AFTERWORD
I can almost hear the voices: “You said the last Brian book was the last Brian book,” and I did say that. But the response from readers is still profoundly overwhelming, hundreds of letters a day, all wanting more of Brian, and so this book, and I will no longer say that I will write no more about Brian and the north woods. . . . In some way he has become real to many, many people and they want to see more of him and so, and so . . . we shall see.
As to the subject of this story, it is hard to imagine any animal as evil—only man would seem to have a capacity for true evil and deliberate cruelty. And bear, especially, lend themselves to seeming likable. They have been romanticized to a point far beyond reality. What bears truly are has been lost in concepts like the teddy bear and Winnie the Pooh and I can well understand how some people will view the bear and the attacks in this story. Some years ago, just after the movie Free Willy—a film about a captive killer whale that a boy helps to freedom—had come out, I was interviewed on a radio call-in show and mentioned that I had seen two killer whales playing with a baby seal, throwing it back and forth like a toy before killing it and eating it, and the phone almost jumped off the hook. Killer whales are friendly, people said, which is sometimes true, and they only eat fish, which is not true—they not only eat seals but often dolphins as well, and off the coast of New Zealand a female and her calf attacked a scuba diver. They are wolves of the sea, if you will, and for a killer whale to eat, as with wolves, something else has to die.
And so to bear: the truth about bear is that they are cute and smart and, sometimes, lovable, and they also kill things and have on more occasions than some people like to admit attacked and killed and eaten human beings.
I have had bear come into my sled-dog kennel and kill dogs to get at their food—one particular dog, Hulk, was killed with a single blow in the middle of the night. My wife has been chased from the garden to the house by a bear, which almost caught her. It had a small terrier named Quincy hanging on its neck fur all the way. And I have a friend whose nephew was in a scout camp in Wisconsin and a bear pulled him out of his tent at night and tried to carry him off and eat him and only let go when dozens of scouts attacked the bear with rocks and sticks and forced it to drop the boy, who had to get hundreds of stitches and has not fully recovered the use of his arm.
And the attack in this story, a couple killed and the woman partially eaten, happened almost exactly as I describe it; the bear attacked them on an island in a lake in the Canadian woods where they had come in a canoe to fish, killed both of them and dragged the woman off to feed.
We don’t like to think of ourselves as prey—it is a lessening thought—but the truth is that in our arrogance and so-called knowledge we forget that we are not unique. We are part of nature as much as other animals, and some animals—sharks, fever-bearing mosquitoes, wolves and bear, to name but a few—perceive us as a food source, a meat supply, and simply did not get the memo about how humans are superior.
It can be shocking, humbling, painful, very edifying and sometimes downright fatal to run into such an animal.