I was in Bilbao, the city of my birth, for a few days before coming back to New York. It was a sunny day, perfect for a little hike into the forest near Bilbao. It was the beginning of fall, and I like to take advantage of that season to forage mushrooms. Luckily, it was Tuesday morning, and there was nobody in the woods—or that was that I thought, until I saw a bearded bare man bearing a bear on his back. 

I looked at him and saw breadcrumbs and beer foam on his beard. There were a lot of questions in my mind: Who was he? Did he live in this forest? Why was he bare? How big was his beard? Was the bear injured? Suddenly, he looked at me in a friendly way and told me in Basque that he was Basajaun, the forest’s mythical keeper. It was amazing that almost all my questions were resolved in just the first sentence. 

He then asked me if I wanted to eat and drink something with him and his sleeping friend Kamil, the bear. I nodded and I told him my name. I showed him my basket of mushrooms and offered to share with them as an aperitif. We walked about a quarter of an hour toward his house. We were in gentle conversation, as if we knew each other from years past, so I asked a little favor.

I was excited to share our encounter with my English classmates in New York, who didn’t know him. I asked him whether I could make changes about him. As an English learner, the story would be easier to tell if he placed the bear on the ground, if he got dressed, and if he shaved. Shaking his beard, he looked at me with a little smile, and I realized that if there hadn’t been a bare man, a beard, and someone bearing a bear on his back, I would have seen simply a man with a bear. 

If I changed the story, the story itself would disappear, so I started practicing how to say that when I was in Bilbao, I saw a bearded bare man bearing a bear.