Bear

by Marian Engel

  “Eat me, bear,” she pleaded, but he turned his head wearily to her and fell asleep. She had to put a shirt on and go back to work. She picked up an embossed volume entitled The Poetical Works of John Milton, Volume 1 published at Hartford in 1856.The illustrations and paper were mediocre, but the print was large. It struck her it would have been pleasant to read “Paradise Lost” in such type at school. It looked somehow forthright. Out of the volume fell another message from God or Colonel Cary:Among the Ainu of Japan, once, long ago, a bear cub was taken from its mother and raised at a woman’s breast. It became a member of the village and was honoured with love and good. At the winter solstice when it was three years old, it was taken to the centre of the village, tied to a pole, and, after many ceremonies and apologies, garroted with pointed bamboo sticks. Ceremonies were again performed, during which its surrogate mother mournedfor it, and its flesh was eaten. “Never,” she cried.She went out and swam naked in the black night river. Lay on her back and watched the aurora flickering mysterious green in the magic sky. It was a hot night, very soft on the skin. The insects seemed mostly to have gone away. She fell asleep on the grass, and dreamt that Grinty and Greedy were rolling down the hill in a butter churn towards her.“We’ll eat her,” Grinty said. “We’ll eat her breasts off.“‘You watch,“said Greedy.“You watch. She’ll eat us first. Let’s run.“She woke, stiff and cold and guilty. She fumbled upstairs and blew the lamps out.The bear was gone. It seemed to her human and sweet and considerate that he should take care of himself when it was time. When she went to bed, she found him in his right place. It was too hot to sleep with him.

  Chapter 19

  She knew now that she loved him.She loved him with such an extravagance that the rest of the world had turned into a tight meaningless knot, except for the landscape, which remained outside them, neutral, having its own orgasms of summer weather. When there were no motorboats she now swam with the bear, swam for hours, splashing and fishing him pretty stones which he accepted gravely and held tohis short-sighted eyes. On the shore, he tossed her pinecones. In the boathouse, she found a ball. They sat with their legs splayed on the grass and rolled it between them. She tried to toss it, but he seemed to be afraid, not to be able to catch it, so they rolled it gravely, hour,it seemed, after hour. Swam again.Played seal games. He swam underneath her and blew bubbles at her breasts. She spread her legs to catch them. She knew now that she loved him, loved him with a clean passion she had never felt before. Once, briefly, she had had as a lover a man of elegance and charm, but she had felt uncomfortable when he said he loved her, felt it meant something she did not understand, and indeed,it meant, she discovered, that he loved her as long as the socks were folded and she was at his disposal on demand; when thefood was exquisite and she was not menstruating; when the wine had not loosened her tongue,when the olive oil had not produced a crease in her belly.When he left her for someone smaller and neater and more energetic and subservient to his demands, she had thrown stones at their windows, written obscenities with chalk on the side of their building, obsessed herself with imagining the neatness of his young girl’s cunt (he had made Lou have an abortion), dwelt on her name (though she never saw her until years later and discovered her to be quite, quite plain), carved anagrams of her rival’s names on her arm, in short, surprised herself with the depths of her passionate chagrin at losing a man who was at heart petty and demanding. For a week,she had loved the Director.For longer than that, perhaps. Certainly she had been in need of a sexual connection. Cucumbers, she had found on investigating the possibilities suggested in Lysistrata, ere cold. Women left her hungry for men. The Director shared her interests, was charming and efficient; they had much in common when they fucked on Molesworths’ maps and handwritten geneologies: but no love. She loved the bear. She felt him to be wise and accepting. She felt sometimes that he was God. He served her. As long as she made her stool beside him in the morning,he was ready whenever she spread her legs to him. He was rough and tender, assiduous, patient, infinitely, it seemed to her, kind. She loved the bear. There was a depth in him she could not reach, could not probe and with her intellectual fingers destroy.She lay on his belly, he batted her gently with his claws; she touched his tongue with hers and felt its fatness. She explored his gums, his teeth that were almost fangs. She turned back his black lips with her fingers and ran her tongue along the ridge ofhis gums. Once and only once, she experimented with calling him “Trelawny” but the name did not inspire him and she realized she was wrong: this was no parasitical collector of memoirs, this was no pirate, this was an enormous, living creature larger and older and wiser than time, a creature that was for the moment her creature, but that another could return to his own world, his own wisdom. She still worked. Upstairs. Slowly. The fishermen of Newfoundland, one of Cary’s notes told her, collect the bones of bears pricks in theforest and pound them into the walls of their cabins to use as coat hooks. His prick was thick, protected, buried in its sheath. She got down on her knees and played with it, but it did not rise.Ah well, she thought, the summer’s not over yet. Then she discovered an immensely valuable early edition of Bewick’s Natural History and felt justified. They lived sweetly and intensely together. She knew that her flesh, her hair, her teeth and her fingernails smelled of bear, and this smell was very sweet to her. “Bear,” she would say to him, tempting him, “I am only a human woman. Tear my thin skin with your clattering claws. I am frail. It is simple for you. Claw out my heart, a grub under a stump.Tear off my head,my bear.” But he was good to her. He grunted, sat across from her, and grinned. Once laid a soft paw on her naked shoulder, almost lovingly. She went to Homer’s as seldom as possible now and only after swimming, in case the bear’s smell carried on the air. She bought more food than she had before. When she cooked for herself she cooked also for the bear, and he sat beside her on the stoop, and sometimes he picked up his plate and licked it. “I do wonder,“wrote the Director, “whether you feel the library is good enough to warrant this investment in time.” Go screw a book, she wanted to write back to him. She now lived intensely and entirely for the bear. They went berrying together in the woods. He pawed the ripe raspberries greedily into his maw. She saved hers like soft jewels in an old Beehive Honey tin with a binder twine handle she found in the shed. She wished he would find a honey tree, she wanted to see him greedy among bees, but he found only worms and grubs under decaying stumps. She found wild asparagus no thicker than trillium stems and cooked it and found it delicious. One morning she got on her hands and knees,and they shared their cornflakes and powdered milk and raspberries. Their strange tongues met and she shuddered. The weather became very hot. He lay in his den, panting. She layon her bed, wanting him, but it was not his time. She thought of her year as a mistress, waiting for her exigent man to come home hungry not for her but for steak au poivre, how she had wanted him always in the afternoon, and never dared to ask. How it might have been different, but… Out on the river, water-skiers buzzed like giant dragonflies. It was too hot to work upstairs. She lay naked, panting,wanting to be near her lover,wanting to offer him her two breasts and her womb, almost believing that he could impregnate her with the twin heroes that would save her tribe. But she had to wait until night fell before it was safe to see him.

  It was the night of the falling stars. She took him to the riverbank. They swam in the still, black water. They did not play.They were serious that night.They swam in circles around each other, very solemnly. Then they went to the shore, and instead of shaking himself on her, he lay beside her and licked the water from her body while she, on her back, let the stars fall, one, two, fourteen, a million, it seemed, falling on her, ready to burn her. Once she reached up to one, it seemed so close, but its brightness faded from her grasp, faded into the milky way. Loons cried, and whippoorwills. She sat up. The bear sat up across from her. She rose to her knees and moved towards him.When she was close enough to feel the wet gloss on her breasts, she mounted him. Nothing happened. He could not penetr
ate her and she could not get him in. She turned away. He was quite unmoved. She took him to his enclosure and sent him to bed. She dressed, and spent the rest ofthe night lying on the coarse marsh grass. The stars continued to fall. Always out of reach.Towards dawn, the skyproduced its distant, mysterious green flickering aurora. The next day she was restless, guilty.She had broken a taboo. She had changed something. The quality of her love was different now.She had gone too far with him. There was something aggressive in her that always went too far. She had thrown a marcasite egg at her lover’s window once, a green egg she particularly valued. She had stayed in this house too long. She had fucked the Director. She had let her breasts hang out before Homer. She had gone too far. No doubt if she had children she would neglect them. She went upstairs and found how little there was left to do. She went downstairs and masturbated. She felt empty and angry, a woman who stank of bestiality. A woman who understood nothing, who had no use, no function. She went down to the boat and rammed around the channel like any other foolish motorized person, veering near shoals, daring the waves of the open water. But the rivers were both very calm and all she saw was the red limb of a maple tree. It made her want to die. She went to bed without supper, without feeding the bear. In her dream, green people slid off the wind and claimed parts of her body to eat. “This is mine! This is mine! No, that part is too old.That is too used. She has hairs on her breast. Take her away.” The horses that pulled the sun stopped and pawed. The Charioteer lashed them on. “Nor snow, now wind, nor rain,” he gabbled at them.“Giddyap, Tarzan, giddyap, Tony. It’s jocund day, get at it, fell as.“Then when he saw the blob of flesh they were shying from, he drove the axe-edges of his wheels in another direction and there was no day in that place. She knew she had to hide, but there was no cavity, no bear. She cooled herself in the water, curling and uncurling, flexing and unflexing, for she knew she had come from water. She sucked at her toes and fingers, pretending to be born. The waves continued to suck at the shore. “It wasn’t very witty,“the Devil said in the night, “to commit an ct of bestiality with a tatty old pet. An armadillo, now, might at least have been original; more of a challenge. Bestiality’s all right in itself, but you have to do it with style. You’ve never done anything with style, have you? You’re only an old kind of tarpaulin woman,you have no originality, no grace.When your lover went off with that green little girl you said the commonest sort of things, you wrote on pavements with chalk like a child, when instead you could have said he wasn’t much of a catch. Then you went after the boss — fancy that, being as unimaginative as that— and when he screwed you, you made sure it wasn’t on the most valuable maps.You have no pride, no sense of yourself. An abominable snowman might have been recherche, or you might had tried something more refined like an interesting kind of water-vole. The lemming’s prick-bone you know, can only be seen under a magnifying glass. There’s a priest in the Arctic with a collection of them; I could have told you about that, if you’d only listened.The trouble with you Ontario girls is you never acquire any kind of sophistication. You’re deceiving yourself about that bear: he’s about as interesting as an ottoman: as you,in fact. Be a good girl, now, and go away. No stars will fall in your grasp.” The bear came to her. His breathing was infinitely heavy and soft. She realized he was watching over her. It was morning.He must be hungry. She got up slowly and heavily and opened them both a can of beans. They ate them cold.

  Chapter 20

  She looked at herself in the female colonel’s pierglass. Her hair and her eyes were wild. Her skin was brown and her body was different and her face was not the same face she had seen before. She was frightened of herself. She warmed water and washed her hair and her face in the basin. She brushed her teeth and retched at the toothpaste. She found lipstick and a comb and stuff to puton her eyes.She found a clean checkered shirt. She got into the motorboat and went to the marina. Babs was at the counter. “Where’s Homer?” she asked. “Up at the lumbermill, first road off past the falls. To the right,” said Babs, without a second look. She drove into the town and bought whisky. Homer was at the abandoned lumbermill, filling his pickup with firewood to sell to his campers. “Hi.” “Long time no see.” “Been on a work-jag.” “Thought you might get bushed.” “I brought you a drink.” He grinned. “Cups?” “I’ve got one in the glove-compartment.” “Me, too.” They sat on a log side by side and began to drink it straight. They kept up with each other. He had no stories to tell her. When half the bottle was gone he plucked her sleeve and took her into a decayed bunkhouse. Unbuckled his belt. As she did hers. They stood half-undressed before each other. He grinned. “Can’t do too long without it, can we?” There were no preliminaries.He had a good long prick and he used it. It felt very strange and naked, and he had a way of hesitating and starting again that was unlike anything she had known before. He excited her. And it was good to have that enormous emptiness filled, but she felt nothing with him, nothing. When he was finished he said thank you. Then they dressed. “You keep the rest of the bottle,” she said. “No, you. It’s easier for me to git.” “Well, okay. You can stop by for a drink some time.““Sure will. Thanks.” She went home and cried.Then she went upstairs and tried to work again. Surely there was something in that enormous library, surely an annotated Roughing It in theBush or a journal.Something more than a recipe for raspberry shrub. Otso, thou my well-beloved honey-eater ofthe woodlands, let not anger swell thy bosom; I have not theforce to slay thee willingly thy life thou givest as a sacrifice to Northland… We shal lnever treat thee evil, thou shalt dwell in peace and plenty thou shalt feed on milk and honey… — The Kalevala “Oh God,” she cried, “I was nevera woman who wore circles of animals eating each other around her neck to church. I don’t want his guts for my windowpanes or his shoulder blades to cut my grass. I only want to love him.”

  But he smelled man on her that night and would not come to her. “People get funny up here,” said Homer, “when they’re too much alone.There was a Colonel who was magistrate after the first Cary. He shot the man who shot his pet beaver. Orville Willis and the Swede he had working for him spent all winter in a wickie-up over by Gardner’s Reach, cutting logs for a house and eating turnips and fish. In the spring, one of the Leroys found them curled up like the Babes in the Woods, stone dead. Mrs. Francis, an English lady, and her daughter, got left alone on her no-good son Ralph’s farm. They got meat-hungry and they went into the barn and caught swallows in those big nets that ladies used to wear on their hats. They plucked them and roasted them on their hatpins and said they were pretty good. There’s wild hazel nuts grows around here too, they’re good eating. Have another?” She sat cross-legged away from him. He crept closer. “You stink of bear,” he said. “I guess I do. There’s no way of living with him except living close to him.” She stared at Homer’s hairless ears and thought of his hairless body. Shuddered. “People get funny when they’re too much alone.” “I have a lot ofwork to do.” “What’re they going to do with the place, anyhow?” “Use it for conferences, maybe.” “Not enough room. Sleep four at the most.”

  “I don’t know,” she said impatiently, “I don’t know.I have to make a report on it, I don’t know what to say.” “Turn in to a fishing camp for government big wigs more likely.” “You and Joe still want to take care of it?” “Sure, it’s a job.” When the bottle was finished she walked out to the boat with him.He handed her a stack of mail. The air was chilly. “Fall’s coming on,” he said. “You’ll be going soon.” “Soon, Homer.” “Joe says he’s coming soon for the bear.Old Mrs. Leroy, she’s none too well. They’ve got the extreme unction out on the coffee table all the time, now. She wants to see the bear before she goes. Joe says he reckoned the other night she must be about a hundred and four.” “Healthy climate, Homer.” “Used to be nice in the old days when all the funerals was by boat.” “I guess it was, Homer.” He went away.

  Chapter 21

  After Labour Day, the motorboats miraculously disappeared. The water was begin
ning to be cold again, but at high noon she and the bear were able to play like otters in the water. She wound herself in her bathrobe on the bank afterwards. She had an urge to put up preserves. Certainly there were bottles in the basement, old greenish Gem jars now worth a fortune in foolish antique stores, with corroded metal tops and stretched rubber rings. But her garden was a flop, and she spent the afternoons instead lazing in the sun with the bear, thinking ofthe things she would have to do if she were to stay with him all winter, thinking herself into a rugged, pastoral past that itwas too late to grasp,remembering the screeching taste of fresh buttermilk, the warm silkiness of succotash and how one of her aunts made soap out of bacon grease and lye and how she burned the hiredman’s European frilled shirts with a flat-iron once, even though it sang when she spat on it. She was idle and grubby. Her nails were broken. She and the bear sat in pompous idleness on the lawn. In the evening, they lazed by the upstairs fire. Bear and woman by the fire. Both in their pelts. His thick pelt tonguing he ragain, her hands in his fur. The smell of him drink to her now. Night and silence. Faraway, the last lakers booming along the river. Once, a spark from a birch log landed in his fur. It smelled of burning feathers until she licked it out.

  He was slower now. Losing his assiduity. He ate great quantities. She knew he was growing a plug of fat in his anus against hibernation. She was nearly— oh, really, completely— through with her work. She was cold without his fur around her. She wriggled closed to him, closer. Until he encompassed her. He moved a leg and nearly broke her arm. She had forgotten his great weight. “It’s over, now,” she told him. “It’s over. You have to go to your place and I to mine.” She sat up and put her sweater on. He sat up across from her, rubbing his nose with a paw and looking confused.Then he looked down at himself. She looked as well. Slowly, majestically his great cock was rising. It was not like a man’s, tulip-shaped. It was red, pointed, and impressive. She looked at him. He did not move.She took her sweater off and went down on all fours in front of him, in the animal posture. He reached out one greatpaw and ripped the skin on her back. At first she felt no pain. She simply leapt away from him.Turned to face him.He had lost his erection and was sitting in the same posture. She could see nothing, nothing, in his face to tell her what to do. Then she felt the blood running down her back, and knew she had to run away. “Get out!“she shouted, pulling her sweateron to — well, warm her,cover it up, sop up the blood.“Get out.” She drew a stick out ofthe fire and waved it at him.“Get out. Shoo.Time for bed. Go. ” Slowly and deliberately,he got upon all fours and waddled down the stairs. She put the screen in front of the fire. Puther jeans on. Blewout the Tilley lamp. Picked up her cigarettes and followed him down the stairs.He knocked something over in the kitchen. He’ll smell my blood, he’ll want me now, she thought. “Go,” she screamed. He went out through the back door, scuttling.She walked as erectly aspossible to the door, bolted it, and fell shaking into bed. When she awoke, it was still light. She was burning. She knew what had happened. She had stayed out too long in the sun, it must be the second of July, and her mother had put that stuff that was like rubber-cement on her back and she was stuck to the sheets, and chilled with sunstroke. She was going to get a fever now and vomit a lot and be taken care of and then be told she never did anything except in extremes. The only thing to do was rip herself off the muslin sheets quick, get it over with. She struggled, She would not come loose. There was something different. She tried to raise one arm. Pain screamed. It rang in her ears. She remembered. Oh God, I am a fool, a fool, a f… It was day. The light was streaming in, She was lying stuck to the bed in full daylight. Unable to raise her left arm. Something had happened. That. Christ have mercy upon us. The room she lay in was dirty. Her hands were dirty.How long have I been like this? she wondered, and where is he? Is he hungry? Is it fall already? Has he gone to sleep? She moved her legs. Good. She had clothes on, she found. She could move her head, her right arm, and, slowly, now, her left.Oh Jesus and John Wesley, it hurts. My hands are cold, my head is hot. I must get up. She found she could roll off the bed. She found she could stand. She walked into the kitchen and found that she could walk. Drink. Take aspirin. He ripped me, she thought. That’s what I was after, wasn’t it, decadent little city tart? She leaned against the kitchen counter for a while, deciding what to do. Then she went out the front door and lay in the river in her clothes, until she felt her sweater coming loose from her broken skin. She tried to remember what happened. She remembered him rising to her,then his one gesture. Her screams. Her flight. Had she been foolish? Oh, no. If there was enough wild animal left in him todo that, the blood… The water was freezing. She got up and ran into the house. Shucked off her bottoms and, with the greatest difficulty, her top. Looked at herself naked in the great oval pierglass once more. She was different.She seemed to have the body of a much younger woman. The sedentary fat had gone, leaving the shape of ribs showing. Slowly, she turned and looked over her shoulder in the pierglass at her back: one long, red, congealing weal marked her from shoulder to buttock. I shall keep that, she thought. And it is not the mark of Cain. She went in to the kitchen and soaked a tee shirt in disinfectant.Slung it over her shoulders for a while. Then dressed, and very slowly set about making her breakfast. When she went outside, the bear was waiting expectantly for her. She handed him his plate. They sat quietly side by side. She shivered for a while. There was a nip in the air. He edged a little closer to her. Upstairs, he lay and watched the play of the fire while she sat at her desk,opening the mail Homer had brought her the other day.A summer’s Times Literary Supplements overflowing with advertisements for archivists, a number of angry letters from the Director (was he feeling sexually deprived?),a letter from her sister describing things that are of interest to mothers only but still cry out to be described. She sat beside the bear for a while, reading. Last night she had been afraid that the smell of blood on her would cause him to wound her further, but today he was something else: lover, God or friend. Dog too, for when she put her hand out he licked and nuzzled it.Something was gone between them, though: the high, whistling communion that had bound them during the summer. When she looked out the window, the birch trees were yellowing, the leaves were already thin. Methodically, she began to pack her books and papers. When she had done that she would begin to clean the house.