The Bear
by Andrew Krivak
Bellevue Literary Press $16.99
Review by Darcie Abbene
Andrew Krivak’s The Bear begins with a man and a girl who appear to be the last of their kind on earth. The lack of details on what has transpired to leave them as seemingly the last humans force the reader’s attention to the present moment. As the girl grows, the man teaches her how to exist in their primitive world but inevitably, the girl asks him about her mother who passed away after childbirth and is buried on the nearby “mountain that stands alone,” which also resembles the image of a bear. These questions and the need to survive propel the man and the girl on several journeys—both practical and symbolic. For the man, a trip to the ocean for salt becomes his final one and for the girl, the journey home becomes a rite of passage into adulthood. She is aided by what she has been taught by her father, the spirit of her mother, and a bear who helps guide her home.
When one thinks of bear stories, thoughts immediately turn to bear attack stories, of which there are many. Those are stories of struggle, triumph and loss, predator and prey. Krivak’s story is, too, but there is a difference. The bear attack stories are tales of two groups: us and them. Antagonistic in nature, these stories are rooted in fear of the other and are an indicator of the distance between humans and nature. This can be problematic when, as so many readers do, we come to stories for education, in how to be human, emotionally and otherwise. Krivak’s post-apocalyptic fable offers readers everything a more common story about bears does not. The bear in this fable is both a concrete image and an abstract construct and anchors its culminating message: whatever havoc the humans bring upon it, the natural world will make it through.
That is where Krivak leaves us at the end of the book anyway. What is far more interesting is the story’s message about where loneliness and community intersect, about how when stripped of society’s overbearing lean toward the human side of things, the relationship between people and the natural world can balance and right itself. The man has told the girl stories of bears, how they only roar when they are frightened, and he has also told her the stories that show them to be helpers. Both pieces of knowledge prove true when a bear appears to accompany the girl’s return from her fateful trip to the ocean. One night, the girl asks the bear how he is able to speak. “Not all animals had the range of voice that could be heard,” the bear tells her, “but all living things spoke, and perhaps the real question was how she could understand him.” The ideas of interchange, reciprocity, and gratitude that this exchange sets up become critical to the girl’s survival.
This conversation connects the two back to the old ways when bears, female bears in particular, served as teachers in hunting rituals, are symbols of hibernation and rebirth, and offer navigational aid through the constellations Ursa Major and ursa minor. There are no actual mothers living in the story, but the presence of mothers are everywhere. Though the girl’s mother has passed away, she is buried on top of the nearby mountain and her spirit is present for the girl and her father.
When she is young, the girl and her father watch a bear fishing at the lake retreat to the forest located at the base of the mountain. First she wonders if her mother was a bear and then she tells the man, “I like that the mountaintop looks like one. And that it will always stay right where it is.” The man responds that this is why he buried her mother there. “The bear is a companion to her while she sleeps. I hope one day I’ll sleep there, too.” This connection of mother energy and bear energy goes both ways. When the bear first answers the girl’s question about where he learned to speak, he says his mother taught him. The passing on of knowledge and the connection to the surrounding world are deeply entwined. Communication here is powerful.
By the end of the tale, Krivak has carefully and deftly made his way to the story’s hopeful message: nature will survive. But there is something more. The story also suggests that humans and nature are more connected than they think. All they have to do is listen.
Darcie Abbene is an adjunct professor at Northern Vermont University and the Managing and Nonfiction Editor at the Green Mountains Review. She has work in Parhelion Literary, Capsule Stories, and Tupelo Quarterly. She reviews books for Necessary Fiction and Kirkus Review. Darcie is working on a novel and a collection of essays on teaching and is a candidate in the Stonecoast MFA program.