In Green Bay, 1989 will always be known as the Year Don Majkowski
Played Out of His Head. He passed for more than 4300 yards. He beat the
Bears. He found a way to make a mullet sexually attractive.
In short, he was a miracle worker. Surprising to many, including The
Fontenot, is that the Majik Man's heroism wasn't limited to the
football field. In recent months, dozens of people, ordinary and
famous, rich and middle class, have shared with us their amazing stories about how Number 7 performed his
special brand of Majik in their own lives.
The following story, the third in our on-going series, was told to The Fontenot by a man who claims to be Blair Kiel, former Packers third-string quarterback.
The February of ’91 Don, Tony Dilweg and I spent a long weekend up at Dilweg’s parents’ cabin in Rhinelander.The first three days were pretty uneventful. I caught a microscopic perch. Don and Tony lost $100 playing darts at the Longbranch. We grew stubble.
But on the fourth day, the day before we headed back, something happened that I've not shared with more than a handful of people in the past sixteen years. Okay, I'm lying. I've told everyone.
We were taking the long way back to the cabin through the woods. All day we’d been drinking and ice fishing out on the lake, and I was looking forward to cracking open a High Life and warming my feet by the fire. But about halfway home, Dilweg stops in his tracks like he’d seen a ghost. We looked where he was looking, a few yards to his right. And standing there, shivering and whimpering was a tiny bear cub. You could see its ribs. Its fur was patchy. It pretty much looked like hell. “We should get outta here,” Dilweg said. “What if there’s a mother around?” Good idea, I thought. I was picturing a very large and angry bear mother barreling through the bushes and gnawing off all three of our throwing arms.
“What’s that?” Don said. He got down in a crouch, like a toad, and looked at the cub.
“I said I think we should go,” Dilweg said again.
But Don hadn’t been talking to Tony. He'd been listening. To the cub.
“His mother was shot," Don said, squinting his eyes in concentration. The bear whimpered again and Don squinted even more, like Steven Seagal. “Three moons ago. His name is Little Shadow.”
Dilweg shot me a Who Farted? look.
“Guys!" Don said. "We have to do something.”
I looked at Dilweg and Dilweg looked at me. “There’s that gas station up on the highway,” I said. “We could go get some cans of tuna or something.”
“Or honey,” Dilweg said. “Bears like honey.”
“ARE YOU KIDDING ME?” Don was suddenly enraged. “Its stomach can’t break down that kind of solid food yet, you morons! Come on! Use your friggin brains!”
“Sorry,” I said.
“This is totally like in Bambi,” Dilweg said.
We all stood there, bummed out, trying to remember the plot to Bambi. Until Don turned to us, suddenly radiant.
“What?” we said.
“I have an idea.” Still crouched, he crabwalked over to the bear cub, awkward in his snowsuit. It looked at him sideways, nervous, and stumbled two steps in the opposite direction. But then Don made a whimpering noise and it stopped in its tracks, like it knew exactly what Don had said. Don sat down and unzipped his snowsuit down to the waist. He slipped the suspenders off his shoulders. He rolled the bib part down to his waist, like an unpeeled banana. He pulled up his three sweaters and flannel shirt until you could see his chest. For a moment he closed his eyes and made his face calm and stony, like Jacke when he did his pre-game warmup. You could tell he was gathering strength, digging down deep. Finally, he opened his eyes and took a deep breath. He clucked at the cub and it wobbled over to him. And then, with a tenderness I’d never seen in Don before, he guided the cub to his bare teat and eagerly it began to suckle him.
-------
“What?” I said, out loud. Which was weird, because no one had said anything. Dilweg’s cheeks bulged a little bit like he was going to be sick. The blood dropped out of his face.
“Sympathetic male lactation,” Don said. He craned his neck to us but kept his torso stable so as not to interrupt the feeding. "When the mother dies while she’s nursing on rare occasions the male can start producing his own breast milk. It also sometimes happens that the newborn of one species will take to the breast of a nursing mother of another, as in the case of certain dogs who will nurse kittens. I guess what we have here is a combination of both.”
Dilweg and I weren’t really listening.
“That cub’s really goin’ at it,” I said.
“No shit,” Dilweg said.
“Can you blame him?” Don said, petting the cubs’ head, a warm paternal smile on his face. “This stuff is chock full of exactly the vitamins and minerals this little guy needs!"
It took almost ten minutes for the cub to get his fill. While we waited, Dilweg and I halfheartedly pelted trees with snowballs. When he was done, Don pulled his sweaters down, stood up and stretched. Where other people might have looked down at their breast in amazement, Don just yawned. Just another day in the life of Majik.
By now the sun had started to set. A pale rosy glow flickered through the trees, strobe-like. The cub looked happy. Its belly was full, its fur had a shiny healthy glow and it was licking its snout exuberantly.
“Good to the last drop,” Don said. “Eh, buddy?”
“Really Don?” Dilweg said, looking woozy again.
We tried shooing it back into the woods, but the cub wouldn’t leave us. It had decided to follow us home like a puppy. Don said he’d call the DNR in the morning and we agreed this was a good idea. As we approached the cabin, silent but for the crunch of our boots in the snow and the scrabbling of the little cubs’ paws, I thought a little about what had just happened. Don Majkowski had just breastfed a bear cub. That’s about as far as I got.
“You guys probably shouldn’t tell anyone about this,” Don said, finally breaking the silence. “The whole Bears thing. Bad P.R.”
“No problem,” we said, not knowing that keeping that kind of thing secret would prove to be impossible.
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