Fiction Review
In the Bear’s House
by Bruce Hunter
Frontenac Press
2025, 320 pp
“And how a person tells a story tells so much about them” (In a Bear’s House, 190).
At first glance, In the Bear’s House by Bruce Hunter is a coming-of-age story, but it is more. In his twelfth book, award-winning Hunter weaves a complex braid of stories that sits comfortably beside W.O. Mitchell’s Who Has Seen the Wind and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, giving us the story not only of a boy who seeks the wisdom of an ‘outsider,’ but a story that captures a place and time that is now history but oh, so relevant. At the heart of In the Bear’s House is the fraught reality of a young deaf boy – Will/Trout – who is lost in his silent world and mostly misunderstood by schoolmates and elders. An angry boy, Trout acts out his frustration. This thread of the braid is told by an omnipotent narrator. The second narrator is Clare, Trout’s mother, who tells her story in alternating chapters. The third thread of the braid is ‘place and time’ which become a character. Hunter reveals Calgary on the edge of the oil boom as well as the Kootenay Plains at the time of the Bighorn Dam that flooded the territory of the Stoney Nakoda. Each of these threads could have become individual books, but Hunter skillfully weaves them into a heartbreaking story of our failure on all three fronts.
Seven of Hunter’s books have been poetry and this novel brims with poetic writing. One of the first tropes, which I noticed, is the conch shell, a shell that was carried to the prairies from Wickham, New Brunswick by Trout’s great-great auntie in 1882. She tells Trout, When I was a girl, we’d put it to our ears and hear the sea. I always thought it looked like an ear (30). Trout calls his early hearing aids contraptions; they, his auntie, and the conch are forever intertwined:
Through the crackle of his contraption, he listened, not to the sea, but to the river, the hiss of water, and once more, to his auntie’s stories (32).
The conch, a reminder of the gift of hearing and imagination. In the Bear’s House is grounded in 1960s Calgary and Kootenay plains, as W.O. Mitchell’s iconic novel, Who Has Seen the Wind, is grounded in the prairies. Hunter links the two protagonists, while also paying tribute to his mentor. He writes,
It was not the first book in which Trout recognized himself, but it was the first where he recognized the place in which he lived (59).
In the Bear’s House is more than an Albertan novel. You don’t need to be prairie- or foothills-born to find a piece of yourself in the story. Although I didn’t know Calgary during its transition from frontier town to oil-rush mecca, I recognize the scrabble and grit from my own growing up on the outskirts of Windsor and the freedom of being a child on a hundred-acre farm with a train running through it. Another thing to watch for as you read is the way Hunter weaves physical/natural and socio-cultural-political history seamlessly into the story. For example, he writes of the Devonian Sea that flooded the Great Plains:
[…] great ancient reefs of spongy stromatoporoids, gelatinous tubes that rose ten stories from the bottom, munched on plankton, amongst fragile sea lilies, giant clams and upside-down cones of rugose coral and the armour-plated placoderm and sharks covered with spines sharp as bayonets. Where dreams and nightmares converged (64-65).
Like most of Hunter’s references, he circles and returns, When the oil companies came through, they drilled over the first well, pumping out salt water from the Devonian Sea where all the oil lay (227). The story is carefully written; the research and the structure are meticulous. Clare’s narrative chapters and her feminist point-of-view presents a clear picture of many women’s reality during the mid-20th century. Other themes include First Nations issues, ecology and environmental concerns, neurodivergence (Clare’s mental health) and the revelation of the impact of deafness in our society and how one child overcomes those challenges. (Sadly, Trout does not have the supports that benefitted Frances Itani’s grandmother, as told in Deafening.)
Besides, all these reasons to enjoy In the Bear’s House, there is wordplay. When Will/Trout prepares to leave home to spend the summer with his uncle and aunt in the Kootenay mountains where his uncle is a forest ranger, his mother, Clare, gives him a book of love poetry.
At his mother’s insistence he read some of the poems in the days before he left, although the poets’ meaning was lost on him. But before closing the door to his room, “Will, listen to the reverie!” But, he was confused and the reverie of the poems hadn’t appeared yet in his young life (95).
Later, we learn,`
He knew something of reverie now, of which the poets spoke in words of such power and beauty. This reverie was close to madness. It was an idiot joy that numbed him and changed him at once (165).
Finally, Hunter addresses the challenge, as a settler, of writing about the First Nations, the colonial authority, and specifically, the Bighorn Dam. He takes us to the breaking of Treaty Seven:
Jack read the letter [from the federal Minister] aloud.…The Dam was now approved, and surveying would start soon on the easterly end of Kootenay Plains.… Jack’s hands shook as he read the letter out loud. […] ‘The dam’s going in Tershishner Creek Gorge,’ Jack said. ‘Three miles right above the reserve. They’re clearing all the way back, this side of Kootenay Plains. Jesus.’[…] Charlie reached under his chair and brought out an old grey flour sack, which he placed on the table. He untied the leather thong that kept it closed, and carefully unwrapped protective paper, revealing a book. Trout saw that it was a family Bible
Trout recognize the picture as a calendar reproduction of the signing of Treaty Seven in 1877. […] ‘My grandfather was there with Jacob Goodstoney Ki-Chi-Pwot, when he signed the treaty.’ Charlie tapped his finger on the picture and pointed at a chief standing next to the Governor General. ‘The Queen promised.’ Charlie nodded and passed the Bible to Jack. ‘You read. Our land.’
The burning of the cabin. The fight over the small graves. The arrogance. The loss. The lingering continuity. It is all here. And finally, Trout returns home, changed. There’s so much I haven’t mentioned, the playing of the bagpipes, the loss of a second son, a stillbirth by Clare (a hushed women’s story), the fatal accidents, the forest fires, Trout learning to play the blues on a harmonica, wisdom slipped in. (There were never just two sides to anything, but many, and layers within them, shimmering in darkness and light (230).) There are many, many reasons to read In the Bear’s House by Bruce Hunter.