Bear by Marian Engel Read Free Book Online

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.

Chapter 9
    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.