
Day 22: The Girl and the Bear
“Write about Fear”
Names
My sister and I were both given animal names.
I was given a variant of my Dutch grandmother’s name, Berendina, which, as I’d been told since as long as I could remember, meant “bold as a bear.” My sister’s name was derived from the Greek leon (genitive leontos) which, of course, means “lion.”
Does a child live up to the meaning of his or her name?
In the beginning, any stranger would have likely thought me better named “Timid as a Mouse.” I was shy and introverted, and fear would rise up in me whenever I had to interact with unfamiliar people.
I was told I’d best get over that, if I wanted to get around in the world. So I did. Thus forever doomed to a life of awkward social interactions and misconstrued jokes, ha ha. (I really do love people; sometimes I come across as over-enthusiastic, in my sincere efforts to connect.) I smiled at everyone, too…but even that can have its downsides. That sort of thing can be a problem, for example, if you’re a teenage girl in the underground Metro stations in Paris. Or Rome for that matter.
But I digress.
Bears
Where my husband and I used to live, on a beautiful spot of coastline in southwest Canada, black bears are now considered a common backyard nuisance. Garbage and compost has to be kept locked down or inside, at night. Turns out there’s a lot of stuff that humans throw away that bears like to eat. Every man’s trash is a black bear’s treasure.
Some people are afraid of bears. It’s true that they can become aggressive if they feel threatened. Never find yourself between a mother bear and her cubs, that’s the general rule.
The first time I saw a bear I remember I was 10 years old, on a camping road trip with my family. The bear was romping around in a long slope of grass near the woods on the highway, near Banff. Many cars, including ours, pulled over to watch it. The rule is you stay in your car with the windows rolled up and the doors locked. I remember feeling excited because my parents and the other people seemed excited. Truth is, though, the bear seemed more afraid than frightening. The bear’s rule, when confronted by a bank of excited humans seemed to be, “run for the woods.” It quickly disappeared.
I lived near a forest, growing up in the suburbs of Vancouver, and explored it nearly daily with my friends, looking for fairies, witches’ cottages, and later, boys; but bears were not common there. Instead, our parents taught us to be constantly wary of serial killers. (These were the days of Clifford Olsen.) More often than not, it turns out, humans are more ubiquitous and harmful than bears.
Bears and books
In school, my teacher read the class a book about a boy who befriended an enslaved grizzly bear. This story would deeply enter my psyche. I think it was the scene where the boy was sleeping curled against the grizzly, the bear’s heart beating under his cheek. That part would always stay with me.
I later would incorrectly remember the book as being titled “The Grizzly,” and as being authored by revered Canadian naturalist Farley Mowat. So I could never find it when I searched for it in libraries and bookshops; but upon searching the web extensively for it this morning, I discover (by instead searching for “book about a boy and a grizzly bear,”) it was actually called Gentle Ben, and was written by American author Walt Morey, who’d spent time in Alaska. (I’d say my memory blip was excusable, because what are the chances? The only difference in the two nature-writing authors’ names, when combined and reordered, is that Farley Mowat’s has an F added to the other 10 letters.)
Funny how memory can play tricks like that. We sort things into categories, naturally. For me it was bears, books, nature-writers, Canada, Farley Mowat, all together, one category.
Today is also the day that I find out Farley Mowat would happily have lit a match to first editions of his marvellous collection of books, but a local bookstore happily (and thankfully) took them off his hands, instead, and someone built him a website that would outlast his time on earth.
And, today is also the day I find out Farley Mowat died. Even though it was some years ago, and it was not him that had written Gentle Ben (a.k.a. “The Grizzly”), I must admit I cried. To see Farley standing there, in that cheerful, so Canadian photo of him, and to think of all he had accomplished in his writing… for animals… for the environment… and that even he would want to light a match to it all, but didn’t, because he cared that much…
But I digress. Back to bears, and fear.
Bears while tree planting
The next time I saw a bear was on my last day of tree planting.
I’d done a terrible job of tree planting; I was a huge failure. Apparently, to earn real money you either a) stealthily stash wads of tree plugs in hollow logs, as a couple of the younger guys did, or b) slide them into the earth at lightening speed, one per step, as the Venezuelan guys did. (The guys from Venezuela didn’t drink much beer, at night. They keep to themselves. Quiet, smiling, friendly when spoken to, but of course keeping their distance from our silly, raucous, anglophone asses.)
I was what is derogatorily known in the tree planting world as a “gardener.” Finding the perfect patch of soil, digging carefully into it with my slim shovel, patting far too long around the planted seedling, obsessively measuring the required distance (1.5 or 2 metres, depending on the type of tree) to the next perfect planting spot. I had no common sense, so if I saw a rock in that perfect place, I didn’t know what to do (before, or after the rock? Hmm, lemme think).
My boss was an excellent planter; but people skills, maybe not so much. As an example, my boyfriend came to visit me from Vancouver, one weekend, and to punish me for taking a day off, the boss sent me packing, on the next site move, with a couple of chain-smoking moustachioed stetson-wearers, who seemed to despise me on sight. I had to share a motel room with them, the first night. We arrived at 2 a.m. by the freckles of their (our!) foreheads, pounding beers in a large pickup, going 160 km per hour.
(I did know real fear, during that drive and the whole night after. I didn’t sleep at all, in that hideous chintz-smeared motel room, watching the watchers’ cigarettes burning, from their beds, in the darkness. I thought I might be ending up in the same way as the Olsen victims.)
But it all worked out fine in the end.
To this day I don’t know why they hated me so much. Maybe just because I was a “dumb girl,” I dunno. But they made their hatred of me clear, with every word they spoke to me.
After that few days in hell with the grizzly men, I was returned safely to the basecamp, back with my young chums from ‘down undah’ Australia.
(In typical Aussie style, they’d nicknamed me “Nads” — but pronounced “Neds.” As in, “Hey, Neds! Kem on oyva and creck a beey-ya!”
Also, there was my tree planting bestie, Katherine from Antigonish. (I loved that place name, Antigonish. It’s the last syllable that’s stressed, contrary to what the average English speaker might think. Kath had to repeat it for me, like, five times.)
But again, I digress. Back to the bear story.
I was thrilled, to be back with my adopted planting family, but I was still the worst planter of the bunch.
Finally, on my last day of work (because I was going to return home that weekend, to attend my university convocation), the boss decided to finally show me how planting should be done. And working side by side with him, that one, final day, I managed to plant 1500 honest trees, breaking average numbers at last (the guys from Venezuela could do 3000; meanwhile, each day for me had been around 300–500). The power of a single day of mentoring can’t be underestimated. (And, he could have maximized my profitability if he’d chosen to do it sooner. But maybe I hadn’t seemed ready till then. Or maybe he hadn’t felt up to it, till then.)
In the shadows
Near the end of that day, I was still planting alongside the boss, who was working in an invisible line about 20 metres away, parallel to mine, moving methodically up the slope. The only other two girls left in the group, Jen and Sharon, were farther down a stretch. It was a wide swath of burmed land, a huge, sloped clearing on a wooden mountainside. We’d parked the truck on the logging road near the top. We planted down, then we planted back up. It was peaceful as always; only bird trills, and the hum of thousands of bugs buzzing in the midday heat.
The boss had shown me how to make a rhythm out of the work, eyeing three planting spots ahead of myself on the ground, planning in advance where to stab the shovel. I’d entered a near-zen state. Stride, stab, pull back the earth, plug the tree, close the earth with a firm boot stamp, just at the base of the seedling. Reach for another, from the heavy, three-pouched harness at my waist. Rinse and repeat.
The misty morning turned to blazing sun. Sweat dripped. Flies buzzed, shoulders ached, legs strode, boots trod, and the long, wooden handles of the shovels were like bladed walking staffs in our work-roughed grips. We were human planting machines.
But suddenly, the boss stood stock-still.
Seeing him freeze-framed in my peripheral vision, I stopped as well, and turned to see what he was looking at.
He was looking behind him, somewhere toward the shade-darkened far lower corner of the big clearing. I saw nothing in particular.
He slowly swivelled his head back toward me, put his finger to his lips in an exaggerated “shhhhhh.” Then, he minutely turned his finger, to point back again toward the lower corner. My eyes followed his finger’s movement.
There, suspended in a tall fir tree, in the lower corner of the field, was a hulking black object, with three smaller ones, clustered beneath it—just a few hundred metres away.
A mother bear… with her cubs.
Strange thing is, my heart did not clench with fear, but swelled with joy.
However, the feeling of joy would not last for long.
The boss turned to me, his eyes wide as they looked into mine, his brows drawn down in a crazed frown, and he mouthed this word:
“RUN.”
Shocked fear suddenly pumped through my veins. The other planters were already loping up the slope toward the truck.
“I… said… RUN! GET…TO….THE TRUCK!”
The truck, the truck, the truck!
My throat closed, my heart pounded, my legs began to move of their own accord, striding, striding up the hill, alongside the others, to this safe metal object that seemed so far away, so very far away…. The barren hill which now seemed so impossibly rough to climb, so high, so steep and so rocky…
.
.
.
[To be continued… ?]
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Notes/refs:
- This is actually Day 24 (rather than Day 22) of a self-imposed 31-day “Write AND hit Publish” challenge, mostly using Jeff Goins’ “My 500 Words” prompts. This morning I realized that I’d inadvertently gotten ahead of myself, calling Day 22 “Day 23” and so on. So here is Day 22. Day 22’s prompt was “Write about Fear.”
- Process notes: This story entered my creative flow this morning in response to the prompt as above. Still can’t remember what triggered the “bear” theme this morning. (So, perhaps we can’t 100% trust my memory when it comes to this memoir, either. ;)) Most of it was written from 05:23 to 07:02 in the morning. The day was very busy with household chores, so I didn’t get back to it 17:00. By then, my husband had arrived home and could be with the kids. I finished and hit publish around 18:30.
- Feedback welcomed; work in progress. What did you like about this story? What did you not like? How would you improve it?

