Bears

Bears are a recurring presence in the novel’s changing forests: hunted by settlers and Mi’kmaw people, encountered through their tracks and signs, and eventually remembered as part of a way of life under pressure. Their appearances connect ordinary subsistence and skilled work to commercial extraction, while the bear’s retreat, like that of other game, makes ecological change visible across generations.

Bears in a Changing Forest

In the account of René Sel’s years of clearing, settlers plant maize among felled trees as Crown corvée gangs widen a trail into a road. Woodpeckers flee, deer and moose retreat, and wolves follow the larger animals north. The forest seems to be swallowing René even as his axe helps destroy it: he sees sprouts rising from stumps and roots, but also an apparently endless horizon of trees. Bears are not named in this scene, yet its account of animals displaced by settlement establishes the environmental setting in which bears elsewhere are hunted and their habitat altered.

The journey back into Mi’kmaw country gives the decline a more explicit measure. Sosep describes woodlands and fruitful edges that once supplied generations with berries and edible roots, but reports that much land has been plowed for maize and turnips and that Acadian settlers have drained salt marshes for livestock. Moose, caribou, and bears have retreated; beavers, heavily taken for skins that can be exchanged for guns and metal pots, have become scarce. The changes are cumulative: agriculture alters land, hunting reduces animals, and trade turns animal bodies into goods. The comparison also distinguishes different pressures on forest life rather than treating the landscape’s transformation as the result of one cause.

Hunting, Work, and Knowledge

The book shows bear hunting both as a claim of personal prowess and as part of the mixed livelihood of settler families. At a logging camp, Sam Keyo boasts that, in his first year on his land, he shot eighteen bears as well as ninety-five deer and trapped numerous predators. His figures place bears within an account of extensive hunting, but Sam is also identified as an Indian hater, and Jinot avoids him. The juxtaposition locates hunting within a social world marked by hostility as well as competition over animals and land.

For Kuntaw, knowledge of bears belongs to a connected understanding of the forest, not simply to the pursuit of game. He teaches Beatrix to read animal tracks, seasonal signs, plant and tree changes, and indications of weather, including the signs associated with bears and rain. He presents this learning as knowledge shared by Mi’kmaw people and explains that forest and ocean shore are joined by countless fine connections. The instruction frames attention to bears as part of an ecological literacy in which signs make sense through their relationships to other parts of the environment.

That knowledge also becomes paid labor under changing conditions. Kuntaw guides a Boston visitor into the Maine woods, traveling north by train, buckboard, and canoe. His work depends on familiarity with forest, streams, lakes, and camp life. He carries equipment, cuts trails through young spruce, builds shelter and fire, and cooks for clients who seek moose or caribou hunts. The visitors turn the experience into stories of masculine adventure, while Kuntaw recognizes that they do not understand the practical knowledge and labor on which their excursions depend. Bears belong to the wider world of hunting signs and forest skills that his expertise makes available, even as outsiders recast such knowledge as recreation.

Bear as Memory and Mi’kmaw Identity

After Beatrix’s death, Kuntaw imagines leaving for the northern forest to recover a way of life he feels he has lost. He remembers his father, Achille, standing with a dead bear on his back, an animal Kuntaw estimates must have weighed four hundred pounds. The recollection gives the bear a place in a family memory of strength and forest life; it is not a measure of Kuntaw’s own hunting success. He acknowledges that he could not carry a full-grown bear, but hopes to live in the old way and to know trees as earlier generations did, rather than see them only as material for houses and ships.

The imagined northern camp is organized around a companion who has not yet appeared. Kuntaw prepares for two, setting aside clothing and bedding and planning to cook for the One Who Would Come. He repairs bows and makes arrows, hoping that life among the trees will restore his sense of himself as a Mi’kmaw man. The remembered bear anchors this imagined return in a specific inherited image, while the surrounding forest is already changed by the conversion of trees into what Kuntaw calls white-man stuff. The passage therefore connects animal memory to the wider conflict between a lived relationship with the forest and its treatment as raw material.

Bears in the Commodity Landscape

Other passages place bears within the expanding circuits of trade. Charles Duquet rejects beavers, fish, seals, game, and birds as foundations for lasting wealth because living resources may disappear and their markets fluctuate. He instead chooses timber, which he mistakenly regards as an everlasting commodity that can replace itself. His reasoning makes a revealing contrast: animals, including bears as part of the game he names, are exposed as vulnerable to depletion, whereas the forest is imagined as inexhaustible. That assumption helps direct the novel’s history toward increasingly large-scale logging.

In the New Zealand logging narrative, the same extractive outlook appears in another forest. Trading and logging stations supply timber and other goods; camps move on after taking the most commercially valuable trees, leaving smoldering stumps and deep waste. The forests are cleared by burning, which destroys not just trees but also birds, insects, fruit, and other parts of the forest community. Bears do not live in this scene, but its method of depicting extraction clarifies the novel’s broader ecological pattern: commercial activity treats forests as stores of useful materials and disregards the life supported by them.

Narrative Significance

Bears gather several strands of the novel’s environmental history without becoming a single fixed symbol. They are hunted animals in accounts of settlers’ claims and livelihoods, participants in the knowledge Kuntaw teaches, and figures within a memory of Mi’kmaw life in the forest. Their reduced presence in Sosep’s account of the homeland stands beside the retreat of other large game and the conversion of land to fields and livestock use. Together, these details make animal loss part of a history of changing territory, trade, and work.

The contrast between Kuntaw’s attention to signs and Duquet’s search for permanent wealth is especially significant. Kuntaw’s understanding connects animals, plants, water, and weather; Duquet sorts living resources according to their commercial uncertainty and turns instead toward timber. Later industrial logging extends that logic from the hunt to the forest itself, leaving cleared and burned landscapes behind. Bears consequently register more than hunting: their appearances and absences help show how economic ambition changes the environments on which human and animal lives depend.