Art Pact 196 - Biggest Bear

We'd have drummed him straight out of the forest if it wasn't for the simple fact that he was the physical and intellectual superior of us all - so he said, and since we were unable to refute it, I suppose it must have been the case. He lived in a huge fallen tree in the very centre of the great clearing, and every morning he would emerge from his sleeping-place and roar at the top of his voice:

"I AM THE GREATEST BEAR IN ALL THE WORLD!"

Now, naturally, being the kind of bear he was, he made sure that he was up earlier than everyone else so that he could roar this at the most annoying time possible. Well - he could, I suppose, have done it in the middle of the night, but that might have tipped the balance between it being annoying enough that we were all wound up by it and being so annoying that it would have driven one or more of us into a desperate rage. Bernard was able to master any one of us individually, and perhaps two or more of us he could have taken down with relative ease, but he also enjoyed the moral superiority that came with being an early riser. By waking us all up he could demonstrate his great health and vitality, at the same time setting himself up so that he could easily berate us about our own sloth. He was particularly fond of teasing the mayor, who weathered the storm of jocular abuse with narrowed eyes and a barely concealed snarl, but never said anything. Every morning it would be the same - after Bernard's hubristic declaration we would all emerge from our own sleeping spots, bleary-eyed and groggy, and he would point one long claw at the mayor's house and laugh madly.

"Looks like madam mayor's started her hibernation early!" he would shout (not actually a shout, but he was as incapable of speaking at a normal volume as he was of respecting the boundaries of politeness and diplomacy, so it would have been a shout had such a sound come from any lesser bear). The mayor, shaking her muzzle, would simply stare at him until he had finished laughing (which would often take some minutes, since Bernard was as capable of laughing long as he was of overestimating the popularity of his jokes, so he would often laugh several minutes past the point that any other bear would have noticed that no-one was laughing with him).

Eventually, though, even Bernard would get the point and his bellowing laugh would simmer down into a jocular chuckle, then into a sort of self-satisfied humming smirk. Then the day would begin, with Bernard roaring around doing his thing in an annoying up-beat way while the rest of us went about our business grumpy and tired, and each of us muttering under our breath that someone should do something about the loud-mouthed berk and that if the next morning was the last one before the end of the world it couldn't come soon enough. That, indeed, was said aloud often enough that although it was said with a sort of jokey grin I was soon convinced that a great many of the other bears actually believed it, and that Bernard had unwittingly scared up some sort of millennial cult into existence. If there had been bears with sandwich boards wandering around the clearing, eating scraps of dried fish from paper bags and crying out hoarsely for us to repent our wickedness before it was too late, I should not have been at all surprised.

Bernard's annoyance did not stop when the morning began, of course - if it had, there might ave been some chance for rehabilitation. After all, everyone knows someone who is annoyingly "morning-y", right? It's just a strange quirk, and often these people are not particularly night-owls, so although they might go on about the rest of us missing "the best part of the day", we can always console ourselves with the thought that they are going to miss the best part of the party. But Bernard was a candle-at-both-ends sort of a bear, and not only did he burn the candle at both ends, he made sure that it was aflame in the middle too, so that none of the rest of us could hold it without being severely burnt. He was a make-worker, one of those people who was so busy yet still managed to be entirely unproductive, a trait which he owned by describing himself as an "ideas bear". Naturally this was not an assessment shared by any of his peers, and I for one repeatedly called him a bone-idle waster at any time when I was assured that I was not within earshot.

Having painted this undoubtedly less-than-glowing picture of Bernard, it is with a great deal of regret that I must force myself to continue - because to my great shame, although this prologue deals with Bernard Bear's awful and barely endurable personality traits, he had others - bravery, and a willingness to discard convention when it made no sense - which were ultimately responsible for saving not only Bernard, but also myself, the mayor, the rest of the town and - truth be told, the rest of the forest and whatever might be outside it - you included. So before you commit my mistake and condemn Bernard as a useless fool I am forced (much against my desire, since although I am grateful to him in my heart of hearts, in my other hearts I still resent him) to fill you in on the rest of the story. A story, I fear, which will paint an entirely different picture of Bernard, one which might be suitable for framing above the mantelpiece of a lord's hall or a town council chamber, or perhaps for using as the basis for a sculpture of heroic scale in the centre of a clearing where in days past the sculpture's model had slept.