Authors: Marian Engel
: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 walked 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.
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.