A famous story about a man named Hugh Glass (c. 1783-1833) recounts how he was badly mauled by a grizzly bear near the forks of the Grand River in what is now South Dakota. His companions carried him for two days, but they became convinced that he could not possibly survive his injuries., and eventually they left him for dead, wrapped in a bear hide shroud, and lying in shallow grave. Glass awoke to find himself alone, badly injured, and 200 miles from the nearest settlement of any size. According to the tale, glass set his own broken leg and, wrapped in the bear hide they had left him in, began to crawl the 200 miles to Fort Kiowa. He allowed the maggots (which only eat dead flesh) to feed on his wounds in order to prevent gangrene. He crawled south to the Cheyenne River, and then fashioned a crude raft that allowed him to float downstream to Fort Kiowa, where he recovered to live for ten more years.
Of course, although this story may be true, or may be based on true events in some way, the story of Hugh Glass and his long crawl to Fort Kiowa is generally regarded as a tall tale. Or a ‘winter’s tale’, as Shakespeare might have put it. Indeed, perhaps he did. Tall tales are ‘tall because they stretch the truth somehow. Winter’s tales are tales told by the fireside to pass the long dark hours of winter–when day or night might be prohibitively inclement. Not surprisingly, bears may figure in both.
We won’t dwell on the famous stage direction in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, except in passing. This stage direction happens when Antigonus, who has been ordered to abandon the baby princess, Perdita (whose very name means “lost”), flees an approaching bear, leaving the baby to fend for herself in the teeth of a descending storm. “Exit, pursued by a bear” may be the most famous stage direction ever recorded, and production staff still routinely debate how factual or fanciful a given interpretation of this note is supposed to be. However the direction is interpreted, however, for the purposes of the plot, the bear consumes Antigonus, while baby Perdita is rescued by a passing shepherd.
On one level, the bear and the storm both serve as chimeras, as devices to heighten tension and speed the course of the play’s plotline. The bear remains that vague dread at our backs, reminding us that danger lurks, unseen and undefined, behind us, ever at our heels, ever moving closer. Like old wrist watches fashioned in the shape of skulls, these devices remind us that there is only so much time, and that it is always ticking away from us, sand slipping through the glass.
On another level, the bear especially serves to emphasize the fantastical nature of the tale. A bear happening along the beach, just at the moment when Antigonus agonizes over abandoning the child to the coming storm in an especially barren place? Yes. Of course.
Most of us recognize these story elements with something of an inward smile. Excuse me, Madam? Excuse me, Sir? Did you drop this gold ring? Does it belong to you? Whatever form the old con game takes, the pigeon drop that draws us into the tale does so with our tacit permission. We let ourselves be ushered in. We let ourselves step inside the storyteller’s world.
In the very first line of The Winter’s Tale, the character Archidamus grounds us in our new territory:
If you shall chance, Camillo, to visit Bohemia, on
the like occasion whereon my services are now on
foot, you shall see, as I have said, great
difference betwixt our Bohemia and your Sicilia. (1.1.1-4)
Archidamus tells Camillo that this place is not like that place. That the two places are not the same, that great differences lie ahead. These differences are grounded not in ‘when’ but in ‘if’. The very first word suggests not the way that things are, but the way that they may be. “If you shall chance” is very different from “when you go”, after all. A “like occasion” may be similar, but it is not necessarily exactly the same. The ground shifts beneath us here–not just because Bohemia and Sicilia are different places, but also because there is a “betwixt”, a subtle indication of possibility not grounded in either place, but lying somehow in between them.
Strangeness, or the distinct possibility of it, is afoot. Whether or not Hugh Glass lived through his encounter with the bear, or whether he lived through some similar encounter, our knowledge of the sometimes tragic turns that may occur when humans meet bears is enough to lend a weighty creedence to the possibility that Hugh Glass survived, or that Antigonus might have been eaten. Perhaps the Sicilian lord’s bear was hungrier than the frontiersman’s. Perhaps the lord fought less strongly, or more so. Perhaps Antigonus was tastier. What human being can really know the ways of the bears? Another reason we tend, in stories, to consign the bear to wild and fantastical realms, making them seem all the wilder and all the more fantastical. Bears can seem like monsters among us, for all their essential nature as apex predators, because they can so easily–should they choose–make us their prey.
Yet, in the tales, and in our minds, they represent the wild unknown, the wild god slouching out of the forest to consume us. Our faith, or our disbelief, devour our being, our groundedness, our understanding of our world and of our place within it. We can’t know what that wild god really wants, and those who have succumbed do not come back to tell us. Bears have legs and teeth and claws, the undiscovered country come alive as agent. Burnham Wood marching on Dunsinane. The threat made solid. Our fears made real.
And in this sense, comes the other bear. To ‘bear’ something, meaning to endure it, or to carry it. This sense is not unrelated to the first, for it is that great animal, the fear, that we carry within us, that we endure, until the bear walks out of the woods at the end of whatever long day we have lived as our life. We carry all kinds of things, of course. Not just in the sense of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. Not just guilt, memory, or experience. But we bear the weight of perspective and cultural expectation too.
Near the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hippolyta remarks to Theseus about the strangeness of the stories that they have been told of the lovers’ fantastical night in the forest.
HIPPOLYTA
‘Tis strange my Theseus, that these
lovers speak of.
THESEUS
More strange than true: I never may believe
These antique fables, nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!
HIPPOLYTA
But all the story of the night told over,
And all their minds transfigured so together,
More witnesseth than fancy’s images
And grows to something of great constancy;
But, howsoever, strange and admirable. (5.1.1-27)
Sometimes the bears are bushes. Sometimes we merely bear our own thorn bushes, in addled imitation of the moon. Sometimes, however, the bear is not merely compact imagination. Sometimes, just as it is in our minds, the bear emerges from that primeval forest, huge and hairy, teeth bared to eat us alive.
Conversely, there are those rare moments when we pursue the bear, in whatever form, because we are compelled by something–and that is often something we cannot easily define. Callisto, was transformed into a bear by a jealous Juno when Jupiter became attracted to the beautiful sleeping maiden. As a bear, Callisto was hunted by her own son (another version of the Diana/Actaeon myth pattern) until Jupiter stopped her son’s fatal arrow and flung both Callsto and her son, Arcas, into the night sky where they remain as bear constellations– Ursa Major and Ursa Minor. There are, in fact, far too many strange and wonderful bear stories to collect them here. Suffice it to say that the word “bear” appears in some form 25 times in The Winter’s Tale–more than any other Shakespearean play. (Antony and Cleopatra ranks next, with 23 uses of the word, which is not surprising in a play about, among other things, the endurances of love in all its forms.)
At some point, we all find ourselves a bit uneasy, and dancing with the bear. Perhaps we are in a barren, windy place, or perhaps nearby wildfires have made the air oppressive and dangerously smokey. Even, maybe, on a sunny day when it seems like one could not have a care in the world, we can find ourselves suddenly on the edge of the betwixt, of that strange continent between continents. And that is just the bear brushing past us, seen or unseen. Wordsworth was right. “The world is too much with us late and soon”, and even in “getting and spending” we do not, we cannot, perceive the world aright. Too much of ourselves in ourselves, and we are too much a part of the world to be able to step back and see it for what it really is (whatever that might be). Only the bear remains something of great constancy, reminding us of fancy and peril combined into a single agent, and we ignore or dismiss that at great peril indeed.