by Marian Engel
He licked it with a long, ridged, curling tongue, but when she tried to pat his head he swung it sideways and away from her. Upstairs again, she cruised the bookcases in the dim light, lovingly turning their square brass keys, gently easing out a volume here, a volume there.The collection was very fine, though it pointed to no scholarly proclivities, and it had been maintained by Cary’s descendants so that it covered the nineteenth century in three languages. Hume. Smollett. Hume and Smollett. Byron, of course, and the other romantics. Sheridan, Dickens. Thackeray. Eliot. No Trollope. Mrs. Gaskell. Bulwer Lytton.Ah,Darwin— but not a first edition. Jane Austen, o fcourse. DeMaupas sant. Lamartine.Goethe, Schiller, a lot more German, though she did not read German.Those credits to womankind, rs.Hemans (‘The boy stood on the burning deck…’) and Eliza Cook (T love it, I love it; and who shall dare/To chide mefor loving that old arm-chair?’). Young’s Night Thoughts. Oh, everything.
She had arrived in her trade because she loved reading. It struck her as she peered into the great bookcases how little reading she did now. Mostly she dealt with undecipherable papers and overwritten maps. As far as books went, she was concerned with their externals only. Here, she would have time to read.She found one volume of the Penny Cyclopaedia produced by the Society for the Promotion ofUseful Knowledge, under the chairmanship of Lord Brougham, lying on its side. She picked it up and a slip ofpaper floated to her feet.
In the Linnaean system, brown, beautifully curled, minute handwriting told her, Ursus comes between Mustela and Didelphis. The order includes Arctos, the true bears; Meles, the badgers; Lotor, the raccoon; and Luscus, the wolverine. Walk: plantigrade; grinders: tuberculated; stature: large. Carnivorous. Frugivorous. Tail generally short. Brain and nervous system fairly developed. Claws for digging, non-retractable. Senses acute. Cylindrical bones more similar to man than those of other quadrupeds, esp. the femur. Therefore able to rear up and dance. Tongue has a longitudinal groove. Kidneys lobed as in bunches of grapes; no seminal vesicles. Bone in penis. In the female, the vagina is longitudinally ridged. Clitoris resides in a deep cavity. Sparks showered from thecedar logs.She checked the handwriting against the samples in her files. It was indisputably Cary’s.When the lamp began to fail she went to bed and dreamt ofwhat she had read on the other side of the paper: saw the Kamchatkanson their high peninsula looking at her through the windows and snow masks they make from the gut of the bear, and heard the whistle of mown grass falling where they slashed it with the sharpened shoulderblade of the bear.
Chapter 7
Morning in the city is to be endured only. There is no dawn any more than there is real darkness. There is only, after rainfall or street-sweeping, the sound of tires squealing on wet asphalt. Here, she woke shivering again and raised her nose to the air like an animal. The light in the bedroom was extraordinarily white. She pulled herself out of the Colonel’s baronial bed and went to the window. The world was furred with late spring snow.
It was the soft, thick stuff that excites you unless you are driving or half dead, packing snow already falling in caterpillars off the greening branches. She sniffed again.Snow has its own cold smell.She put her boots on and went outside and peed in it, wondering how many years it was since she had yellowed snow.There was no sign of the bear.He had crawled into his byre to hibernate again.She stood outside, listening. Small birds cheeped. The river sucked at reeds and stones. Branches cracked, rubbed against each other. Bird-feet rustled in dry leaves. Perhaps, too, that was the bear snuffling and snoring in his house.She went inside, hating to disturb the precious felted silence. She filled the kettle, nervously craping the dipper against the pail.She dressed and heard the tearing noises of her clothes. She stomped her shoes on and heard the laces whirring against each other as she tied them up.She scraped the butter knife against her toast. Stirred hercoffee with a jangling spoon.Not everyone, she thought, is fit to live with silence.The bear came out of his shed when she rattled his pan. Wearing the same cowed expression, he scooped his dish towards him with his paw.She held herhand out. He put his muzzle briefly in her palm. Then turned away to eat. Good.They were beginning to be friends. She went upstairs to card and classify in the brilliant light. The Colonel’s will specified that the books were not to be separated from the house. She and the Director had plotted to found a summer Institute, if the property was suitable.Now it looked to her as if the material he owned was all imported.The use of the building by scholars would only be justified if there was local history involved. You do not come to northern Ontario to study London in 1825. Or do you? she wondered mischievously.The snow continued to drop away from the branches, shooting across her sightlines as she worked. By noon it was gone. She put on her boots and went outside to explore.The obvious thing about islands, which one tends to forget once one haslanded on them, is that they are water-creatures. This one was small. Cary’s clearing was bounded by almost impenetrable bush. There was no beach, and here the bush came right down to the shore.To the south of the house, however, a path had been cleared to the southern point, and there, in one of the Colonel’s magnificent maples, a kind of crow’s nest had been built. She climbed its wooden ladder and, shading her eyes with her hand like a cartoon sailor,saw far beyond the river’s mouth to the open reaches of the inland sea.
She found a break in the brush, and entered the forest solemnly, as if she were trespassing in a foreign church. The ground was spongy, creeping and seething with half-born insects, still white here and there with the morning’s snow.She made her way,convincing herself that on an island she could not get lost, to a rise in the land,climbed its littered slope,and found herself standing by a minute pond. Bubbles ofmarsh gas or beaver breath rose lazily from its black depths. She looked up and saw a pair of goshawks high in a dead tree, ill-wishing her.She went back to the house swinging her arms for exercise. She wished it were warm enough to swim.She went upstairs to work. She was, after all, and however chilled, a reliable person. She sat down at her desk and proceeded to record what there was to record. Then, somehow, because she wondered how he would react to the snow, she began to think about the bear.His bigness, or rather his ability to change the impression he gave of his size, excited her. Yesterday he stood there staring at me like a fur coat, she thought, and today he looked like some kind of raccoon. She went to the window to see what he looked like now and she heard a very odd kind of sound: a crooning or mourning.Yet from her aerie she could see nothing.She went downstairs. Out the back door. There, on the stoop satan old, old woman.She was babbling and crooning to the bear. She wasan old indian woman. She looked like the woman who used to peddle bittersweet on the street when Lou was a kid, a toothless old Indian crone in many cardigans and running shoes,ten cents a bunch, and Lou bought it and her mother said it was a waste of money, a form of begging. She was babbling to the bear, who lay half-in half-out of his shed watching her closely. One of his eyes winked once. Lucy Leroy looked round, almost at once.“Alio,” she said, holding out a withered hand, smiling with toothless gums. She was totally withered. Lou imagined the body under the old pinned clothes, imagined its creases and weatherings, the old thin dugs: I will be like that, she thought.But the woman’s eyes were alive as oysters. She held out herhand.“New lady,“she said.“New lady. Good bear.Good bear.““I didn’t hear your boat.“Lucy grinned unnervingly, still holding onto her hand.“Good bear,” she said.“Good lady.Take care of bear.” “I don’t think I really know how to take care ofhim,” she said modestly citified. Lucy’s live eyes crinkled.“Good bear,” she said.“Bear your friend.I was a young girl once. I camefrom Swift Current. Married a man,came here.Now I live on Neebish.He’s a good bear. I am one hundred years old. I can read. I went to the mission school.““And the bear?“Lucy’s face crinkled with ome inconceivable merriment. She did not look one hundred years old, only eternal. “Shit with the bear,” she said.“He like you, then. Morning, you shit, he shit. Bear lives by smell.He like you.“Lou restrained herself from shuddering and heard a motorboat.Lucy stood up
.Shecame barely to Lou’s breast. She was old and crooked. “That’s Joe. I go.“Snap, crackle, she was off. The bear didn’t move, and neither did Lou. She had no time to. Lucy was gone, that was all, a hundred years old, gleaming, toothless, and gone.A boat gunned off.Lou squatted and looked at the bear.She thought of the outhouse with its frilled enamel lids. She thought of European toilets with footprints and holes.She looked at the bear and began to laugh. He looked as if he was laughing too.
Chapter 8
The next morning when she went outside, the sun, as if to compensate for the aberration ofthe late snow, had real warmth to it. She stood for a moment and stretched in it. It raked her skin through her pyjamas. She thought for a moment, then gingerly tiptoed to the bear’s cabin, hunkered by its wall,and with some difficulty moved her bowels meagrely.The bear, lying with his body inside, his head in the sun, moved its nostrils only. “Come on,” she said, when she was finished the humiliating act. “Come on.” Tugged at his chain. Unhooked the chain from the post.At first he did not respond; then he got groggily to its feet. When she tugged hard, he padded after her. Hoping that he would not run and drag her fatally after him, she led him to the water.He was nervous and passive. There was no tautness in the chain.She kicked off her boots, hitched up her pyjama bottoms and led him gingerly into the water. He sat down and wiggled his matted bottom against the stones. Then he moaned lightly, and put his head down to drink. Finished. Looked up at her for a signal.What should he do? She saw that her feet had turned blue and stepped out of the water behind him, on to thewarm new grass.He trained and went forward, then changed his mind and came back to her.To her this first small rebellion was a return of life, and she rejoiced in it.She let the chain loosen,without letting it go. He lowered himself again into the shallow water, and a great shudder made eddies around him. His short tail wagged out behind him.He edged himself further forward and slapped the water with his paws.She was afraid for a moment that he wouldpull away, but no, when he reached the end of his chain he backed up, relaxed, and sat with his back to her, sniffing the air around him. Impulsively, she scooped water with her hands and poured it over him.He shook and shuddered. She could have crowed. Afterwards on the bank, he shook and wet her through. She laughed, let his chain go entirely and dashed to the house. Found an old brush in the woodshed, sat down and curried him.What a mother I am, she thought.In the afternoon, another slip of paper fell out of another book
:Table of Longevity:
Platypus — 10 years
Chimpanzee — 40 years
Castor — 19 years
Marten — 15 years
Wolf-16 1/2 years
Ursus Arctos — 34
years Leo — 30 years
Elephas — 69 years She looked at the note. Turned it over and over.So he wrote little things down about bears.God help him, he’d better have written little things down about other things too, the selfish bastard. What the Institute needed was not a nice house, or a collection of zoological curiosa but material to fill in the history of settlement in the region.There was no research material at all for this township between the period of Jesuit visitation and the resurvey of 1878, and here was Cary sending her little notes about— bears. She wanted to pick up each of his books and shake them till the spines fell off. Instead, she carefully filed and dated his note,marking its envelope with the name of the book it fell from. Perhaps when she was very old she would return and make a mystical acrostic out of the dates and titles of these booksand believes he had found the elixir of life.“Cary, you old wastrel,“she found herself saying, staring up at his portrait over the fireplace. From behind dusty glass, the scarlet of his tunic faded to pink, but his cheeks doll-rosy, the bridge of his nose eroded by sunbeams, black eyes still flashing, the lean, elegant colonel stared back at her.When she turned to look out his window, she thought his eyes followed her and for a moment she was Cary advancing boldly on the new world, Atalaunder one arm, Oroonoko and the handbooks of Capability Brown under the other. Hastily, she fled to the notes of his granddaughter. “Colonel John William Cary was both classically and militarily educated at the Royal Military College, Great Marlow, and continued his studious habits even when he was abroad. Thus he was well enough educated to converse knowledgeably with Byron at Malta. When he was stationed in what is now italy he imported books at great expense from England.He was what is known as book-poor. His wife resented his passion.” I bet she did, Lou thought.Ursus Aretos, ours, orso, Bar, Bjorn; inhabits the mountainous districts of the Alps, Pyrenees and Arctic Circle. Also, Siberia, the Kamchatkan peninsula and North America. The Laplanders venerate it and call it the Dog of God. The Norwegians say, “The Bear has the strength of ten men and the sense of twelve. “They never call it by its true name lest it ravage their crops. Rather, they refer to it as “Moedda-aigja, senem cum mastruca,” the old man with the fur cloak. She looked out the back window. “Greetings to my people,” she said. Went on with her work.The long holiday weekend came. Briefly, the inlet filled with motorboats,pennants of smoke arose from other little islands. She felt invaded, though no one stopped at her dock.One afternoon she sat out on the lawn in a deck-chair, pretending not to notice when fishermen waved. That night she saw sky-rockets over the water and thought she smelled a million roasting marshmallows. She pictured Cary unfolding a faded Union Jack on the Queen’s Birthday. He would have thought Victoria an improvement on Queen Caroline but disapproved of the prudishness even then advancing on the bush.She settled into a routine. She worked all morning, then in the afternoon disappeared into the bush to walk on carpets of trilliums and little yellow lilies; hepatica and bunchberries. The bass woods had put out huge leaves. Often,scarved and gloved against the black flies, she lingered by the beaver pond. The goshawks stared at her from their barkless elm with impenetrable eyes.If the day was warm, she took the bear to the water. He showed no doggish enthusiasm when she went to get him, simply followed her docilely when she tugged his chain. Then, in the water, sat like near-sighted baby placidly enjoying the return to liquid existence. Once a week Homer brought her mail. Once a week she shopped at Homer’s, sometimes in the now long evening sleekly putting along the channel causing her on and bittern to rise from the reeds.Once she drove into a nearby town for whisky and fresh meat. The Government had opened a liquor store in an orange and white trailer.She worked in the morning and in the evening, less efficiently than she would have in the office because for once she wanted to take her time. One evening she took her supper out to eat on the wood shed stoop in the sun (the darkness of the kitchen seemed to indicate that whichever of the Carys had built the house had not consulted his woman). The bear sat as close to her as he could at the end of his chain. She unsnapped it and he came to sit by her knee. She reached out a hand and kneaded his scruff. His skin was loose on his back and his fur was thick, thick, thick,and beginning to gleam from the swimming.He stared at her earnestly, swinging his head from side to side, as if he could not see her with both eyes. Later, she went upstairs again. She was deeply absorbed in the classification of a series of Victorian natural history manuals when she heard an unfamiliar sound downstairs and stiffened; froze; held her breath. A door squealed open. For a moment, defenceless, she felt panic. Then, without knowing why, she relaxed a little.The heavy tread that advanced was accompanied by a kind of scratching: claws clacking on the kitchen linoleum.She heard him slaking his thirst at the enamel water pail.She went to the top of the stairs. She saw him below in the darkness staring up at her.“Go back to bed,” she told him. His thick legs pumped up the stairs towards her.She retreated to her desk and sat on it, hunching towards the window. Inside the house, he looked very large indeed. At the top of the stairs he drew himself up to his full height, in that posture that leads the bear to be compared to the man, with his paws dangling: he’s a cross between a king and a woodchuck, she thought as he moved his heads short-sightedly around. Then he raised one hand in salutation or blessing, and folded himself down on all fours again. Deliberately he w
alked around the far end of the chimney wall and laydown in front of the fire.He knows his way, she thought.She went cautiously to him.He was wriggling like a dog, trying to get comfortable. “Well,” she said to him, “you’ve got your nerve.” The room seemed darker now. She lit an extra lamp. The bear looked up when it hissed to a glow,then laid its head on its forepaws and appeared to go to sleep.She discovered it was impossible to type with her back to him. She made nothing but mistakes. Therefore, she got herself a drink and a book and settled down on the sofa beside him, thinking of Homer’s warning: “He’s a wild animal, after all.” She had picked a life of Beau Brummell out of the bookcases. Perhaps the way to Cary was through his contemporaries, though she could no more imagine the Beau in the bush than he could perhaps have imagined himself dirty and insane among the nuns of Calais. The book had all the worst characteristics of Post-Victorian biography. It was pompous and speculative, badly researched, unindexed. The world has improved in a way, she thought, and in her head a whirl of scholars whizzed from fact to fact, all of them weeding and verifying the life of the dandy who invented the necktie and became so obsessed with his pride he insulted the king. Cary might have known him, she thought. He was in London after the war ended. Perhaps he dined at White’s with an officer friend. Would he have snubbed the man who refused to serve his country in Manchester, or would he have laughed and rubbed his gloves together? Maybe he took one look and decided to emigrate then and there.The fire blazed.The bear slept wheezily, occasionally winking his fireward eye. She grew warm, kicked offher shoes,and found herself running her bare foot over his thick, soft coat, exploring it with her toes, finding it had depths and depths, layers and layers. The Beau was dominating duchesses. The Beau was on the make.How she disapproved of him,how she admired him. His egg-like perfect sense of himself never faltered. To circumstances and facts he never bent.Lucky for him he never married,she thought: he would have found domesticity squalid. Cornet Brummell who would not go to Manchester (not on liberal grounds, refusing to quash a popular riot, but because gentlemen do not go to manchester), who would not touch reality with a barge-pole, who invented the necktie and made it fashionable to be clean….really! She looked up at Cary and down at the bear and was suddenly exquisitely happy. Worlds changed. women in scarlet uniforms, women who had lived well; neither rich or highly well born, both she was sure, in the end,ruined.She felt victorious over them; she felt shewas their inheritor: a woman rubbing her foot in the thick black pelt of a bear was more than they could have imagined. More, too, than a military victory: splendour. Nonsense. Too much whisky.She got up and blew out the extra lamp. It was time to go to bed. Cary and Brummell had no need of her pity or her victories. Cary was not ruined: this was his house and she was in it. Nonsense. What a fool she was. “Come on,” she said brusquely to the bear. She put the screen in front of the fire and turned out the Tilley lamp. The bear stood up and yawned, lumbered in front of her down the stairs, his hind quarters shifting awkwardly as he made the downward climb. He went out the back door without looking back,and she locked it. Pumped herself a clean pail of water,went to bed.