Lost Boy Found in His Bear Suit —by Patrick Barb

Three days after he went missing in the woods, they found the boy alive. 

He was sticky with wild honey, and chunks of salmon were smeared around his lips. The fuzzy collar of his teddy bear jumpsuit, the only outfit he’d wear to bed, was worn and matted. 

But he was alive, and that’s what mattered. 

His parents were supposed to wait back at the makeshift command center the authorities established at the 4-H Center. But after a restless night spent holding hands across the gap between two cots made up with Army surplus sheets, they weren’t going to wait behind. 

“Don’t be surprised if he looks different. Being out in these woods for that long, at his age,” Park Ranger Steve told them. 

The boy played with leaves on the forest floor. One of the EMTs had pushed the jumpsuit’s hood, with its teddy-bear ears, off his head. The boy turned at the sound of shoes crunching through the underbrush. He smiled. His mouth opened wide with the effortless enthusiasm that only small children can achieve.  

Reheated coffee stung his mother’s esophagus before passing through her pale, chapped lips. Pain and horror drove her to her knees. Unsure of whose comfort to prioritize, the father rubbed her shoulders but kept staring over at his boy.

The crying child looked more like an abandoned plaything than the smiling sprite who’d kissed his stubbly cheeks and called him “Daddoo.” The boy pulled the hood back onto his head. The fabric cast a shadow across the top of his head, coating his eyes in a bottomless black.

After the EMTs and Park Ranger Steve got everyone calmed, they explained to his parents that the wriggling white “worms” falling from the boy’s smiling mouth weren’t maggots. They were grubs. Larva. “Hell, if we know how he got to ‘em.”

Somewhat reassured, they walked over and scooped him up in their arms. He was theirs once again--their little lost boy, found in his bear suit. Each tried to find a tiny hand inside the stitched-on paw coverings at the ends of his sleeves. But he growled, teeth snapping, and pulled his hands back further into his mud-caked fuzzy outfit.

He wriggled and squirmed in their arms. He seemed stronger than they’d been told to expect. The boy broke free and fell the short distance to the ground. He landed on padded feet and ran. 

They had to sprint to catch up with him. His parents ran that much harder than the others, perhaps fearing they wouldn’t find him again if they let him run too far. But he eventually stopped. After pushing aside some broken branches, they found him standing by a dark cave entrance. A slight breeze pushed the bear ears down against the top of the hood. 

“She’s sleeping now.” Flashlight at the ready, Park Ranger Steve nodded toward the cave entrance. He’d already seen the scat, with the bones and bits of hair, as they’d made their approach. He’d heard the stories from older rangers, the ones about an old bear sow whose cubs were killed out of season by some hunters. Campfire tales said she’d take human children to even the score. 

But that story had been around for ages, details changing with every retelling. The old mama bear, if she’d ever lived at all, would be long dead. 

Then again, the cave was right there. 

The boy’s parents shook their heads. It was their call, and they didn’t want to know what was inside. They only wanted their boy back home. Away from the cave. Away from the woods. 

They returned to the Jeep. The boy passed out almost immediately and slept between his parents in the back seat. They wrapped him in a foil rescue blanket, ignoring the tightness of his stretched-thin skin and the stiff black and brown hairs growing out from under the scrapes and scratches on his tiny body. 

The Jeep’s engine growled, then roared. Its tires threw dirt and rocks back behind them. Its tracks, like claw marks, were left behind to show that they’d been there.

AUTHOR BIO

Patrick Barb is a freelance writer and editor from the southern United States, currently living (and trying not to freeze to death) in Saint Paul, Minnesota. His short horror fiction appears in Boneyard Soup Magazine (forthcoming), Twisted Anatomy (forthcoming), Hookman and Friends, and Across the Universe: Tales of Alternative Beatles, among others.

For more of his work, visit patrickbarb.com.

Twitter: @pbarb

IG: @patrick_barb