Page 20 of Power Play

There was a man from Winnipeg. He was an army veterinarian who looked after horses, back when the army still ran on horses.

“Can he do dragons?”

“We’ll come back to that.”

It was the first war. He was on a train going east to it, and the train stopped at a place called White River, in Ontario, and there was a man standing on the platform with a bear cub.

“Why?”

“Because he’d found it.”

“What happened to its mother?”

“She died,” I said. “So the cub needed somebody.”

Iris accepted that.

He bought her for twenty dollars.

“Twenty dollars?”

“That was real money then.”

He named her Winnipeg, after his own town, because he was going a long way from it and wanted to take some of it with him. He called her Winnie for short.

“Because he was leaving it,” Delaney said. She had both elbows on the table by then and her salad had been abandoned entirely. “That one is going to ruin my week.”

The bear crossed to England on a boat with the regiment and lived with the soldiers. Then he got sent to France. A man couldn’t take a bear to France, so he left her at the zoo in London, where she’d be safe until it was over.

“And then a little boy went to that zoo about a hundred times,” I said, “because he loved her. His name was Christopher Robin. He liked her so much he named his own stuffed bear after her. And his dad wrote the books.”

Nobody said anything.

Then Delaney put her face in both hands.

“Fourteen years,” she said into her palms. “Fourteen years of doing the voices.”

Iris turned it over, and every stage of it crossed her face. Then she got where I’d known she would get.

“Did he come back and get her?”

I’d asked that question myself once, of my mother’s father, in a kitchen in Transcona, when I wasn’t much bigger than Iris.

“No,” I said. “He came back after the war and he went and saw her, and she was happy there and she had people, and he decided she should stay.”

“That’s sad.”

“A little.”

Iris thought about it. It took her a minute.

“Can dragons turn into bears?”

“No.”

“They could if they wanted.”

“They couldn’t,” I said, “because they are dragons.”