Authors: Marian Engel
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.