Folklore

Bear Facts: The History and Folklore of Island Bears

Part Two

by Jim Hornby A handmade wooden toy pits man (?) against bear — too often the case on Prince Edward Island.

In Part One of "Bear Facts/' which was featured in Issue 22 (Fall-Winter, 1987), Jim Hornby treated readers to a history of the black bear on Prince Edward Island. In the conclusion to his study, Hornby chronicles the passing of Ursus americanus in the province, and examines its long afterlife in Island folklore.

F o r g o t t e n But N o t G o n e

Despite their large size (even the volume of their breath could give

them away as they hibernated in snow-covered dens), and the constant en-croachment of civilization on their ranges, Island bears could feel, with Mark Twain, that reports of their death were greatly exaggerated during the 19th century. In 1806, John Stewart wrote that "in less than half a century, I have no doubt but the bears will be entirely extirpated." John MacGregor wrote in 1828 that "they are now much reduced in number and rarely met with"; 11 years later, S. S. Hill opined that "they will soon disappear." In the 1850s, Isabella Lucy Bird, author of The English Woman in America, observed that "Bears, which used to be a great attraction to the more adventur-ous class of sportsman, are, however, rapidly disappearing"; but since the lady spent most of her Island visit in Charlottetown, we can be certain only that the animals avoided city streets.

Other observers disagreed with the prophets of imminent extinction. As late as the 1830s, city folk gathered at the foot of Gallows Hill, now the corner of Euston and University Streets, before heading west; they wanted to travel in

groups for protection against bears. An 1836 visitor to Morell stated, "Bears are said to be frequently seen in this neighbourhood." In 1862, the Guardian recorded that "Bears are becoming very numerous and exceedingly troublesome east of Souris." Even near the turn of the century, bears were reported only as "gradually becoming scarcer" in the Dundas area.

The extinction of the bear on Prince Edward Island was explained, a bit prematurely, by a commentator in 1900: "The forests have fallen before the woodsman's axe. Bruin has also dis-appeared." This extinction, while inev-itable, was so slow that a National Museum of Canada publication would cautiously state as late as 1958 that the black bear "is now believed to be extinct on the [I]sland, although from time to time reports are received of animals having been seen."

Las t B e a r Hunt

The Evening Patriot's headline for February 8,1927 - "Large Black Bear Shot at Souris Line Road" —marked the last killing of a bear on Prince Edward Island. In the next edition, the editor of the Patriot remarked on the surprising persistence of the animal, so often thought to be extinct:

Some of the older people have been much interested in the report of a bear being found abroad in the province at this late date. They remember when they were boys of hearing of bears in the woods. Indeed, we all remember the stories ... but for many years

none have been seen . . . and it was generally believed that they had disappeared entirely.

The actual shooting had occurred on February 7, 1927. The late Bernard Leslie of Souris Line Road was 16 when he and his 18-year-old brother, George, hunted and killed the bear. George noticed the tracks where the bear had crossed the north end of Souris Line Road, heading east by Hainey's Brook. Bernard told me the story. "A thaw came, a February thaw, and the bear pulled out of his den going to make another quarters for himself." The next morning the Leslie boys waited until their father left for Souris: "We didn't tell him 'cause he'd ruin the whole thing on us; he'd have to come." They armed themselves with two 12-gauge shotguns: an old bolt-action and a newer double-barreled. Aside from some buck-shot, their ammunition was one shell, into which they put a 3

A inch ball bear-ing. Then the chase was on.

Bernard Leslie described the hunt:

We tracked that bear from 9 o'clock in the morning and it was one o'clock in the afternoon before we found him. We walked through the woods with no track, just fol-lowed the bear's track. Into bushes and thickets — you wouldn't know but you'd meet the bear in the thicket. And there was snow came that night, about three inches of snow. You'd have to crouch down to get through the thickets you know. And we walked and walked.

At last we came to a place . . . and here was the bear. He was on a little hill, but we could see him

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breathing, we could see his body going up and down under the snow. He was sleeping, see. He'd camped there for the night and slept. He broke some boughs and made a little bed for himself. So Geordie took the first shot with the ball [bearing] cartridge, and he's about 15 feet from him when he fired. The bear was lying on his right side and it got him through the left hip. And that ball came up through his hip and cut the jugular vein going out the side of his neck. That's what fixed the bear.

The bear jumped up on his hind feet then, and snarled and roared and jumped a bit, and then he lay down, he fell down with weakness I guess. So Geordie took the gun from me and he stepped up closer with the buckshot. And the buck-shot never went through the bugger's hide. But the ball really was the one that killed him."

The brothers skinned their prize on the spot, using only pocket knives, and brought the skin home in triumph. The carcass, weighing over four hundred pounds, was later boiled to render the grease — a smelly business, Bernard recalled. They were asked to send a firkin of bear grease to England, for which they happily received $14. Ber-nard Leslie wasn't sure the English-man got the results he wanted from the grease: "I don't know if it makes hair grow or not. I don't think it did."

Dancing Bears Although wild bears have dominated the story of their species on Prince Edward Island, no account of Ursus americanus would be complete without a reference to dancing bears, an ancient if rather seedy form of entertainment offered here by itinerant showmen for many years. The earliest Island refer-ence in print may be the curiously exotic passenger list from the Royal Gazette in 1830, announcing that the Pictou packet had arrived in Charlotte-town with (besides eight other pas-sengers) "a company of French Rope Dancers, a Female Preacher, and a Dancing Bear." With the number of bears resident on the Island at this time it seems odd that they were brought in for amusement, but perhaps the local bears were too busy avoiding the local Nimrods to spare time for dancing.

William D. Johnston remembered seeing a dancing bear with its master in Montague. They "travelled from place to place exhibiting bruin's ability to waltz to his trainer's tune of Larry,

Larry-donk-dow, Larry-larry-dow. When it came time to feed the per-former, the showman would strap the bear's legs together, remove the muz-zle, and bruin could enjoy its repast." Another dancing bear had a grisly meal after performing at Brackley Beach in 1874. Its master charged the substantial sum of 10 cents to see it dance: "The man played a mouth organ as the bear sort of kept time to the music, then as the dance ended the keeper asked for something to feed the bear." The man was later found killed by his bear on the Mill Road, and is said to be buried at Brackley. The bear, having broken its chain, was shot by Charles Gregor.

Performing bears were not confined to the 19th century. There are many

more recent appearances on record. Successors to the dancing bears occa-sionally have been brought here for shows, such as during Old Home Week. Sometimes, too, the consequences can be grisly. In early October 1984, a black bear brought to the Island for "wres-tling" exhibitions bit off parts of fin-gers of two young men who entered the ring with it in Tyne Valley.

Poem, Song, Recitation Though (presumably) no longer with us, Island bears have been celebrated in a number of expressive forms. Among these are a poem, a poem/recitation, and a folksong.

The poem "Bear Hunt," too lengthy

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Curious bystanders look on as a dancing bear, muzzled and chained, strikes a pose with his handlers in 1890s Charlottetown.

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This bearskin robe was "made expressly for A. Home & Co. it is unlikely that the bear in question was an Islander.

of Charlottetown, but

and poorly versified to print here, was written anonymously to commemorate the killing of a bear near the St. Peters Road in Marshfield. The bear was dis-covered on the property of a prominent public figure, Robert Poore Haythorne, and chased across the road to the grounds of Marshfield School, where the fatal shot was fired by James Wyatt. A detailed report of this hunt, written by Haythorne, appeared in the Examiner for July 27, 1863 as "Bear Hunt on the St. Peter's Road." The poem "Bear Hunt" is remarkable only for the lack of detail provided in its 272 lines.

A far more appealing bit of verse is "The Hunters and the Bear," written by Lizzie Macintosh of Belle River and dated February 8, 1902. Although no bear was found — it has been sug-gested that the sight of a large New-foundland dog inspired the hunt -—the poem is interesting as social history, and for the sympathy it expressed for the bear. Its pleasant cadence has lent itself to use as a recitation, and some older people remember it as such.

A Kings County folksong about a bear hunt has been printed at least twice: by Edward D. Ives as "The Bear at Grand River," (in Lawrence Doyle: The Farmer-Poet of Prince Edward Island) and by Randall and Dorothy Dibblee as "The Bear Song" (in Folk-songs from P.E.I.). Since the song is thoroughly discussed by Dr. Ives, I will add only that, again, the bear's point of view is ra ther sympathetically expressed. Two of the lines ("He came out on the road leading down to the mill/He looked at the sun and his eyes

seemed to fill") are reminiscent of a statement made by noted hunter John Jay in The Weekly Examiner & Island Argus of December 28,1883: "When he and the others were in hot pursuit of a bear, the animal has turned to see how far they were behind, stood upon one foot as straight as a man, that he might see the further, and shaded the sun from his eyes with a paw as he looked."

Bears in Island Folklore

It is hardly surprising t ha t such a complex animal lives in the folk memory of Islanders. The contradic-tory qualities associated with the bear include, bravery, endurance, strength; also brutality, clumsiness, gruffness, ill-temper, misanthropy, moroseness, uncouthness. Among Island Micmacs I have found a surprising lack of bear lore, but they presumably revered the bear as a symbol of physical power, both because of its size and the fact that it can survive months of hiberna-tion without eating. John MacGregor scornfully noted an item of folklore about bears (which is sometimes used to explain why female bears have no breasts): "It seems extraordinary, that a bear on leaving his den is nearly as fat as at any period of the year. The vulgar, but absurd, belief is that they live during winter by sucking their paws."

John Hunter-Duvar, the 19th century Island man of letters, collected a number of stories concerning the rela-tionship between bear and Micmac. He states: "Formerly an Indian always

apologized to a bear before killing him. 'Excuse me, my lord Mokowa,' he would say, 'not my will but circumstances over which I have no control compel me to do it.' This was to prevent being haunted by the animal's ghost." In addition to this spirit belief, Indians told Hunter-Duvar several tall tales about bears. One was that an Indian had fallen on "a sleeping bear that started up and angrily exclaimed 'where the deuce are you coming to' or words to that effect." Another Indian told Hunter-Duvar of seeing in the woods "two bears sitting on their haunches and laughing consumedly at some joke that one had told to the other."

A modern bear joke associated with Island Micmacs runs as follows: "A school asked the chief to speak on 'How Indians caught the bear.' He said, they dug a hole beside a big tree, filled it half full of ashes, put boughs on top. When the bear came sniffing around they kicked him in the ash-hole." A similar story was collected in Charlottetown as directions for "How to catch a bear." "You dig a big hole and in the hole you put a barrel of flour, a mirror and a block of ice, and then you cover up the hole and the bear falls in the flour and looks at himself in the mirror and thinks he's a polar bear. He sits on the block of ice and gets pneumonia and dies." In Ernest W. Baughman's Type and Motif Index of the Folktales of England and North America (The Hague, 1966), the two preceding items are classified according to narrative characteristics as motif X955(a): "Lie: Remarkable killing of bear." However, neither of these two "methods" is men-tioned by Baughman.

Some bear folklore involves fending off bears as opposed to killing them. J. B. Schurman's responses to an 1876 history questionnaire included a story of a man holding a bear's tongue, and a belief: "It used to be said that if you looked straight into a bear's face he would not come at you."

Several of the stories collected revolve around unusual evidence of contact with a bear. Here is one: "An ox arrives home with a bear's paw stuck in its hindquarters. When the bear struck, the ox ran so fast that the bear's paw was torn away." From West Prince comes the story of a mare that was scared by a bear in the woods; next spring the mare's foal was found to have a bear claw in its front leg. This is related to Baughman's motif X1202: "Lie: animals inherit acquired charac-teristics or conditions." A take-off on this theme is the following story: "They claim that a pregnant woman if she saw anything and got a fright, it would affect the baby. So this woman was in the woods, and she was that way, and

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The winter set in quietly along Belle River shore,

One day two little urchins enjoyed a pleasant romp,

That night, when darkness covered this peaceful, quiet land,

And when the springtime visits this land and Bruin's lair,

Miss E. Macintosh Belle River, 1902

From Hesta MacDonald, Belfast Historical Society

she got an awful fright from the bear. Now, it did affect the baby — he was born with bare feet."

The most popular tall bear story I have heard on Prince Edward Island is an internationally reported one: a man suddenly meets a bear; he escapes injury by reaching down the bear's throat and pulling it inside out. The story is listed as tale type AT 1889B, and as Baugh-man's motif XI 124.2. Both listings include other types of animals as well as bears. A version of the story appears in a French tale collection first pub-lished in Paris in 1579, where a lynx is pulled inside out, "just like an eel when you skin it."

Another, and unsurprising, folkloric use of bears has been as bogeyman fig-ures to frighten both children and adults. One example derives from a trip that John Bell and family made from West River to Crapaud in 1820. A local history records, "To cheer their journey through the woods the tree was pointed out that Alex Macquarrie climbed to escape from a bear and they were told how the bear climbed up after him and gnawed the flesh from his heels." This heel-gnawing of treed men, whom the bear often has pursued up the tree, is a recurrent story told of at least six Island men, and may indicate a traditional narrative theme.

A clear example of the bear as bogeyman can be found in a Chelton man's recollection in a letter to the Guardian during the 1950s of "the tall stories I used to hear of bears and a bear's fondness for baby meat." In the Evangeline region, the belief existed among Acadians that whistling at-tracted bears. And in Albany, Prince County, area people were afraid to go down the Arnett Road after dark because bears were said to lurk there.

Many years ago a young Scot from Fernwood was given a bear scare as a prank by his fellow wood-cutters. The knew that his mother was constantly admonishing him not to tear his trousers. So, a local history of the area records: "When Hughie would be work-ing in or walking through a particu-larly tangled area of brush, the cry would be raised, 'A bear! a bear!' Hughie would then make a dash for safety at terrific speed — and with disastrous results."

The bear was also employed as a frightening figure in games, as the fol-lowing two examples attest. A bear game or prank occurred at the first tea party in Crapaud:

After ten, we saw a bear crossing the field. The big boys chased it with sticks into the woods and bared it, and it turned out to be George Palmer dressed in buffalo

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This bearish mailbox reminds passers-by on the outskirts of Montague that the black bear may be gone from Prince Edward Island, but he is not forgotten.

robes. He was running on all fours. The poor fellow was done out and he laid [sic] down pant-ing. A man got some pound cake and fed him.

Of this incident, one can only observe that it is a long way from pound bounty to pound cake.

A game called "Bear Won't Come" — a version of "Hide and Seek" — was played at Cape Traverse school around the turn of the century. It was played near some bush where one child ("the bear") was hiding. The other children, simulating many real encounters, pre-tended to be picking berries nearby. The bear would attack from cover and try to catch some unfortunate. The game was played until only one child, the winner, had escaped the bear. Thus, perhaps, did the young mimic the fears of their parents.

A final example of the bear as bogey-man occurred about 25 years ago, when a Burnt Point man promoted a bear story in order to keep people out of his corn. The rumour started when his neighbour's big dog scared a horse, and someone mistook the dog for a bear. The man heard about a "Burnt Point bear" being abroad. "I didn't tell them there wasn't," he later recalled. "It was surprising all the people seen that bear." The story grew when he told a visitor that the bear was "always out in the corn." Finally, a lamb that had been buried was dug up by some dogs. "I said the bear dug it up." By this time the story was big enough to keep human predators from this man's corn for quite a while.

Place and Person Names Bears have made a remarkable imprint on Island place names; but, because many names have been changed or forgotten, their number has gone unnoticed. The great majority of these place names are from Kings County, where the animal itself has been most persistent.

The first such name that will occur to many is Cape Bear, Lot 64, a transla-tion of the French "Cap a l'Ours," which dates from the mid-18th century. At that time, nearby Murray Harbour was known as "Havre l'Ours." Another name that comes quickly to mind is Bear River, a community as well as a river (and, at one time, the name of a post office and railroad waystation) in Lots 43 and 44. In explaining the origin of this name, geographer Alan Ray-burn writes, "It is reported that Roder-ick MacDonald killed a 600 pound bear there about 1820 after a four-hour fight."

Among the Island place-names used by the Micmac is another "bear river" {Mooinawaseboo), today's Belle River. The Micmac name for Gillis Point translates as "bear trapping" (Moin-agenetjg). In Eastern Kings, on the North Side, the bear-related name of Timothy's Bush has been noted. On the South Side are Basin Head, formerly called Bear Creek, and Black Pond (Loch Dhu in the original Gaelic). At the outlet of Black Pond is a large boulder named Bear Rock, after a bear that was found sheltering there by a girl herding cows. The former name of a fishing station at that location, "La Bear," may derive from the same incident. A local history of the area relates, "The story went that a Perry from Souris shot a big bear at Loch Dhu . . . . (These bears, of course, are never described as medium-sized or small.) Not far away, in the Boughton River area, was "Bear Trap Road." Other localized place-names are Bear Swamp near Freetown, in Lot 25, and Bear Spring in Glen Valley, west of Hunter River. The latter name has fallen into disuse since the spring has been dry for many years.

As the foregoing list suggests, the appearance of a bear in the neighbour-hood was a landmarking event. Any tree that was involved in a bear story was an object of local curiosity (as has been shown) for years after, especially if claw-marks could still be seen on it.

The bear's man-like qualities have led to its use in nicknames that empha-size some men's bear-like qualities. In the provincial archives, for example, there is an 1832 reference to an old Donald "Bear" MacDonald, and during the 1970s, the "Bear" MacDonald clan was mentioned by Walter Shaw in Tell

Me the Tales. Another family, the "Bear" Hughes of Dromore, has carried the name for several generations. The name is traced to an Irish-born ancestor, who was "probably a little cross." The nick-name "Rory the Bear" seems especially appropriate. One man that bore it was a former rector of St. Dunstan's Uni-versity, Father R. V. MacKenzie. He was called "Rory the Bear" because, as a contemporary recalls, he was "slightly ferocious."

Sometimes a bearish nickname de-rived from an incident rather than a resemblance. Many years ago, a woman living on the Baltic Road (between Priest Pond and Red Point in Eastern Kings) was out stooking grain, with her infant daughter in a basket. A bear grabbed the child, which was mauled before it could be recovered. It is said that the child was thereafter known (in Highland Gaelic) as "the bear's leavings."

Conclusion

Times change. A recently-heard refer-ence to "bear bait" stemmed from the American term "Smokey the Bear," meaning a highway patrolman. An Island bus driver used the term "bear bait" as a sports car passed him at high speed. The driver explained that if there was radar ahead the sports car would hit it, and so we could drive a bit faster if we wished.

As for homegrown bears, well, no one's caught a rug since the Leslie brothers in '27. Since then, there have been many reported sightings all over Kings County: at Ashton, east of St. Peters, in August 1937; at Avondale and Keefe's Lake in the fall of 1949; around Dundas, "at least four times" between 1953 and 1956; at North Lake in the early summer of 1958; at the Anderson Farm near St. Peters Lake around 1962; and (reported by tobacco pickers) at Commercial Cross in the mid-1970s. None of these sightings has been confirmed, but the reports refuse to die out. Once all too real a part of Island life, the bear continues to have an afterlife in the memory and the imagination.

Sources

Source materials for "Bear Facts" are too numerous to list individually, but include Island newspapers spanning the last two centuries, as well as local histories. Some of the living oral tradi-tion was collected from personal con-tacts and interviews.

The author wishes to thank the many people across the Island who assisted in the project. iSi

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