Free Bear by Marian Engel

She had seen parts of Canada that would cause any explorer to roll back his eyes like stout Cortez. In spite ofthe river’s beauty,and the probable violence of the colours in the fall, this was domestic. Suddenly, she burst through the trees and found herself at the southern point, and thought, my God, how wrong.The river was broad and turbulent. Islands and range-lights winked in the sun. The bear crashed through the bracken and bounded to her, snorting.They came for this, she thought: they were landscape nuts.They intended to make watercolours and have Robert Adam do their drawingrooms,HumphryRepton their facades and Capability Brown their gardens. Failing that, they built log-cabins with handsomely proportioned windows, and not where the view was, but where the bog gave over to maple and sand and there was some protection from the weather. If their consols prospered, they replaced the cabins with tall Victorian houses and sent their sonsout for gentlemen who could return in later summers for the view. the ones who were most truly romantic perished horribly, she remembered. Fell through the ice, contracted pneumonia or tuberculosis, died of strange fevers, scurvy, depression, or neglect. Only the hardiest survived and there few memoirs. Often the diaries that were left to the Institute broke off when the settlers arrived from England. Ifyou were building your own cabin, making your own cloth and soap and candles, furniture and tools, there was no time to concoct a bottle of ink or find a quill to use it with.She was descended from a man who came over from the north of Ireland with a wife and ten children to join his brother in Ontario, who had nine children himself. In New York, when they were making their arrangements for the second stage of the journey, the eldest son went out to explore and disappeared.They hunted five days for him, had to leave without him,cried all the way to Canada. When they arrived months later at the brother’s, he said, “But where’s our Andrew?” where upon the pater familias went upstairs and laydown and died. Leaving his brother with two women and eighteen children. There was a certain mad toughness and a definite fear of New York in the family still.Cary would be what was called gentry, though, she thought. Not like our lot. A wife too grand to follow herman to the woods wasn’t our sort of thing. We would have stayed with him to make sure he didn’t take a drink.
    slowly, trying to keep from wetting her leather boots, she made her way, the bear behind her,around the magnificent point to the other side ofthe island, where Lucy Leroy was supposed to have a cabin. In the distance, bell-buoys tolled and lakers hooted, but as she circumambulated the whole island she found no sign ofanother habitation.When she got home, she was exhausted. She had walked so little in the past month, her legs were atrophying. She went inside and lay down for a sleep.When she awoke,it was dark. She struggled groggily with the lamps,made coffee,and went out to feed the bear. His eyes gleamed red-gold in the dark as he bustled towards his dish.As she was finishing her supper, she heard him scratching to be let in and thought,why not? It struck her when she opened the door to him that she always expected it to be someone else. She wondered if he, like herself, visualized transformations, waking every morning expecting to be a prince, disappointed still to be a bear. She doubted that.You say you will work, you work. She went up stairs to work.She always held herself to her commitments. In another incarnation she had worked on a newspaper among people who were always going to leave to write books, but meanwhile scurried from deadline to deadline, for missing a deadline was their form of Original Sin. She left the newspaper not to write but because when she was required to interview a baker on his fiftieth wedding anniversary she found him quailing lest she reveal the fact he had married his deceased wife’s sister.