It isn’t just people that can live in discomfort if they have to. In fact, more often than not, it’s animals who have to live in discomfort for the sake of people’s so-called comfort. So that they can tell themselves life is worth living. That everything is fine, just as long as they can, at the minimum, have access to their “little” luxuries. One such “luxury” being the ability to hunt bears. In Michigan, where the state’s only bear species is the American black bear, the practice of baiting the animals with drum containers is common. Particularly in a place like Hillman, located toward the upper part of the “hand” that makes up Michigan’s unique shape. It’s the type of area that certain types would unhesitatingly call “God’s country.” Though, if that were truly the case, shouldn’t more people be inclined to live there? That’s often what Mila asked herself as she drove about thirty minutes to get to a movie theater. There wasn’t one in town, though there had been up until 2005. But, with a population under a thousand, perhaps it was difficult to stay afloat when most of that population was interested in hunting.

Mila was among the minority that didn’t. An anomaly that was undoubtedly assigned to the wrong womb, because she definitely didn’t belong here. Yet here she was, trapped as badly as the bear that would make international headlines the day after she turned seventeen. Though the bear wasn’t “technically” trapped, it had been “collared” with a lid while it was still a cub, subsequently condemned to roam the woods and forests as it “grew into” the lid over time. The hole in the top of it becoming tighter and tighter as the bear’s neck got bigger and bigger. The images—various ones picked up by the trail cameras of select property owners (a phrase that should be a slur)—that seemed to be circulating everywhere were horrifying to Mila, who had always despised the zeal for bear-hunting in this town—nay, in this entire state. If she had more courage, she might have committed to being the lone public protester against it. That is, if she didn’t live in a town where everyone knew if someone so much as had a pimple on their ass.

That’s truly how it felt sometimes. Though others insisted that the best part about living in Hillman was all the privacy you got. No one around for miles to bother you, depending on what part of the town you had “settled in.” Fortunately or unfortunately, Mila lived in the part that was considered the “main thoroughfare.” In other words, near the Dairy Queen on State Street. Mila’s mother, Irma, had chosen to move them into the Forest Manor Apartments sometime when she was five years old, after her father, Lou, had walked out on them. She got a job at Eli’s Market—the other “big business” on the block—and had been working there ever since.

If Mila had ever felt close enough to Irma to say something, she would have asked why they kept bothering to stay in Hillman. The only reason Irma had moved there in the first place was because of Lou, who had gotten a job as a cashier at the ACE Hardware for a few months until he was inevitably fired for being too drunk on the job (which was really saying something in Michigan, because, generally, you could be at least be slightly drunk on the job in certain parts of the state and still get a pass). Before that, he was living in Flanders, one of the many “ghost towns” that Michigan could offer motorists who were “just passing through.” Mila would have also advised them on taking a trip through Bay City, the town where Madonna was born, just two hours south. But no, rather than having the state stick to that as its claim to fame, it was more likely to be stuck with this bear—itself stuck in that lid for such a cruel amount of time. Of course, everything about the “why” of the bear getting stuck was cruel. Mila couldn’t understand how bear-baiting containers were even legal, let alone the far more grotesque act of hunting itself.

The blue fifty-five-gallon plastic drum lid might have covered a container that was filled with any number of cliché kinds of bait: honey, bread, molasses. Whatever the case, the bear, clever as he was (at least when others weren’t playing dirty), fell for it—and literally. Sticking his head inside to the point where he was evidently pushed forward far enough in to get stuck. It was The Department of Natural Resources that came to his “rescue” after those subsequent two years of hearing various reports of its existence. Finally, enough successive accounts of the location led them to the bear that day, the day after Mila’s seventeenth “anniversary” of being alive.

When they removed the lid, the indentation around the bear’s neck was so severe that no hair could grow there. It was like he had a “collar of skin” instead, and one riddled with abscesses. Mila wished she hadn’t been there to witness it, but she followed the DNR vehicle when she saw it speeding down the road just as she was turning out of her apartment complex. It was like she had been seized with a feeling. An unshakeable intuition that told her to “follow that car!” so that she might see what they were doing, where they were going.

As it happened, she was right. Just because she was seventeen, it didn’t mean she “knew nothing about life.” Her intuitive intellect is what had so often guided her into situations like these, seeing things she otherwise “shouldn’t.” But to witness them wrangle that bear and remove the lid from its neck, well, it was all Mila needed to further confirm everything she had already learned about humanity—life itself—up to that point. And that was: it isn’t just people that can live in discomfort if they have to. In fact, more often than not, it’s animals who have to live in discomfort for the sake of people’s so-called comfort. So that they can tell themselves life is worth living. That everything is fine, just as long as they can, at the minimum, have access to their “little” luxuries.

That’s what makes people the real animals. Animals not in the biological sense that they already are, but in the sense of the word that refers to savagery, callousness—putting their own innate “needs” above everything else. As if baiting a bear is a viable need. Particularly when it’s humans who are the ones encroaching on their territory, not the other way around.