his scope with a handkerchief and then wiped off his face. There was no wind and, with the rain, he was certain the bears couldn’t smell him. Bunny was sitting on a tree stump, under cover out of the rain, drinking tea out of their thermos. He put his pack back on, slung both the dart gun and the old rifle over his shoulder, took the thermos away from Bunny and poured the last of their tea into the cup for her. When she finished the tea she climbed up onto the pack, screwed the cup back on the thermos and tucked it in its side pocket. Then she positioned herself on the pack to ride with him in her usual spot and he put her down on the ground.

“You’re walking, Bunny,” he said. “All that lazing around the temple has got me out of shape. This damn pack is heavy enough.”

She looked at him reproachfully and then followed along close behind him.

Jeremy was on his belly, 25 yards from the cave, and he lay there and listened for a long time. He could smell the clean, healthy, musky odour of their den. The wind was blowing up the river bed, making a hollow noise, but he thought he could hear one of the bears snoring.

He had seen them while tracking them, and they were the fabled red bears: the enormous mother, probably 600 pounds, twice as big as an ordinary sloth bear, as big as a Yukon brown bear, and her two adolescent cubs, easily 200 pounds each, big enough so that it was like capturing three fully grown bears at once. The snare only needed to hold the mother long enough for him to dart her and make some distance between himself and the three tranquillized bears. The tranquillizer could take ten minutes or more to work but he knew that the cubs wouldn’t abandon their snared mother and the tranquillizer would slow them down if they did. In the worst case he had the rifle.

He took out his spade and the trap-pipe to anchor the snares and started to dig, as quietly as he could, in the hard soil. Bunny watched him, keeping her distance. Once while he was digging on his knees she ran down, put one of the snares back in the backpack, and tried to drag the backpack away. He grabbed the strap of the pack and shook his head at her. “I don’t like it one hundred percent either, Bunny,” he said, “but it’s the best we can do under the circumstances. I can’t think of a safer way to do it.” She let go of the pack and went back on top of a boulder to watch. There were no trees that he could chain the pipe to, once it was buried, so he wrapped the length of a chain around a small boulder and secured it with a padlock. As he worked he paused often to listen. The bears were quiet in the cave.

He checked the wind again and positioned himself on the ground about 50 yards from the mouth of the cave in the scrub brush on the edge of the bear path to wait.

The bears didn’t come out the first night. They didn’t come out the second night either, and on the following day Jeremy crept into the mouth of the cave to be sure they were there. He could smell them and they made a hollow sound while they slept, a gentle, whooshing sound like the vacuuming noise a sloth bear makes when it is eating termites from a mound. On the third night he had fallen asleep with his chin on the dart gun when he heard the bears coming out of the cave and awoke. It was dusk but there was light to see. All three of them stood at the mouth of the cave, shoulder to shoulder, with their snouts in the air, sniffing. The wind was uncertain and Jeremy wasn’t sure whether or not they could smell him.

The mother advanced ahead of the cubs and missed the first trap. She missed the second trap. She was closing in on him. He checked his dart gun, aimed at the bright white collar of fur across her chest between her front legs. Then he heard one of the traps snap and the cub in the rear, the blonder one, the smaller, younger male, cried out in pain. Another trap snapped and it howled again. The mother reared up and twisted back toward her cub. He had a good shot at her shoulder and belly as she turned and he fired. The dart hit her in the fat behind her front arm and stuck. It was a solid strike. She snorted in surprise and turned back towards him. The male bear was crying loudly for his mother, in real distress, pulling with both of his legs at the snares. His right front leg and his left rear leg were snared and he was struggling desperately. The pipe wouldn’t stay in the soil for long, he was too strong. His sister stood up on her hind legs and looked around, above the brush, with a deliberate, searching expression. Her long front claws were distended in alarm. Jeremy quickly reloaded the dart gun and faced the mother bear on his knees. She saw him and charged.

He fired the second dart too quickly and it struck her in the face and bounced off. There was no time to reload the dart gun or to pick up the rifle, which he’d left on the ground beside him, or even to run, if there had been somewhere he could have run, which there wasn’t. He understood that his best chance was to fight the bear as fiercely as he could with the only weapon he had, the butt of his tranquillizer gun. He had time to turn it in his hands and stand before she was on top of him. She came straight into him at full speed and knocked him onto his back. The gun bounced away and he scrambled onto his knees. She reared above him and dropped down, slicing into his back with both of her paws. The amount of blood was astonishing. He cried out and put his hands on his back and tried to roll over and get away from her. She slashed at his head and neck with her long, hooked claws. She caught him in the face and he remembered a story he had heard, about two girls in the woods who played dead while brown bears batted them around for hours. He stopped moving. The earth felt hot beneath his hands. The mother bear decapitated him.

Bunny found Jeremy’s head where it had rolled to the dry river bed and she sat next to it and looked at it. The head was turned up to the sky. Jeremy’s face was dangling backwards off the skull to one side—it had been peeled from the left ear to the nose—and Bunny lifted the face with her paws and tried to push it back into place. She struggled with it for several minutes until she had it almost right. Then she patted the cheeks with her paws. She sat there for several minutes patting the cheeks gently with her palms and her claws before a vulture spotted them and swooped down to land a few feet away. Bunny ran into the woods on the other side of the river bank.

She had never been alone in the woods. It was deep in the night, a light rain was falling, and Bunny could hear and smell all of the animals of the rain forest. She was high in a tree, watching the foliage around her for snakes. She was hidden from the vultures and eagles beneath the tree canopy but an owl hissed and screeched in a tree not so far away. Bunny lifted her nose into the air. She didn’t sleep.

There were large brown ants on the tree and they started to bite her. She brushed them off and moved to a different branch but they were there, too. More and more ants were climbing on her and biting her. She brushed them off with both paws and wrapped her tail around a branch. They were going for her eyes, her ears and her belly. She scrambled down to the ground.

When she was on the ground in a pile of muddy leaves she carefully picked each ant off herself, one by one, and bit off their heads. She climbed into a different tree and felt an ant. She tried to grab it but it was too small. She scratched herself but couldn’t find the ants. She was itching under her legs and her arms. Her ears itched. She could feel the ants all over her but they weren’t biting, they were making her itch. It was worse than the biting. She dug into her ear fiercely, hurting herself, and caught a tiny one crawling in her ear canal. She held it in her claws and inspected it. It was a louse. She bit it but it escaped. She was covered with them.

She climbed down the tree to search for water to drown the lice. She hated water but the itching was driving her crazy. She thought of the backpack again, which had a half-empty bottle of scotch inside, and bottled water, and at least a dozen protein bars, and apples and radishes. She saw white berries on a bush covered with orange flowers. She sniffed them. They didn’t have any smell. She pulled three berries from the branch and nibbled one. It was bitter. She spat and wiped her muzzle with her hands. The lice continued to crawl all over her. She couldn’t smell any running water and she didn’t know where to look for it.

It was morning and Bunny hadn’t slept. The lice were still biting and she had a bad stomachache. She was walking along the edge of the dry river bank in short grass where she could keep low. She didn’t like staying out in the open, but it was dangerous in the woods. There was no safe place for her. Normally they were in a tent or if they were on a long hunt and traveling light, sleeping outdoors, Jeremy would put down her blanket and prop up his pack as a lean-to for her. She remembered the way back to their truck but she didn’t want to go to it without Jeremy. She was exhausted and she didn’t know where she was walking. She thought if she walked for long enough, her situation might improve.

She found a muddy spot and rolled in it, covering herself with as much mud as she could, to try to kill the lice. She was very, very thirsty. She had to find water. She rolled to her feet and started to walk up the riverbank again in the hot sun.

She was caked in dried mud. Two black eagles caught sight of her and followed her. She watched their shadows come and go on the riverbed. She tried not to look up too often because they could see her watching them and it would encourage them. One of the eagles swooped down and she ran into the forest. It was close behind her, following her into the trees, and she felt it miss her by a few feet. It smelled like blood. She hid in the roots of a tree, turned around, and watched the forest around her. It was silent and motionless. She couldn’t see the eagle. She was thirsty and itchy, but she kept still. She had so many problems now that she had to prioritize.

Bunny stood at the edge of the stream, itching her lice and watching the two young crocodiles. They weren’t much bigger than she was. Their eyes were open but they were asleep. Slowly, observing them carefully the whole time, without making any noise, she drank. She could see small fish in the water and she was ravenously hungry but she hesitated to try to catch them. The crocodiles could wake. There could be larger fish in the river, and snakes. She hated water. She was a bad swimmer. A fish flicked past her, and without thinking she jumped in to catch it in her jaws. She missed the fish. The water was deeper than it looked and the current was strong. She panicked and started to claw at the water with all four feet but the current had her. It pulled her down to the bottom of the stream and tumbled her along the riverbed. She closed her eyes and held her breath. Then she hit a rock, hard, and the air blew out of her lungs, but she managed to swim to the surface and blink.

One of the young crocodiles glided into the stream after Bunny. The other one raised its head and watched for a moment, snapped its jaws in the air at mosquitoes on the river’s edge, and then pushed itself into the water. Bunny was swimming toward the bank, making slow progress from the middle of the stream where the current had taken her, and she didn’t see them. She had her head raised as high as she could above the water and she dog-paddled, steering with her tail. She was making progress. Then she felt a tug and a terrible pain in her tail. As she went under the water she saw the crocodile had her. It yanked at her tail and pulled her down to the bottom of the stream.

Bunny fought with the crocodile underwater. It dragged her to the bank and started to roll, and then changed its mind and tried to pin her between its feet. It was a young, inexperienced crocodile that still hadn’t mastered how to drown its victims. Bunny was biting the crocodile on the leg while it chewed and tore at her tail. There was blood in the water. The crocodile had a small snout but it wagged its head and ground her tail between its baby teeth until it tore away the end of her tail. It chewed the piece from Bunny’s tail in its jaws, spat it out, and then caught it again to eat it before it floated away.

Bunny was drowning. She had bitten through the crocodile’s forearm but the crocodile didn’t seem to notice. She tried to claw at its eyes but they were closed. When it released her for a moment to eat the end of her tail she startled to scramble away but it caught her tail and one of her haunches in its jaws again. She clawed at the rocks on the loose soil of the riverbank to try to escape. Then she took a rock and started to smash it against the head of the crocodile as it shook her back and forth. She got her head above the water for a moment and breathed, and then it pulled her back down by the leg. She wriggled loose and it snapped at her to get a better hold, and she pushed the rock in her claws down its throat. Both of her arms were in the crocodile’s jaws and she held her head up as it thrashed to the surface and back down under the water. The crocodile had the rock stuck deep in its throat and it couldn’t swallow or close its jaws. Its teeth tore at her skin and she pulled out her hands and swam away. The other crocodile was motionless in the water, watching her. She climbed up the bank. Both of her arms were bleeding, the skin was torn all the way up to her shoulders, and her tail was bleeding where the end had been bitten away. She watched the water seething where the crocodile twisted and spun, rising to the surface and then dropping back under again. Then she turned into the forest and went to look for a place to sleep.

A long, skinny green beetle with pale yellow wings walked carefully on a twig. Bunny watched it, trying to make up her mind. Then she picked it up with both hands and stuffed it into her jaws. She hunted for another one.

Bunny sat in the morning sun on the edge of a high, stony ravine, eating black beetles.

Her tail hurt. She concentrated on keeping it lifted up off the ground, but it dragged when she was walking and the wound reopened. Almost half of her tail had been bitten away. The lice didn’t bother her anymore. Her shoulders were scabbed and there was dried blood all over her back and her bottom.

She was a mess.

When she was full of the buttery beetles she walked to a stream that ran down a cliff. The mist in the air from the waterfall made a rainbow over the ravine.

The day was already hot, and she needed a safe place to sleep until night. She drank.

She climbed down the steep wall of the ravine face down, using her sore tail to hold on to the shrubs and short trees that clung to the cliff face. The spray from the waterfall felt good in her fur and her face. When she was halfway down, she found a long crevice with a shelf in the rock—she sniffed for snakes, there was no odour—and she slipped into it, curled up and fell asleep.

Bunny dreamt of Jeremy. In the dream Jeremy was young, he had acne on the side of his face, and they were on a stage together, looking at a large crowd of people. The people were seated in chairs and they watched Bunny and Jeremy. She was on his shoulder with her tail wrapped around his neck and he was talking to the people in the crowd. At one point in the dream he offered her a sip of whiskey from a bottle. She was eager for the whiskey but then it only tasted like water. When she woke it was dark and time to get on the move.

At night she walked. She walked all night long, every night, not knowing where she was going. She ate insects and eggs from nests and small lizards and even once part of a snake. She watched for hawks, eagles and owls. Her wounds healed and she grew skinny. She was out of the forest and into the farms of the lowlands. The countryside was broken into fields and there were people to avoid. It was easy to steal food from the garbage piles and the fruit trees. While walking she stayed close to the road and the gullies on the sides of the roads because she could hide in the tall grass and there were not as many dogs as in the fields. Bunny didn’t mind dogs because she outwitted them effortlessly. But they were a nuisance. She learned to sleep in the open sun.

Near dawn a family of men passed her on the dirt road in their tractor. 12 of them, from four or five generations, were squeezed into a wooden trailer behind the tractor, and all of them watched her. Their expressions were very serious, like they were considering catching her. One small boy with shiny eyes was poised to leap out of the trailer. Bunny was tired and not in the mood to be harassed by humans. She whistled scornfully. All the men broke out in laughter.

Then she had great luck. She found an apiary.

Bunny inspected the hives from the branches of a short apple tree that grew on the edge of the apiary and the immense field of sunflowers. The moon was almost full and she didn’t like the moonlight in the field. She had raided bee hives many times during her travels with Jeremy, while he slept, and she knew that the bee farmers were likely to have dogs and shotguns.

At the far edge of the field was a metal shed with a light. Music played inside the shed. A farmer came out, peed into the field away from the beehives, washed his face and brushed his teeth in a barrel and went back inside. She waited. The music went off and the light went out. Bunny climbed down the tree and crept carefully into the field, keeping low, her belly against the ground. She heard the deep woofing of a big dog not very far away, but she couldn’t smell it. Another dog started to bark, and then another, and she froze. She lifted her nose and caught their scent. They weren’t in the bee field, they were a few hundred yards distant. She moved again. Soon she was at the first hive. It was a short hive, no taller than she was, made of light wood, with no lock or latch, and it was easy for her to pry off the lid. It fell to the ground with a loud noise and she froze again and listened. The dogs were still barking but there was no other sound. The beekeeper was asleep. She climbed on top of the hive, the angry bees buzzing around her, crawling on her and trying vainly to sting. They didn’t bother her. She lifted a honeycomb out of the hive and started to eat.

Bunny sat at the edge of the bee field in the evening sun, playing with an empty diet coke can. She threw it into the air and jumped to catch it. Her balance was off—she was still learning how to move with only half a tail—and she missed it and fell on her side. But she was amused by her accident and she squeaked twice and whistled. She surprised herself when she whistled and she whistled again. It was the first happy sound she had made in a month.

She was living in a broken wardrobe a mile from the apiary. Every night she waited until the beekeeper and the beekeeper’s boy fell asleep and then she went around the side of apiary next to the field of sunflowers and found a new beehive to open. After a few nights of that the beekeeper had added hinges, latches and locks to the beehives, but it was easy for Bunny to chew through the thin, flimsy wood of the hives and pry the hinges loose. Some of the padlocks were new and she couldn’t pick them with her claws. But the large old brass padlocks were easy for her to open, and she liked to wait up and watch the beekeeper in the morning after a raid: he’d pick up the lock, look at it with confusion, shake his head sadly and then put the lid back on the hive and lock it again. Sometimes he cursed while he did it. He never suspected she was in one of his own apple trees, hiding behind a branch, staring at him from between the green leaves and the apples.

Once the sun set she walked down to the stream near the road where all of the local farmers got their water and drank. A car passed, its headlights on, crossing the bridge, and she ducked into a culvert. There were tiny brown snakes in the mud and they coiled around her feet and her tail. She stepped gingerly between them and then pushed them away. She was getting hungry.

She took her usual route through the apple trees and along the edge of the sunflower field to the beehives furthest from the beekeeper’s home. She waited at the edge of the farm until he brushed his teeth and washed in the water barrel, and his music was off and his light was out. She waited a while longer to be safe. It was a cloudy night, a good night, with almost no moonlight. She started into the bee farm, heading for a hive she hadn’t tried yet. It was taller than the others, near the centre of the farm, and it had a shiny chrome lock. She’d have to chew through the hinges but she was in the mood to take her time and work up an appetite.

She fell over on her side before she felt the pain and realized what had happened. She squealed in fear and shock and tugged at her hind leg. The pain was worse. Bunny knew better than to pull on the snared leg but she couldn’t help it. The wire was too thick to chew through and the rusted iron tasted awful in her mouth. Every time she pulled the snare tightened.

Then she heard the dogs. They were barking to each other, signalling. She stopped squealing. She was perfectly quiet, lying on her side with her wounded leg pulled out behind her, a little blood running from where the snare had cut into her thigh. She listened. They were still barking but it didn’t sound as though they were coming closer. It was farm dogs behind fences. She tried to remember how Jeremy had released animals from snares after he’d caught them. There was a pipe or a peg. She had to dig where the snare line went into the earth and find where it was tethered. She sat up in the dark.

There was a growl. Then there were three growls, all around her. She saw the first dog walking between two beehives, its hackles up, its head low, its teeth showing. She looked around for somewhere to hide but there was nowhere to hide and she ran at the end of the snare away from the dogs, pulling her leg painfully. Then all three dogs charged in at her and she screamed for help. She had fought a dog before and she knew to go after the nose and the eyes but it was hopeless to try to fight three dogs with her leg in a snare. But she was fighting for her life and she jumped at the dogs with her teeth and her front claws, and she beat the first one off before it could bite her. Then the second one had her by her free leg and she coiled to attack it and she bit clean through its nose. It dropped her and howled in pain. The first dog was on her again. It had her by the belly and she clawed for its eyes. Then she heard a woman cry out. “Baahen Chod!” The dog bit down hard on her belly, shaking her, and the snare almost pulled off her leg. There was a light and a noise and Bunny didn’t see or hear anything else.

The old beggar woman walked home at night through the bee farm with her shawl pulled around her face. She saw the dogs fighting at the edge of the field and she thought about going the other way. But she was in a bad mood and she didn’t want to take the long way, so she picked up a handful of rocks. She started to throw the rocks at the dogs before she was close enough to see what they were doing but they wouldn’t leave. They were snarling and worrying at something. She shone her flashlight at them and she saw the dead animal they were attacking. It was a mongoose on a snare. She could simply walk on past and ignore them. Then she saw the mongoose move. The poor thing was covered in blood but it was still alive. One of the dogs picked it up again and shook it. The snare kept it tethered to the ground, but the dogs had almost torn it free. She threw the stones at the dogs, keeping the light on them, and swore at them. She got one of the dogs squarely in the side and it yelped and danced away. The other dog dropped the mongoose and growled at her, and she ran in, shaking her flashlight at the dog. It backed away, growling. Then the beekeeper, whom she knew, turned on his light and came out of the shed. He ran across the field waving his stick. He swore at the dogs and swung at them with his stick while she threw her last few rocks at them and they ran away.

“Look,” he said, and poked the mongoose with his stick. She shone her flashlight on the poor thing, the bloody yellow rag of an animal. “I’ve been trying to catch this fucking thief for days. It’s been picking my locks. Smart little fucker.”

The mongoose made a noise when he poked it again.

“Shit,” he said. “It’s still alive. Tough little bastard.” He raised his stick to kill it and the old beggar woman stepped in front of him.

“Let me take it,” she said. “It is no use to you.”

“I should kill it,” he said. “They have rabies. This is a bad one. Attacked seven of my hives.”

“Let me have it,” she said.

Bunny woke in the old beggar woman’s shed. It was a tin shed like the one the beekeeper lived in but she could smell the exhaust from the road and she heard cars driving past and overhead. The old beggar woman was stitching a wound on her snared leg. There was no pain. She couldn’t feel the leg and she couldn’t move it. The old beggar woman saw that she had awoken and she stopped her sewing to give her some warm milk with a dropper. Bunny drank the milk and went back to sleep.

Every morning they woke together, ate a poori and a bit of potato for breakfast and walked to the market to beg. Bunny crawled into the old woman’s bag and she stayed there all day, watching the busy local market from the safety of the bag, emerging when there were children who wanted to give her candy or if the liquor store manager brought her a teacup of whiskey. The old woman talked to her all day and fed her bits of whatever food she was given. At lunchtime they bought a bottle of Limca and a grilled cheese at Vegetable Sandwich and shared them both. Bunny had a trick of holding the bottle with her feet and her stump tail and rolling, tummy up, in the old woman’s lap to drink it, and children and other people from the village would gather around to watch. The old woman had pierced Bunny’s ear with a needle and given her a gold earring. Her right hind leg never worked properly again—she couldn’t use it to hold anything—but she could walk on it without pain, though it got in her way and she preferred to walk with three legs. When the old woman slept Bunny stroked her forehead and cheeks with her paws.

Sometimes, in the dark, a dog barked outside, and Bunny jumped out of bed and tried to climb the wall of their tiny house. But she couldn’t climb anymore, with her tail and her leg, and the old woman woke and took her in her lap and held her. Bunny watched her old, wrinkled, kind face in the dark.

“Okay, okay,” the old beggar woman said. “Okay, okay.”

Then one night Bunny woke before dawn while the old woman was asleep. She pulled the earring out, tearing the skin at the bottom of her ear, and put it in the old woman’s hand. The old woman rolled over and closed her hand around the earring but didn’t wake. Bunny walked out of the shed on the edge of the highway and headed for the forest.

Clancy Martin is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He has published more than ten books on a variety of subjects, mostly philosophical, including two novels, and his writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Ethics, Journal of the History of Philosophy, Harper’s (where he is a contributing editor), Vice (where he is a contributing editor), and dozens of other magazines, journals, and newspapers.

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