by Marian Engel
It was considerably darker now, and the air was damp and chilly. She shivered as she followed Homer around the south side of the house, where he showed her the long-handled outdoor pump, and the outhouse that was one of a collection of sheds off the back yard. It was a two-holer and she noticed with amusement that its seat-covers were old-fashioned enamel streetlight reflectors pinch-frilled like pie-edges.She made as if to go inside the house again, for it was dark and she was tired and cold, but Homer stood looking at her uneasily, shifting from foot to foot.She wondered if he was going to touch her or to denounce her. She wanted to get in and get settled. There had been so much day; she had a lot to think about. She was impatient.“Did anyone tell you,” he asked, “about the bear?”
Chapter 3
There had always, it seemed, been a bear. That Lord Byron the first Colonel was so stuck on had kept a bear.The Colonel kept a bear. There was still a bear. Joe King’s aunty, Lucy Leroy, a hundred years old, if you could believe them,looked after the bear after the Colonel died. But she was gone. It was out back now. It would be asleep. But she ought to know about the bear.“I don’t hold any brief for bears. I don’t like pet animals much, to tell the truth. I like a dog if he’s a good retriever, and the odd time I’ve taken in some critter that’s been hurt but the Carys had this thing about keeping a bear and when the Colonel died what could you do about it? There it was. So without saying much to the lawyers we kept it. Joe and Lucy took care of it. It’s got a shed of its own back there—the original log house. You’re from Toronto, you’ll love a log house. It’s kind of an old bear, but not too bad-tempered.“I didn’t know what to do when they said they were sending a woman up here. I’d expected a man, I dunno why. “It’s there, and it belongs to the place. I don’t know where they got it, there aren’t any bear around here. Maybe Lucy knows, but she went off to her daughter-in-law. I didn’t know what the hell to say to you about it, but you look all right.You treat it like a dog,Joe said. I asked him before he went away.But don’t get too friendly before the bear knows you because he’s kind of old, nobody remembers how old, but they live to twenty-five or thirty so he can’tbe too young.I came right back here after the war, and I can’t remember a cub, but of courseI wasn’t here much. Cary didn’t like company except an order of groceries once in a while.“Joe’s left a hundred pounds ofdog chow in the shed. Whatever else is there came out of the money the Institute sent us when they said you were coming. “I don’t know what I’d do if anybody laid a bear on my shoulders. All I can say is, Lucy says he’s a good bear and you know some people don’t like Indians and they can’t hold their liquor, but around here we respect Lucy, and if she says it’s a good bear, maybe I can ask you to feed it and water it while you’re here and after that we’ll decide what to do.“Having spoken quickly and nervously, he looked towards the dark trees at the back of the lighted house,shook his head,put his hand on her upper arm, and guided her up the verandah steps. At the front door he said that she ought to try to come over to the marina by herself in the motorboat tomorrow. If she didn’t arrive by four, he’d come over and see what the matter was. The trick was to turn left when the river mouth opened into the main channel.Then he called his son and beat it.
Chapter 4
She went inside and sat down, dazed, at the kitchen table. She heard the sound of the motorboat going away, then nothing. She opened two doors so she could see the crackling fire in her bedroom. So this was her kingdom: an octagonal house, a roomful of books, and a bear. She could not take it in. She was stunned by it.There must be aword for such a wildly happy find—joy, luck, whatever it was come by chance: ah, serendipity. Without giving up her work(which she loved), she was deposited in one of the great houses of the province, at the beginning of the summer season and in one of the great resort areas. She was somewhat isolated, but she had always loved her loneliness. And the idea of the bear struck her as joyfully Elizabethan and exotic.She lit the gas-lamp in the kitchen easily enough: held a match to it, turned its key, and heard it pop softly alight.Under its warm glow she filled the kettle with a dipper from a graniteware pail of waterby the sink. The water was cold and smelled of sulphur. The house was cold now too. She made herself a cup of tea and took it into the dim bedroom, where she sat on a long, curving sofa in front of the fire, staring into the flames. By what crazy luck she had come to this place she would never know. “I will be happy,” she whispered to herself.One of her country uncles used to say when his luck turned good, “I’m sitting with my feet in a tub of butter.” Her feet were cold. She took off her boots and toasted her socks at the fire. Half stretched out, she realized she was exhausted: joy was tiring. She rummaged in her baggage for her sleeping bag and laid it out on the sofa. The colonel’s huge bed behind her looked both formidable and damp. She tidied the kitchen, turned out the light, unhooked her brassiere, and slid fully dressed into the sleeping bag. Still listening to the fire, she fell asleep.She woke early. She was cold. Very cold. She pulled her sweater down and her sleeping bag up, wriggled until she was comfortable, and prepared to go to sleep again. Meanwhile, she sniffed the cold, fresh air and remembered where she was. The house smelled of woodsmoke and new grass.At seven, she got up and put her boots on; went outside to survey her kingdom.It was a grand one.A hundred yards o friver front had been turned into wide, just-greening lawns. Along the bank stood a row of magnificent, evenly spaced maple trees coming into flower. Beyond them, the river stretched silver, curling around its shoals, and disappeared into scrawny birch and brush again. There was no sign ofany other habitation.She stood on the riverbank quite still, conscious that every motion made a foreign sound, even her hands rubbing in her pockets for warmth. She savoured the newness around her, the yellow wands of scrub willow at the edge of the bush, the listing boathouse, the green buds of the trees, then turned to face the incredible house.
Its faceted white bulk gleamed in the early sun; its black-roofed verandahs hung like an apron over the first floor. The windows of the second storey were broad and shining. From its roof, two chimneys and a windowed lantern rose like the crown ofa hat. She could hardly believe its perfection.Then she remembered the bear. This was not a dream. That man, that man Homer, had told her that behind the house there was a bear. It has seemed a wonder fully strange idea at first, but it appeared there really was a bear. By now, patently a hungry bear.She ought to go and look. There was no use avoiding it.She wondered if the bear would be good company.
Chapter 5
She was not fond of animals. Had had a puppy once and been much moved when he was run over, but had not missed him. Had been annoyed by kittens but rather pleased by calves on a farm she visited once. That was her history. A dubious beginning for a bear. So, she thought, maybe I’ll start on the books first, work from the known to the unknown; but she had also to go out to the outhouse, which was in the same direction as his shed. She plucked up her courage. If she could not face the animal she might take some interest in the chinking and notching of his shelter.From the front, the house looked single and solitary, but there was a fungus of outbuildings behind it: a board and batten woodshed,and a tumbledown log house connected to it by something that looked like a corncrib and was perhaps a wood shelter of the remains of a chicken house. Together, they formed a fenced compound.
She approached this compound by its southward gate. The bear would be in the old cabin. There was a post by the door and on the post a chain which disappeared into darkness. The ground was muddy, but there were no new tracks in the mud. What do you say to a bear? she wondered, leaning on the fence. “Hello,“she said softly into the darkness.She got no reply. It must be asleep, she thought; maybe it’s still hibernating.The time she had met a moose was the only time she had felt her knees knocking. She had expected to be afraid of the bear, but here she was standing quite calmly in his doorway. She was certain that it was there, and that it was benevolent. She wondered what kind of fool she was.She went back into the house, slamming the screen door behind her. There was
a great deal to do before she could do what she wanted— start on the books— because if she did not unpack now she would live her life here in a muddle. First she organized her personal possessions in the bedroom, then she loaded the canned goods haphazardly into the kitchen cupboards. It took her a long time to decide what to do with refrigerator things like butter and bacon. She found a rusty four-sided toaster and put it over the gas element. She wiped a black iron frying pan out and laid strips ofbacon in it. She was hungry.The morning light was dappled, fallow, green, a moving presence at the windows. The kitchen swam in an underwater gloom. When her breakfast was cooked, she carried it out to the stoop of the woodshed to sit in the light. As she sat down, she realized the bear was standing in his doorway staring at her.
Bear. There. Staring.She stared back.Everyone has once in his life to decide whether he is a Platonist or not, she thought. I am a woman sitting on a stoop eating bread and bacon. That is a bear. Not a toy bear, not a Pooh bear, not an airlines Koala bear.A real bear. Half a bear, actually, and not a very big half, for it lay tentatively in his doorway so that she had no idea of its size.it was only a dusty bulk of blackish fur in a doorway. It had along brown snout,and its snout had a black, dry, leathery end. It had small, sad eyes.They stared ateach other as she ate, sizing each other up. It was no less small-eyed when it turned full face towards her: its gaze was not direct;it was diffused by the angles of its skull. This long, brown snout and these small eyes turned towards her. It did not seem menacing, only tired and sad.The only sign of animation was a quivering of the nostrils at the sound of her fork on the enamel plate.She thought, you have these ideas about bears: they are toys, or something fierce and ogreish in the woods, following you at a distance, snuffling you out to snuff you out. But this bear is a lump.Then, because the one thing she knew about animals was their enormous and, it seemed to her, parasitical hunger, she went into the shed and scooped dry food from a sack into the basin that sat beside it. This she took gingerly to the bear. It looked perhaps a little brighter as it quickly curved an arm out and pulled the basin to it, and put its jaws inside.Then it looked up to her again, as if for permission. No, she thought, more likely it wants me to go away. She watched it from a distance while it gorged noisily. When it had finished, it looked up at her and licked its nose with a long, thin, ant-eater’s tongue. Then it licked its chops with a tongue that seemed to have become short and fat. Then, with what seemed a very great effort, it hauled itself on all fours, and advanced towards her.She sucked in her breath and stood quite, quite, still, forbidding her knees to knock a second time.The bear stood in the open, on all fours, and stared at her,moving its head up,down,and sideways to get a full view of her. Its nose was more pointed than she had expected— years of corruption by teddy bears, she supposed — and its eyes were genuinely piggish and ugly. She crossed the yard and pumped it a pail ofwater. She set he pail down quite near it, nearer than she thought she ought to have dared, but the bear looked so passive she could not genuinely fear it. In its stable doorway, it had looked smaller.Now she could see that it was what Homer would call a good size: upto her hip and long with it; a full-grown bear with a scruff like a widow’s hump. As it turned to drink, she got a large whiff of shit and musk. It was indubitably male, she saw, and its hindquarters were matted with dirt. After it drank thirstily, it curled up again by the barn door. It looked stupid and defeated. She hunkered where it could not reach her and stared at it. Its nose was like a dog’s but broader. Its snout was narrow, its eyes were close together. It was not a handsome beast.And it would not be, if it always lived at the end of that chain. She thought briskly of restoring some gloss to it, taking it for walks. “Bear,” she whispered to it,“who and what are you?” Bear did not reply, but turned its head toward her with a look of infinite weariness, and closed its eyes. She sat for a long time smoking, drinking coffee, staring at it. She had taken some nephews to a bad movie about bears once. That was all.An unprepossessing creature, this bear, she decided.Not at all menacing. Not a creature of the wild, but a middle-aged woman defeated to the point of being daft,who had sat night after night waiting for her husband for so long that time had ceased to exist and there was only waiting. I can manage him, she decided, and went inside. She washed her dishes, spent some time rearranging the kitchen cupboards to suit her left handedness, exclaiming to herself over the kitchen dishes, which should not in such a place have been anything other than willow pattern, and were not, and, knowing further delay was only delicious procrastination, moved slowly through the arc of the house, parlour to hall, and stood at the foot of the stairs.A house like this,she thought, in these regions was an absurdity; too elaborate, too hard to heat, no matter how much its phrenological designer thought it good for the brain. To build such a place in the north, among log houses and sturdy square farm houses, was colonial pretentiousness. She shivered as she thought ofthe open stairwell in howling winter.When he sold these plans, Fowler had recommended a construction of a homemade stucco that turned out to be as durable as flypaper. He was the sort of American we are all warned about. She went uptowards the light, complaining in her practical mind about immigrant idiocies. Stopped dead at the top of the stairs in a blaze of sunshine.The two chimneys hemmed the stairwell. Over it gleamed an enormous windowed lantern. Aside from that, the second floor was open. Four walls were windowed to the height of built-in counters; the other four were papered with glassed bookshelves. There were vast sofas in front of the fireplaces and low tables stacked with folio-sized books. An elaborate brass tilley lamp hung over the counter facing the river. The windows were shaded with nautical-looking rolled-up canvas blinds.From the front window the river had another dimension. She could see it idling all the way to the river channel. She stood quietly, fingering the brass and leather telescope on the sill, dusting with empty fingers the celestial and terrestial globeson eitherside of it. If the bookswere all bad Boston Bunyans, she did not want to know yet. She went to the table by the northern fireplace and opened a volume of engravings of ruins. Piranesi. She stared at the broken columns for a long time.Then she went and looked out the back window, brushing a dead fly off the empty counter. The bear was staring up at her. She waded around the room slowly, reverently. It was a sea of gold and green light. She wondered where to begin, and indulged herself by lazily scanning the shelves trying to comprehend the books’ scope and order. She was presented with a sharp and perhaps typical early nineteenth century mind: Encyclopaedias, British and Greek history, Voltaire, Rousseau, geology and geography, geophysical speculation, the more practical philosophers, sets and sets ofnovelists. She wondered where else there was such a perfect library for its period. She had no fear that her work would not consume a summer.She went downstairs and brought up her paper, her typewriter, her filing cards.She sat down immediately and tapped out a letter to the Director telling him that all was well. Then she looked at her watch and discovered it was time to leave for Homer’s store.
Chapter 6
She was still trying to find the snap of the elbow that would whip the motor to life when Homer veered around the point and drew up beside her.She looked at him in daylight. He had a shrewd face, round ink-framed plastic glasses,very false false teeth, little broken veins in his cheeks. He wore a green drill workman’s cap and a red mackinaw. She liked him.
After he showed her again the knack of getting the engine going, she followed him down the channel.He yelled back to her that the water was low this year, and told her the names of the shoals and asked did she know the difference between a shoal and an island? It had to have a tree to be an island.That was important up here.That island there was where old Mrs. Bird was found almost dead one spring among her eleven children. Her husband had gone out across the ice for supplies in January, must have fallen through. She and the children survived the winter on turnips.They were okay but she was in hospital so long the Children’s Aid had to farm out all the kids, and only one ever came back to see her, though she lived to be ninety-four. People st
ill do get lost, he said, winters when the ice is punky.Homer’s grocery store left a sophisticated taste something to desire, but contained the necessities. It made her glad she had grown up on Campbell’s soup and bologna and peanut butter sandwiches. He sold withered potatoes, knobby carrots and wilted cabbages, but good localcheesea nd pale,creamy butter.He apologized for the vegetables. “I have to get the stuff up from Toronto and it don’t keep. You’ll have to eat turnips and cabbages like the rest of us.“She treated herself to a quart of maple syrup and arranged for him to pick up her mail in the nearest town.He waited on her himself. No one else came in.She was aware ofdoors banging and voices calling in the back ofthe building, but there was no sign of his wife or his family.“How’s the bear?” he asked.“Oh, fine, I guess,” she said, not knowing what else to say. “It looks pretty miserable tied up that way.““Don’t forget,however human it looks, it’s awild critter after all. Don’t get soft with it.““Did they take it for walks?” “I don’t know what the hell they did with it, pardon my French.““It could use a swim.““I wouldn’t fool around with it. You might have to get to know it the hard way. I guess it looks kind of little when it’s all curled up in the shed, but a bear’s a heavy animal. It can knock your head off with a wallop. I bet it weighs six hundred pound.““Didn’t Mrs. Leroy ever take it out?“He grinned. “Oh, she was a funny one. I’ve seen her with that bear. She used to take one of them straight kitchen chairs out to the back yard and sit and just talk at it for hours. Maybe French talk, maybe Cree, I couldn’t make it out.She’s a wonderful knitter, Mrs. Leroy, and on a fine day she’ll sit there and talk and knit a mile a minute. The two of them together, they were a sight to see.” His eyes got shifty again. There was something he had thought of, but didn’t want to say.“It isn’t vicious, is it?““That bear? Jeepers, no. It’s just… well, he’s just a plain old bear, and he’s been on that chain for so many years there’s no telling what would happen if you lethim loose.He might kill you, he might just sit there, he might walk across the yard and take a leak.Mrs. Leroy wouldn’t think very much of you if you let it get away, though, and neither would the farmers further back along the shore.“She promised she would not, and drove the motorboat home alone, back along the creeping river.The water was dark, yet clear and metallic-looking, too cold to trail a hand in.She steered between shoals and islands and reedy shores to her dock,and carried her groceries into the isolated house.That evening, she went upstairs with a rag and polished glass inkwells and penracks and the yellowed globes. She fussed with the telescope until she could see fardown the empty river in the last of the light. Then she lighted the Tilley lamp, put a roll of labels in her typewriter and began the imperious business of imposing numerical order on a structure devised internally and personally by a mind her numbers would teach her to discover.At first she worked quickly, almost desperately. She had a presentiment of an unknown joy awaiting her, a feeling that it could easily be taken away. She must be virtuous and efficient. It was like the smell that scented the air morning and evening, elusive and mysterious. Everyone wants to be Robinson Crusoe and to be a half-hatched Robinson Crusoe is almost unbearable. Ifthe experience is not to be taken away I must begin on it at once, she thought.After an hour, she was shivering. She went downstairs, put on a pullover, put the kettle on. On her way to the outdoor toilet she could see the bear’s night-green eyes following her. As she went through the yard to the back door he got up and grunted. She stood quite still, letting her eyes adjust to the dark so she could see his dark form. He lumbered gently forward, his head lower than his scruff, looking bashfully at her.When he reached the end of his chain, he sat down on his hams and grunted like a pig. Picking her way over the dark rough boards of the woodshed, she went in and got him the scraps from her supper. He lapped them up at once, then looked at her it seemed, beseechingly. She stood as far back from him as she could, and held out a stiffened hand.
