Bear

by Marian Engel

  The next morning, adjusted once more to normal time, she woke in high spirits. Lay for a moment enjoying the light. Went to the door to sample the sun. It was hot, but the island was suddenly steaming with black flies and mosquitoes. She retreated, slapping herself, and dressed. Breakfasting loyally outside with the bear, she tried to remember how long the black flies lasted.She decided she had never known that. Mid-July, perhaps. She was trying to decide to regard the black flies as a good symptom of the liveliness of the North, sign that nature will never capitulate, that man is red in tooth and claw but there is something that cannot be controlled by him, when a critter no larger than a fruitfly tore a hunk out of her shin through her trousers. Her leg streamed blood. She went inside. In case the bear was disappointed (for she had discovered she could paint any face on him that she wanted, while his actual range of expression was a mystery), she went out, plastered with mosquito lotion, and took him down to the shallowest part of the channel, where the water was warm. There, while he swam on the end of his chain, always spluttering with surprise when he came to the end ofhis freedom, she sat with her legs under water, a hooded sweater on top, batting the insects away. The bear sat down on the brilliant stones and clawed and swatted as swarms of mosquitoes invaded his eyes and nostrils.“Oh bear,” she laughed. “We’re a funny pair.” He turned around and quite definitely grinned.She struggled in the cloud of. insects to get the garden going. The weather was damp, which was good for growth, but it disgusted her to wear her leather boots in the mud as she forked the furrows,knelt and weeded.She worked with a piece of cheesecloth tied around her head, felt like a colonial civil servant’s wife in India, struggling to endure. The flimsy cloth tickled and swelled as she breathed. “Hey,” she wanted to yell, “I’m a city feller.” She went to bed bitten and blistered, with a new respect for farmers and pioneers. In the middle of the night she heard his footsteps: thuds and gentle claw-scatterings on the kitchen floor. She lay still, not daring to breathe, thinking of the open bites on the back of her neck,remembering she had not fed him. She drew her sleeping bag around her neck, lay stiff and alarmed.He lumbered through the bedroom door and squatted by her for awhile, sniffing and snooping, his eyes faintly red in the dark.“What do you want?” she whispered, rigid with fear. He sat for a long time staring at her, smelling at her.Then snuffled and sniffed and went back outside.

  In the lore of Irelande, she read later (safe inside and the bear chained up, the windows closed against insects, insulated), there was a god who was a bear. In the city of Berne in Switzerland, bears are kept in a pit,in remembrance of the heroic past of that city. Many good Christians there also honour those fine animals at the summer solstice, when creatures mate in full view of the populace. It is rumoured that even the pious pay them reverence in view ofthe ancient belief that they, not Adam and Eve, were our first ancestors. This was folded into a copy of Hugh Miller’s The Testimony of the Rocks presented to Colonel Cary by one A.N. Williamson, Gary’s Island, 1859.

  Chapter 13

  Now that the fishing season was going in earnest, she took the sound of motorboats in her stride, but this motor stopped, and she was startled. Peering out the window, she saw Homer tying up his silver fish. She ran downstairs, glad of human company.“Hi, Homer.” “Saw ya had the bear in the river this morning.” “He gets miserable, just sitting there. And I wanted to get under the water, away from the flies.““Just lemember he’s a wild critter.” A reproof glinted on his glasses. She thought,I wonder what he’d say if he knew what happened last time? She had only taken him in this morning to conquer her fear.“Did the Carys?” she asked.“Well,I never heard anything from them about him at all. I brought you some beer.You been here a straight month, now. Figured we ought to celebrate. You’re doing pretty well, you know.” It amused her to think she had passed some kind of test without knowing it. She wondered what she’d have had to do to fail.“I could use a beer, Homer.” C T oughta fix up that old kerosene fridge out there in the shed, for you, but she’s a bugger. How’re you doing otherwise?“They went into the kitchen. He decapitated two beers with his jack-knife.She told him she liked it fine here.“Lot of people can’t figure out how you stand it.““What do you think, Homer?““Well, ” said Homer, tipping back his head and his beer, “I think this is probably the plummiest job youve ever had, since your tastes run this way.”

  That pleased her. He was not one to underestimate his region, and his acceptance ofher gave her a feeling she was not a tourist, not one to be scorned. It took the curse off hiswarnings about the bear.She felt comfortable with him at last. Homer tilted his chair back against the kitchen wall and began to talk about the last Colonel Cary, the one who had left the island to the Institute.Who was a woman. “It was like this,” he said. “It was in the will that the estate had to go to the child who became a colonel. Well, one of the boys made it in the first generation because you could buy a commission and the old man had some money put away for it, and there were a ot of wars on then,and I guess he didn’t do too badly; but one thing, he didn’t get around to marrying very young. He was a good fifty, and the wife he brought back here was no spring either. So when theyhad their first child and it was a daughter, they got the minister down from the Falls in a hurry and christened her— Colonel. “There was hell to pay for that four years ago when she died and left the place to your Institute, but she was a fine woman. Tough as nails and not bad looking either.They sent her down to Montreal to be educated, and after that she taught in some girls school or other for a while. Then when her mother died, she came up here to look after her Pa. He lived on til the ‘thirties— we live a long time up here, it’s darned healthy, and he must have been near a hundred — and then she went back to school teaching until she retired.

  “There were a lot of relatives, but not many living around here. The old Colonel’s wife wouldn’t come up here,you know;Toronto was as far from England as she’d go. Two of the boys came up, and one of them had a logging business near the Sault, eventually. There was a daughter called Sarah Snowdrop who kep’ house for him a while, but she was apparently worse than nobody and she had fits. Mostly he lived alone out back there in the log house. Once he got a gang of men together and built a sawmill over there on the other side ofthe river, but the river ain’t as big as it looks and they had to dam it up threedays to keep the wheel going two.“Eventually, the wife in Toronto died and he went to the Falls and courte done of the Lazare girls. ‘I’ve got an island and a house to myself he says, ‘and a pianola, and Sarah Snowdrop can’t keep houseworth a damn.”You call that a house you’re living in?’ she asked him. ‘I call it a hut. You build me a house on that godforsaken island of yours, and I’ll take you serious even if you are a Protestant.‘“Margaret Morris, who’s married to the foreman at the lumber mill in the Falls, she’s got this all written down because her grandmother was Emily Lazare.“Well, it was Katie Lazare he built this house for.They say it took him five years to get it together.Everything except the timber had to come by sail up the lake.Then just before it was finished, Katie died. Fever, pneumonia, Lord knows what.“So then he went courting Emily, Margaret says.She was a wonderful woman, that Emily. She was dark, and some figured she had Indian blood in her, but the French are dark and you notice a lot of Scots and Irishwomen with eyes that black too. She could size a man up and cut him out a blue flannel shirt—and it was real flannel in those days, not that pyjama stuff— she make them double-breasted with two rows of buttons, like a uniform — without a scrap left over and it fit like a glove. She couldn’t knit, but she got the Indians to knit for her,she couldn’t read nor write, but she knew everything else. She was one of those women who kept the country up here going. She could cook and cut kindling and keep her kids alive and healthy. She married one of the Cadottes and had thirteen kids. No way she was going to marry an englishman who was already old.“After that they say he went kind of crazy, living alone here with his books. He had a bear he used to talk to.He got a bit better when his son a
nd his wife came up to live with him. Times were still hard, then,but civilization was creeping in.The second Colonel’s wife got the place organized a bit better and brought her furniture over from England. All those fancy tables belonged to her.When he died the hard winter of ‘78 this part ofthe north was already opened up It wasn’t a wilderness any more.“His children used to come up here and visit him, mind you. They were a moneyed outfit, pretty well bred. They were used to an education in that family and they turned out a lot of doctors and lawyers. While Colonel Jocelyn was alive a lot ofthem would come up here in the summer and run around in the Chris Crafts. “They were mad when she left it all to the Institute. She got on well with her cousins from Cleveland, but they were pretty well fixed. I figure she was right to leave it as a historic monument. It was a historic monument, damnit.Who else but Colonel Cary could have thrown away a fortune building a barn of a place like this anyway? The damn island’s only a sandbar, you can’t farm it.You can’t put cottages on it now you have to have running waterand septic tanks because of the pollution. All the summer people now want flush toilets and washing machines. Your shithouse, pardon me, was good ecology, as they say.““Was she a tall woman, Colonel Cary?” “Not tall, not short. Some taller than you, no much. She walked English style, as if she was riding a horse. She was the first woman to wear pants up here.Would’ve created a scandal if anybody had time for one. There were those who said she was a snob, and those in the family didn’t get on with her.When they came to visit, she gave them a lot of things, china, silver. She said she’d no use for finery, all she wanted was her island.“Fine woman, though. It was before we had snow machines but if she wanted anything in the winter she’d come over to our place pulling her little sledge. She was one person I never had any fear would fall through the ice.“She lived mostly alone after she came back up here.I used to check on her every so often, though I hate walking on ice. Some people don’t mind it, but me, I’m not brave that way. I don’t trust ice.Known too many men gone through. “The Leroys and the Kings were pretty good to her.She was friends of theirs.She and Lucy got along like a house on fire. You know, people will tell you Lucy’s Metis, but that was a long time back. I figure she and Joe are nearly full-blooded ndians,and what that means is, you never know where they are.“Now, she liked the odd beer too. Used to sit on the dock with me there after the flies had gone and we’d knock off a six-pack. She was a great gardener, and a great fisherman.She had big hands like a man, way bigger’n mine, and she didn’t fool around with any lotions. Kept her house spick and span, and all the silver polished that she hadn’t given away. Baked bread.Did all those things women are supposed to do and she kept herself with a trap line. There wasn’t a lot of money by then in that family,you know, in spite of their being English gentry originally, and what there was got spent on this house, and on the original family in Toronto.She didn’t have much of a pension.I guess now she could have sold all her furniture as antiques, but the antique business is pretty new. No, until she was an oldwoman she’d put on her waist waders and shove off in the boat in the season and trap rat and beaver. That’s tough, cold work,you got to be part Indian to put up with it, but she did it.She knew all the cricks and the inlets, she had a licence of course, and she wasn’t afraid ofthe work. Yet when the Anglican missionary and his wife came through she set out the blue plates and what was left of the silver (when my wife saw the tea service her eyes popped out) and put on a dress like something out of an old Hollywood movie and make them feel like common clay.“She got a lynx once,year before she died,when she was an old, old woman. I didn’t ask her how or why. Suppose it was caught in one of the traps. All I know was she asked me to mention it to so-and-so because she didn’t have a licence to trap it. She had to tan it and stretch it and hide it,couldn’t show it tothe regular dealer. There’s a man from Quebec, somewhere up near the Saguenay, come round the odd time to pick up anything unusual: protected species, accidents (I mean,you get a lynx by accident, what’re you going to do? Confess?Bury it?Not on your life.)and he gave her two hundred dollars I think she needed pretty bad.“I saw that skin. It was a beauty.Not a hole in it.I don’t know if it died in the trap or she strangled it. She could have. She was that fierce. She’d stretched it on willow and it was yellow and soft as a kitten.““Was that her bear?” “Nope. I don’t know who gave her that bear, but you couldn’t say it was hers. I never did, did I? She never liked that bear.Maybe Lucy gave it to her, but you couldn’t say it was hers because she paid no attention to it. She seemed to think there’s always been a bear out there, so I’ll keep a bear.But I always felt sorry for it because Lucy and Joe were the only ones who paid any mind to it.The colonel just sort of tolerated it. The one she was fond of was her Irish setter.“Now that other bear she had before, he was a character. Followed her round the house like a dog. The hunters—you know, there’sh unters and hunters, I haven’t got anything against a man hunting for meat,I go north every year for moose and a moose licence isn’t cheap. How’d you like to paddle that old cedar strip canoe twenty miles with half a ton of raw, dead moose in it? But hunting for moosemeat ain’t the same as some dumb hunter coming along with a rifle with cross sights thinking he’s Ernest Hemingway and shooting her bear through the heart when all he’s doing is sunning himself on the dock.“She felt herself falling over with a little thud.Then remembered that the Colonel was not Lady Caroline Lamb, but a tough, boney old woman hooping the pelt ofan illegal lynx to a willow wand.“She was a great lady,” she faltered. “Nah,” said Homer, scratching his head. “She wasn’t a great lady. She was an imitation man, but a damned good one.”

  Chapter 14

  She was given to crises of faith. That evening, after Homer left, she sat up in Colonel Cary’s admirable study, surely one of the great rooms of the world in terms of adaptation to purpose, unable to read or to settle to cataloguing.She wondered by what right she was there, and why she did what she did for a living. And who she was. Usually these quandaries arose weeks after the beginning of an absorbing assignment, but this one had set in early, just after she had established her working patterns. She understood technically and even emotionally the need to redefine objectives, but she could not understand why the period of redefinition had to be accompanied by depression,an existential screaming inside herself, and a raucous interior voice that questioned not the project she was working on, but her own self.“What am I doing here?” she would ask herself, and the interior voice would echo, “Who the hell do you think you are, having the nerve to be here?“She had been drinking beer. Her head ached and spun. She also felt guilty, as if she had revealed to Homer some secret which was not hers to reveal.if she had done something bad, and he knew. She tried to concentrate on externals,on her cards, on her notes. She looked around at the bookshelves and realized that in order to make the job last the summer she would have to cheat. There wasn’t an efficient week’s work left. She could go soon; she did not want to go. She always attempted to be orderly, to catalogue her thoughts and feelings, so that when the awful, anarchic inner voice caught her out, her mind was stocked with efficacious replies. “What am I doing here?“could be answered with lists. She had another stock of replies to”Who the hell do you think you are, attempting to be alive?” She justified herself by saying that she was of service, that she ordered fragments of other lives.Here, however, she could not justify herself.What was the use of all these cards and details and orderings? In the beginning they had seemed beautiful, capable of making an order of their own, capable of being in the end filed and sorted so that she could find a structure, plumb a secret. Now, they filled her with guilt; she felt there would never, ever, be anything as revealing and vivid as Homer’s story, or as relevant. They were a heresy against the real truth. You could take any life and shuffle it on cards, she thought bitterly, lay it out in a pyramid solitaire, and it would have a kind of meaning; but you could never make a file card that said, “Campbell,Homer” convey any of the meaning that Homer had conveyed tonight. She
would soon have to admit that up here she was term-serving, putting in time until she died. Colonel Cary was surely one of the great irrelevancies of Canadian history and she was another.Neither of them was connected to anything.She felt childish, sulky. She knew she must do something specific until the mood passed off. It was no good to sit and brood. She went downstairs and untied the bear.Took him swimming, trying to enjoy his gorgeous rolls and splashings. But he, too,seemed subdued and full of grief. The shallow river channel was warm, but to get out to any depth she had to swim in water that was icy.For one short moment she laughed as the bear came floating to her with all but his eyes and nostrils submerged like a crocodile, but something clouded that too, and she took him to the shore in gloomy silence. She went upstairs again and went through the cards she had made. The library was conventional, and the personal information about Cary was meagre. It was too early in her research to give them any meaning, and perhaps they would never have any meaning. She felt like some French novelist who, having discarded plot and character,was left to build an abstract structure, and was too tradition-bound to do so. She felt weak, unable to free herself from the concrete.She flew into distemper when she tried to fly into ideas. Surely, surely, a practical voice inside her spoke up, that is not the point of the exercise at all: you are here simply to carry out the instructions of the Director.

  Deep in her files was buried the original letter from the Director, instructing her to (a) catalogue the library left to the Institute by Colonel Cary on Cary Island, (b) make separate annotations regarding the history and condition of this library, (c) report at length on the suitability of Cary Island as a centre for research into the human geography of the northern region, and (d) list, with sources, any addition information that would be useful to historians interested in the Cary period of settlement. she read the instructions twice and sighed with relief. Anything she did would be relevant.Now she had her licence to exist.