The Bear

“The Bear” follows the hunter over seven days to track his prey as it dies. The hunter eats part of the bear’s thigh, then climbs into its carcass to save himself from the wind. Here he dreams of being a bear in spring. For the rest of his life, he wonders what the experience meant.

The poem is an allegory with multiple interpretations, the most obvious being about a man connecting with the natural world and how that connection sustains him physically and spiritually.

In the first stanza the hunter must get close to the snow to smell “the chilly, enduring odor of bear” (Line 8). Through this first sentence, with its carefully chosen words, the speaker defines the bear as “enduring” (Line 8) and the hunter as one who not only smells the bear but is familiar with the smell, which establishes the intimate connection the hunter has with wild animals.

In the next section the hunter whittles a wolf’s rib and freezes it in blubber as a trap. This is a traditional way of hunting for people who do not have guns and modern equipment. Though it is gruesome, it is also a sign of respect to kill the bear using the elements of nature instead of a machine. The hunter will not have an easy kill but will have to earn his meat by tracking the bear and experiencing some of the struggle and pain the bear feels as it dies. The next stanzas depict the difficult pursuit, resting where the bear rested and dragging himself over the “bauchy ice” (Line 26).

In the third section, the hunter begins to starve and finds a turd soaked in bear blood. This indicates that the bear has been there before, and it is starting to die. The hunter bends down “as I knew I would” (Line 30), and even though he hesitates, he eats the turd for sustenance. To a modern audience this would seem unthinkable, but to the hunter it seems like a logical solution, even if unpleasant. He is able to get up and go running again, which seems worth the momentary discomfort of eating a turd. In the animal kingdom it is not unusual for cats or dogs to eat fecal matter or vomit. This decision to eat the turd marks the hunter as part of the animal world.

In section four, the hunter has lasted seven days. The hunter has lived on bear blood, presumably by continuing to eat turds. Finally, the hunter finds the bear’s “upturned carcass far out ahead” (Line 38). The way the speaker describes the encounter with the bear displays his reverence. He writes “I come up to him” (Line 41), which mimics religious texts in which a supplicant might come to a deity. The speaker meditates on the bear’s appearance for seven lines, noticing the “petty eyes, / the dismayed / face” (Lines 42-44). This description humanizes the bear and brings the bear down not only to a mortal plane but also to the level where it may be defeated by a human rather than destroying them.

The fact that the bear may have caught the first “taint” (Line 46) of the hunter before he died suggests a connection between the hunter and the bear. It is a transfer of powers and energies. The bear knows his life is forfeit, and he knows to whom it is forfeit. The word “taint” though that the hunter is himself just another animal that spoils the fresh air with its scent. Like an animal, the hunter eats the bear’s meat raw, but unlike other animals who have their own fur to protect them from the cold this hunter must open the bear “and climb in / and close him up after me, against the wind” (Lines 51-52) to sleep.

He succeeds not only in catching the bear physically but also spiritually as he takes on the bear’s consciousness. It is both horrific and mystical. The bear in its dying becomes a figure of pathos attempting to save its life, though we know it is too late. Still the bear attempts its “dance of solitude” (Line 61) and “parabola of bear-transcendence” (Line 60), which suggests the bear itself is a type of shaman who has its own ways of healing through dance the way many practitioners of Indigenous American traditions did.

The penultimate stanza depicts the bear falling and delineates a gruesome description of the bear’s body in both its strength and its failure. The stomach

has tried so hard to keep up,

to digest the blood as it leaked in,

to break up

and digest the bone itself” (Line 66-69).

In spite of the stomach’s noble aspirations, it could not digest the bone or the blood, and so the bear dies. Still, the bear/hunter in the dream thinks “I must rise up” (Line 76) though his body remains still.

In the last section the speaker says, “I awaken I think” (Line 78). This hints at the coming mystery of the final stanza. Whereas previously the speaker has reported on his experience in a straight-forward way, listing the events with little commentary, except that of the physical qualities of the bear, the speaker now starts asking questions, showing his own growing consciousness and a shifting awareness of the world around him. In this final stanza it appears to be spring. The geese “reappear” (Line 79) and the dam-bear, or mother bear

lies, licking

lumps of smeared fur

and drizzly eyes into shapes

with her tongue (Line 82 -85).

When the speaker describes his own movement, the voice is now passive. He does not say “I stuck out a leg” but rather

And one

hairy-soled trudge stuck out before me,

the next groaned out,

the next,

the next (Lines 85-89),

as though there is now a force moving through him—one he cannot fully control. The fact that what is moving is a “hairy-soled trudge” (Line 86) suggests he is no longer fully human but part bear, moving in a rhythm that is shamanic and almost unthinking. “The next groaned out, / the next, / the next” (Lines 87-89) is a rhythm of someone moving in a trance.

The speaker furthers this sense of being caught in a passive state in the final lines where he states “the rest of my days I spend / wandering” (Lines 90-91) as though he has no direct purpose or will of his own but instead is stuck “wondering / what, anyway, / was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived?” (Lines 91-93). A reader could interpret the last line “by which I lived” to mean the hunter himself is no longer quite alive and is asking what kept him alive during the time when he was still living, or he could be asking what kept him alive during those seven days in which he drank the bear’s blood during the hunt. Calling the blood “poetry” (Line 93) suggests the ultimate apotheosis or combination of the human consciousness and the animal consciousness. Only the human, more specifically the poet who is writing this piece, would equate blood to poetry and poetry to blood.

The poem intentionally ends with a question rather than a firm answer because it is a poem about the mysteries of the human and the natural world. Poetry itself is a kind of mystery, and where it comes from and why it sustains a person is hard to explain. How a person can imagine themselves a bear or catch a bear's consciousness is also inexplicable. For the poet, it is sufficient to say that the translation from mere human consciousness to something deeper and less definable is complete, though unexplained.