Bear

by Marian Engel

  Chapter 9

  The next morning she sat in the sun chewing her breakfast and shivering because the weather had taken a turn for the worse.The bear lay as usual in the doorway of his byre, staring at her. What does he think? she wondered. She had read many books about animals as a child. Grown up on the merry mewlings of Beatrix Potter, A.A. Milne,and Thornton W. Burgess; passed on to Jack London,Thompson Seton or was it Seton Thompson, with the animal tracks in the margin? Grey Owl and Sir Charles Goddamn Roberts that her grandmother was so fond of. Wild ways and furtive feet had preoccupied that gneration, and animals clothed in anthropomorphic uniforms of tyrants, heroes, sufferers, good little children, gossipy housewives. At one time it had seemed impossible that the world of parents and librarians had been inhabited by creatures other than animals and elves. The easy way out, perhaps, since Freud had discovered infantile sexuality.Yet she had no feeling at all that either the writers or the purchasers of these books knew what animals were about. She had no idea what animals were about. They were creatures. They were not human. She supposed that their functions were defined by the size, shape and complications of their brains. She supposed that they led dim, flickering, inarticulate psychic lives as well.

  He, she saw, lay in the weak sun with his head on his paws. This did not lead her to presume that he suffered or did not suffer. That he would like striped or spotted pyjamas. Or that he would ever write a book about humans clothed in ursomorphic thoughts. A bear is more an island than a man, she thought.To a human. Last night: the horrifying slither of his claws on the linoleum; his change of stature at the top of the stairs. She had quailed, literally quailed: sunk back into the window nook. If she had been standing up, her knees would have knocked again.He was shorter than she was, not much over five feet tall, but immensely dense, deep in the chest, large-limbed. His outstretched arm was twice the girth ofa man’s. Non-retractable claws, he has: she stared at the bear with respect and a residue of fear.

  Old Lucy Leroy, now, what does she say to the bear? How come he knows his way upstairs? No, back to the beginning: how and what does he think? The clank of her fork in her plate seemed to wake him from his reveries. He rose slowly and slouched towards her, moving his head in that snake fashion that seemed natural to him. She realized he was still unchained and stood up nervously, thinking,I don’t want him to smell my fear. She took a step towards him and stroked his head. He licked her hand once and ambled back to his byre. She had no difficulty snapping his chain on the link of his collar. Whatever he thinks, she decided, he behaves very well.And went upstairs to work.She found last night’s book on Beau Brummellon the sofa. It seemed crazy to want drag him into the history of this place, away from tea with the Duchess of Whos it who was so fond of dogs, from the clubs and banquets where he obtained supremacy by unmitigated gall.Yet this fine sloping lawn, its spread of magnificent trees along the riverbank, its carefully sited lantern view, were products of his place and time, for as much as Blake and Wordsworth, Cary and Brummell had wanted a better life.The egotistic child attempting to attract the attention of the sovereign at Eton, the high-coloured young officer on the thunderbox, map-dreaming in Malta, were as infected by romanticism as the poets they would have scorned as lower class.And look where their adventuring had led them. She gave herself a tough morning of work. At noon, the skies opened up. It was raining as if it had never rained before. Raining buckets, raining thick sheets of grey water.Thunder rolled.The skies flashed lightning. The sky was dark grey. The wide river flattened and puckered to receive the raindrops. Mist began to rise. She could hear the lawns turning into mush. She went to the back window and stared towards the den ofthe bear. His yard was a sea of mud, and dimly she saw his eyes gleaming in the darkness.I can’t bring him in tonight, she thought.Rain thrummed on the roof and cascaded off the eaves. She could not remember ever having seen such rain except in England. She wondered if there was a lightning rod on the lantern. It was a miracle it didn’t leak.The rain made her want to urinate. She went downstairs and found, as she had expected, a rose painted, lidded chamber-pot in the bedside table. And used it gratefully. Resisted, then, the urge to crawl into her sleeping bag and put her hands over her ears. The bear, she thought affectionately, is in his sleepingbag with his hands over his ears. He has no middle-class pretensions, no front to keep up, even to himself. She went into the kitchen and began to make a pot of soup. Late in the day, the rain stopped suddenly. The sun came outand gleamed through the trees, turning her view from the library into an astonishing tunnel of green. She put on her boots and went down to the river. The boat was half sunk. She would bail it later.

  Now she wanted to listen to the river world shaking the rain off its wings.A bittern boomed eerily. With a rush, a flock of returning swallows careened across the sky. A fish leapt. At her feet, frog spawn winked in the sun.

  Chapter 10

  The next morning was hot.She took the bear down to the river, hooked his chain on a nail in the dock, and jumped naked into the water beside him.He seemed enormous, with his fur alternately flaring out and clinging seal-like. She dog-paddled beside him, scooping little waves towards him. He slapped the water with his paw in return.The water was icy. She was about to swim to shore, when playfully he swam under her, then, with a sudden turn, tried to leap over her.She sank underwater and opened her mouth to scream. She choked, and trying to rise to the surface,found him above her.For a moment she thought she had drowned; then she found air and courage top ropel herself the few feet to the shore,where she threw herself on the soggy bank, rebelliously panting. Then she felt the tremendous shower of his shaking beside her.A moment later, he began to run his long, ridged tongue up and down her wet back. It was a curious sensation. Much later, she took herself upstairs to work,for there seemed no reason to lie about savouring fright. She was, however, shaken, and her sensation of narrow escape was not helped by the fact that it reminded her of a time when, in a fit oflonely desperation, she had picked up a man in the street. She still shied away from the memory of how he had turned out not to be a good man. Surely the bear … no: it was fright that linked them, fright and flight. Book, book. Always, when these things happen,pick up a book.A paper floated out:In Wales, the bear was used as a beast of chase. The name Pennarth means bear’s head. Item: My Lorde usith & accustomyth to gyfeyerly when his Lordshipe is at home to his barward when he cornyth tomy Lord in Cristmas with his Lordshippe’s beestes,for makying eof his Lords chippastime, thesaid xij days, xx s—Household book, the Earl of Northumberland. The Esquimaux believe that the soul of a wounded polar bear tarries three days bear the spot where it leaves his body.Many taboos and propitiatory ceremonies are observed with regard to the slaughtering of the carcase and the consumption of the flesh. To the Lapps, the bear is King of the Beasts. Hunters who kill him must live three days alone, else they are considered unclean.“But he wasn’t chasing me, he was playing with me!“she cried aloud.The thought of the bear baited,flayed, pursued, was agony.Oh Lord, keep him safe from harm!” she heard herself saying. She had not prayed in years.

  Chapter 11

  Homer came next day with his son, Sim, and a roto tiller and seed. She had forgotten he had said he would help her start a garden.To the north ofthe house there was a little path in the woods that led to a clearing full of fungus and poison ivy.“Them raspberries there,” he said. “You could cut back them raspberries. There’s nothing like the raspberries here.Some say old Colonel Cary brought them. You don’t get them down south like that.One thing about raspberries: they love wood ash. Sim ‘11 cut them back foryou— I can tell you’re notmuch of a gardener, the way you just stand there—and by the middle of the summer you’ll have some dandies.And you watch out around here in the summer, too: there’s lots of wild asparagus. Little narrow stuff. Sparrow grass, people call it. Whenever I find a bunch of wild asparagus I take off my hat and say a little thank-ee to Colonel Cary, because I know he brought that. Like mushrooms?“He stood staring at her, eyes gleaming, a strange salesman’s
smile on his face.“Sure.” “Morels in the woods. May morels. Have you been in the woods back there?““Just the other way, to the beaver pond.” “Oh, it’s all bog, there, but up here,you know he used to have an apple orchard.Now Sim and I’ll get this part cleared up and tilled or you,and you just go back in there and look for morels. Ugly things they are, but they’regood eating. Fry ‘em in butter.Guess they’re why I never got excited about margarine, so many things are tasty with a bit of butter or bacon fat don’t work out with margarine. Now we’ll get this coarse-dug for you and then you can fork it and if you’re smart you won’t be too much of a lady to snatch some manure out of the bear’s stable — oh, 1 seen you, I know you can take him and tie him up the other side of the yard, you’re getting to be great friends with that bear — and manure the plot with that. Chicken manure’d be better but beggars can’t be choosers. Then about the end of the week you can put your seeds in. You’ll lose some to the rabbits but you should be able to get up some beans and a few cabbages and peas. There’re stakes in the shed.“Your turnip and your potato — that’s what the old folks used to live on— you won’t be around here long enough to wait for them,I reckon.” The rest of what he had to say was drowned out by Sim at the rototiller, a machine that made more noise than a hundred motorboats. She fled into the bush and discovered black, gnarled old apple trees, and dozens of the strange decayed phalluses that are morels. She thought of cooking them up for Homer and the silent, albino-looking Sim, but suddenly their racket topped, they waved good-bye and chugged off into the dusk.She cooked and ate her morels and found them good— they tasted the way truffles were supposed to taste in books but never seemed to in reality— and went upstairs to spend the evening reading, drinking Scotch whisky and licking a Lifesaver sucker Homer had stuck in her bag of groceries and seeds as a treat.It was long after midnight when she went to bed,none the wiser from the perusal of a book that purported to reconcile Genesis and The Origin of Species.

  Chapter 12

  Now, the long warm days taught her the meaning of serendipity. She seeded the garden carefully, then on impulse took the bear to root in the morel patch, where he grubbed in a kind of ecstasy, digging and snuffing and once in a while raising his weak eyes to her, going back to work as if there might be no more time. Afterwards, she took him to the edge of the river, where he sat in the water like a large-hipped woman, dragging his bottom on the stones.“I love you, bear,” she said. That night, the bear’s heavy tread on the staircase did not disturb her. Let him come. She had taken down a book and was making a card for it. She had just shaken it gently; a slim slip of paper had fallen out. She was leaning over when she heard the bear on the stairs. Their eyes met around the chimney.“Go sit down,” she said, and he did.St Ursula, Br., had 11 or 71 thousand virgins. See: Selder’s note on the 8th song of Drayton’s Poly olbion. The Ursuline order,founded at Paris in 1604 by Mme de Ste Beuve, was formed to succour the poor and educate the young. Ursula and herchildren populate the sky. On the reverse side of the paper was a recipe for ink. The bear sat by the fireplace. She raised her head and closed her eyes and thought of the other pieces of paper that had fluttered out of books. She thought of Homer saying, “They’ve always had a bear.” She thought of Byron’s mother, vainly scrambling for money to maintain Newstead Abbey and feed the bear. She looked at the bear. He sat there, solid as a sofa, domestic, a rug of a bear. She went to kneel beside him. He smelled better than he had before he started swimming, but his essential smell was still there, a scent of musk as shrill as the high, sweet note ofa shepherd’s flute. His fur was so thick she could lose half a hand in it. She kneaded his hunched shoulders. It gave her a strange peace to sit beside him. It was as if the bear, like the books, knew generations of secrets; but he had no need to reveal them. Methodically, because passion is not the medium of bibliography,she finished cataloguing the book she was working on. Made a small private mark on its card to indicate a bear-clipping had been found in it, started a new card, and marked on it on what page and in what book she had found the slip of paper. And, curiously, the time and date. She spent the rest of the night making similar cards for the other slips of paper,though she could not assign accurate times and dates for the finding of them. She wondered, as she did it,why she was doing it; if she were trying to construct a kind of IChing for herself. No: she did not believe in non-rational processes she was a bibliographer, she told herself She simply wanted the record to be accurate.She went to bed at dawn, giving the bear his breakfast as she chained him in the yard. As soon as he got there, he crouched and made a great turd that steamed in the morning chill.She watched his face as his bowels moved, half-amused at herself to be looking for emotion,and there was none.She had nothing to contribute.

  She slept until late afternoon, and in the evening, working alone upstairs without her friend, found a piece of paper which read, Waldo, in the Ruthenian legend, a lost prince, is rescued from ignominy by a bear whose droppings are gold. This she entered on another card.