The Bear Walker

This short story first appeared more than 60 years ago in ‘Canadian Forum ‘, a monthly that is still remembered for its elegant contributions to Canadian intellectual discourse. The story is fictional, but the main character is based on a residential school survivor with whom I shared a room while I was working at the lodge on Manitoulin Island. The nomen ‘Indian’ has now been reclaimed by East Indian immigrants but a half-century ago, it meant an indigenous person – a ‘native’ of Canada.

As luck would have it, I was the first to meet Elizabeth Laird

Williams at the  Manitowaning dock. There was a curious pointed

look about her; her hair-line dipped to a sharp widow's peak; her

nose terminated in a point and there were sharp little points are

each corner of her mouth. For a moment, when I first saw her, I thought of what that

little pointed mouth might become in twenty years. Little lines

would gather on the upper lip; the lips would grow thinner,

slightly disapproving. But I am getting ahead of myself. I had driven down to the wharf where the old Normac had just pulled in, to see if there were any passengers aboard who might want accommodation. The lodge where I had a summer job needed customers. I found only Elizabeth.

   "Maybe I can help you?" said I, for she was looking up and

down the wharf as if she expected a taxi to materialize suddenly

 from behind the warehouse at the water’s edge.

   "I suppose," she said, "that everyone here just walks up to

the town." She stared without pleasure at the steep road that led up from the

wharf to the village.

   "Well, those that walk down here, do" I replied. 'Were you wanting

to go up some other way?"

   "It's my luggage," she said. She had three suitcases, and as she looked at them with a trace of despair, she appeared a trifle more helpless and feminine than before.

   "Well, there's my old jalopy," said I.  A Dodge pick-up truck,

originally black, with J. Nimmo, Prop., Indian Point Lodge, stenciled on the door. He was the man

I worked for, the proprietor of the Indian Point lodge.  Elizabeth gave the old truck a look of greater

appreciation than it had received for a good many years, and said

something which was probably polite, but a caterwauling blast from

the Normac's whistle jammed her wavelength.

   "Huh?" I asked, when the soundwaves had stopped battering our

eardrums.

   "Thank you very much," she said, and stood back, waiting to be served. I loaded her luggage

into the back of the truck.

   On the way up from the wharf to the town, which stands on a

bluff overlooking Manitowaning Bay, I learned her name was

Elizabeth Laird Williams and she learned that mine was Jack

McBride. She was an assistant professor of

anthropology from Rochester who had come to Manitoulin Island to research

First Nations customs, and she learned that I was an undergraduate from

Toronto working here for the summer. Two weeks later, I was calling

her Liz, and she called me Jack without sounding like my

mother, but that is getting ahead of myself.   

   I deposited her at the lodge, and left her to enjoy the

amenities of that establishment, while I went back to the wharf to

load an unforgiveable amount of cargo addressed to J. Nimmo Esq.

From what I heard later; she had scarcely installed herself in a

room when she began her research. She discovered an Indian of

indeterminate age sitting on the steps of the post-office and

pounced on him. How was he? The Indian greeted this interest in his

health with some surprise, but he guessed he was O.K. Would he have

a cigarette? He would, thank you. And finally, she supposed he had

a great deal to tell about tribal rites among the Indians?

   "Only what I see in the movies," he said. "I don't get to read 

much."

   "There is a tremendous interest in Indian customs nowadays,"

said Elizabeth, by way of explanation. Which was an exaggeration.

Back then Indians could not vote in Canada, and the "tremendous interest" did

not extend as far as the nearest politician.

   "Well," said the Indian, who thought her thirst for knowledge

was not entirely to be condemned, "there's a bunch of professors

down in Tranna who know a lot about Indians and things like that.

Just ask them anything. They'll tell you."

   Oh, he was a cunning one, that Indian, and he had met

professors before.

   Elizabeth's second conquest was the village idiot, who was

always on hand to greet newcomers. She examined Elizabeth with a

watery stare at first; then she sidled up to her and gurgled,

   "Manit'waning beat Little Current last night."

   A native of the town would have greeted this overture with an

indulgent smile, or said "You like baseball, my dear?", but

Elizabeth met it with a blank stare which the poor soul mistook for

deep interest, and she gurgled until she began to froth at the

mouth.

   "A week ago," she added, "Little Current beat Manit'waning."

   "Oh," Elizabeth managed. "Where were the Mounties?"

   "You like baseball?" asked the idiot, by now nearly rendered

incoherent by a flood of saliva.

   "Baseball? Oh, you were talking about baseball!" said

Elizabeth, with sudden comprehension. "Yes. Tell me. Do you know

any Indians who are willing to talk about their native customs?"

   But the idiot was out of her element there, and although she

tried to divert Elizabeth back to baseball, the conversation

petered out.

   Personally, I didn't know how she was getting along with her

research. The Indigenous folk have a reputation for being taciturn, which

is not entirely deserved. I spent one entire morning listening to

a recital of the matrimonial vicissitudes of a middle-aged Indian;

he related the misadventures of his ex-wife without passion, but he

did seem to derive an unholy satisfaction from the fact that no

other man had been more successful at keeping her faithful to him

than himself. But the Indian veils his superstitions and beliefs

from the laughter of the white man. Two centuries of Christianity

have not vanquished the ancient gods, but they have taught them the

arts of dissimulation.

   So, when I got a chance, I introduced Elizabeth to Allan

Smith. That was the nondescript name his priest had given him, and

he wore it in his encounters with the white man. He was a handsome

chap, with a lithe body and smooth black hair, which glinted in the

sun with a steely blue tint. He had gone to a Jesuit-run residential school

at Spanish River, where pupils were sent to Confession every week, and, he said, with a laugh,  ‘we didn’t have enough time to commit enough sins in a week and so we made them up”. But his intelligence had so impressed the

teachers there that they thought him university material. But his interest faded. School was claustrophobic and

foreign and the food was bad. And then, his father died of pneumonia. He left the

academy without matriculating and returned to the reserve on

Manitoulin Island, where he lived with his mother and worked his father’s few acres off and on.

      Yet there was something about him that marked him off from the 

other Indigenous folks I met. It was partly the way he used the English

language: not always grammatically, but with a well-developed feeling for

style. English was a foreign instrument on which he played his own

peculiar rhythms and produced his own effects. Elizabeth's eyes

flickered with sudden interest when I introduced her to him. 

   "How do you like our island?" he asked, politely.

   "It's beautiful," she said. "The scenery here is very nice if

that were all I came here to study."

   "Well, what did you come for? To fish?"

   She told him that she had come to research Indigenous customs, but

so far, she had made less progress than she had hoped. "The Indians

here a rather a glum lot if you don't mind my saying. They don't

open up."

   Allan laughed, a little self-consciously.

   "Well, after all," he said, "suppose an Indian were to do

research, as you call it, on the customs and practices of the Roman

Catholic church? What would happen then?"

   "Then he need only apply to the nearest priest, and he would

get everything he wanted. Probably more," said Elizabeth.

   "But you know a good deal about us already," he replied. " A

couple years ago, a professor came up from Toronto, and he knew

more about Indian customs that a lot of us did."

   "It's too bad these customs are dying out."

   Allan looked out across Manitowaning Bay toward the

reservation on the other side, and I could sense his withdrawal.

Perhaps he was thinking of how the white man had so ruthlessly

misunderstood these very customs which they mourned in a very

academic way now that they were passing.  Or perhaps not. Allan

learned the code of the paleface; he could rub shoulders with them

unashamed, with his faintly ironic smile on his lips, but behind

his black eyes there was a dissidence I did not quite understand.

   I wondered if Elizabeth was aware of it. She saw a good deal

of Allan in the next few weeks. She once informed me with the

certainty of someone who had passed Introductory Psychology with an

"A" that Allan was schizophrenic; in one part of himself he

belonged to his Indian background, but at the same time, he was a

product of the white man's education. I think she forgot that he

had given up his education.

   "Tell me, Allan," she asked once, " do you find much prejudice

against you as an Indian by other people?"

   "No," he said, but he didn't mean it.

   "But do you?" she persisted.

   "It's not open here," he explained. "But you feel it. Indians

are different. We can't help that, but white people don't really

like it. We are not to be trusted with our own lives. We are

treated like children."

   "It would make a difference if you had the right to vote,"

stated Elizabeth, for all this happened five years before Canada

extended the franchise to native Indians.

   "Do you think so?"

   "I'm sorry," she said.

   "You needn't apologize," he replied with a short laugh. "I

don't blame you."

   "But I feel ashamed," she said. She leaned across the table.

We were having coffee in a restaurant which, by an attraction of

opposites, called itself the Waldorf. She put her hands close to

his. "I want you to know this. I don't have any of that feeling

towards Indians."

   He laughed, embarrassed, but his hands closed over hers.

   But there was a vast gap between them, though Elizabeth would

not see it. It appeared one day when we were discussing the curse

of the bear walker. This is a superstition which many of

the Manitoulin Indians accept. When misfortune strikes a man, he

blames it not on bad luck, but on a bear walker who has cast a

curse on him. The bear walker is generally an old woman, innocent

enough in reality, I suspect, except that she might take an unholy

satisfaction out of the powers that were credited to her. But there

is only one way for a man to free himself from the bear walker's

curse, and that is murder. The bear walker must be killed for her victim to be freed.

   It is, I suppose, a variation of the werewolf legend that must

be common to half the countries of the world. An obsolete notion, Elizabeth thought, but possibly a good subject for a dissertation. 

   "But there are some odd things happen over in that reserve,"

said Allan. "They're hard to explain."

   We allowed that they might be interesting, but we would not

put any stock in them.

   "But suppose," said Allan. "I know of one story. There was a

young man I know very well. He was the only son, and he had some

education. At least, he was not stupid. But a bear walker put a

curse on his family after a quarrel and first his father's horse

did, and then his father took pneumonia, and after a while, his Dad died

too. His mother knew it was the bear walker, and she told her son,

`You must kill this woman who is the bear walker, or we'll all die.'

But the son did not want to kill, and he didn't know what to do."

   "But surely, if he had an education, he couldn't believe in

the bear walker at all," said Elizabeth.

   "Why should education matter?"

   "Well, with education you know these beliefs for what they

are," said Elizabeth.

    “Yes, but his mother was growing weaker, and she – and her family too –expected him to do something. We have lived a long time with our customs.”

   "But what happened, " I broke in. "Did he kill the bear

walker?"

   "No," said Allan.

   "And did the family all die?"

   "I don't know," he replied. "I never heard."

   The movies came to Manitowaning once a week, and we three went

together. The show was an epic titled Only the Valiant, all about

Indians and the U.S. cavalry, and in the finale, an impressive

number of extras in Indian dress were mowed down by a Gatling gun,

and European civilization was saved once again. The captain of the cavalry

squadron which had defended the pass against the savages for a day

and a night was solemnly complimented by his commanding officer,

and assured of a promotion which would allow him to marry his

commander's daughter. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed

Elizabeth sitting in embarrassed silence, and Allan watching her,

his lips twitching with suppressed amusement.

   Elizabeth was to leave the island on the next sailing of the

old Norgoma which called at Manitowaning on her voyage from the Soo

to Owen Sound. But she cancelled her booking and reserved a

stateroom at a later date. I began to suspect something was up. 

Allan, I knew, could take sex as casually as meat and drink, but

towards Elizabeth he maintained a respectful reserve. Yet he found

something in her that attracted him. It was not the lure of

forbidden fruit: yet to this day I would hesitate to say that he

was in love with her.

   They began to see a good deal of each other. They went for

drives in Allan's pickup truck, or for rambles in the countryside.

It was at Ten Mile Point that the affair came to a head.

   "Allan," said Elizabeth, as she adjusted her lipstick,

"There's one thing I want you to know. I have never felt any

prejudice against Indians. I have always accepted them as they are.

   "Good," said he, with a trace of humour.

   "If I were asked to marry an Indian, the fact that he was an

Indian would make no difference to me. Not if I loved him. In fact,

I would be proud to be the wife of a full-blooded Indian."

   Allan looked out over the water. The view from Ten Mile Point

could hardly have changed since his ancestors came to the island to

worship the Great Manitou, and the continent was young. I imagine

that he smiled his slow smile and that his eyes veiled a mixture of

feelings, one of which was cynicism. But he put an arm around her

shoulder.

   "I'm sorry I'm not full-blooded," he said. “You see, Davy

Crockett and company were a promiscuous lot. You know, we used to say that HBC meant ‘Horney Boys Club’ not Hudson’s Bay Company. But you can be about seventy-five percent tolerant, if you wish."

   So they became engaged in a semi-formal sort of way. Elizabeth

sent letters to her friends in Toronto and Rochester, and letters

came back from Toronto expressing surprise that she should be

marrying an Indian, and from Rochester marveling that she had found

an Indian to marry. Elizabeth went ahead with plans for a wedding,

and Allan showed a rather absent-minded interest in them. Had she

been an ordinary woman, she might have wondered how well she

understood her man, but she was not ordinary woman. When he

hesitated to introduce her to his family, explaining that his

mother was ill, she understood. He was probably shy and a little

ashamed of his parent, for his mother spoke no English. Elizabeth

understood. She was studying for her doctorate in cultural

anthropology, and prided herself on understanding her husband all

the better because he was a native. Her research continued at a

slower pace. But we still discussed Indian customs over coffee at

the Waldorf, Elizabeth interpreting them and Allan listening

silently. Once we returned to the bear walker superstition. Or

perhaps it rose itself among us, like some primeval desecrated

spirit half-buried on the island.

   "Suppose you had bad luck," Allan said," and you believed that

a bear walker had thrown a curse on you and was causing the bad

luck. What would you do then?"

   "Kill the bear walker," I said.

   "A normal person," said Elizabeth, "would just not believe in

the bear walker."

   "But suppose he did."

   "Once the basis for these superstitions is understood," said

Elizabeth, " then there is no fear."

   "All right," said Allan. "Suppose you don't believe yourself.

But other people round about you do believe that your bad luck is  

caused by a bear walker. What then?"

   "Well, I don't see that that's much problem," said Elizabeth."If you don't believe, well, that's all there is to it."

   Allan looked baffled.

   "It's just that I was wondering what the right thing to do

would be," he said.

   "Well, surely there can't be any question of that," Elizabeth

replied.

   "It's a funny thing," said I. "Perhaps what we're calling

superstitions belong here. They seem to fit the lakes and the woods

somehow, better than we do. Maybe we are the intruders."

   Elizabeth suppressed a sniff, but conveyed its meaning all the

same.

   "That's sophomore talk," she said.

   "I wonder," said Allan, irrelevantly, "if ever these

missionaries who go to places, like Africa, to civilize the

natives, ever end up getting converted themselves? That would be

funny!"

   "It would be fair," I said.

   Allan left soon after, saying his mother was ill, and he had

to return home. I saw Elizabeth back to her hotel. She was very

quiet.

   "Cold feet?" I asked.

   "Cold feet? No, the night is warm"

   "The marriage, I mean."

   "Oh, no," she replied. "It's just that sometimes - sometimes

I feel so distant - so out of contact with Allan. He is wonderful

when we are together. Very gentle. But I think  he might forget

me if I were out of his sight for two weeks!"

   I laughed. "A convenient way to live."

   "Not for me. And enough people have told me that I'm making a

mistake without you hinting at it too. Good night." She turned to

enter the hotel.

   "Elizabeth," I said. "You can press him too hard."

   She paused as if she would reply, and then, thinking better of

it, she went in and closed the door.

   I walked home through the night, and beyond the range of the

few streetlights, the darkness crowded around me, ancient but not

unfriendly. The water in the bay lapped sullenly on the shore. The

island seemed waiting to reclaim its own: the island with its

strange, musical names: Manitowaning, Mindemoya, Sheguindah,

Wikwemikong. I wondered if Elizabeth could have understood that.

Perhaps she did: understood and rejected, and maybe that was a

greater sin than never to have understood at all.

   The marriage was to take place in Rochester, some two months

after Elizabeth left the island. She talked about teaching in a

university once she had received her doctorate, and she made

plans for Allan to enter college as an adult special student. Allan

did not discuss the future at all.

   Saturday night the stores stay open in Manitowaning, and the

farmers come in from the country, and the Indians came from their

reservation to shop in the few emporiums which the village boasted,

or at least, to gossip on the street corners. Saturday nights in

the summer are a time to watch the world go by. People gather in

little knots, and the RCMP officer and the local constable parade

up and down, but they get little business. Manitowaning was a quiet

town. No liquor for sale, for there was no telling what an Indian

might do. Sin was kept behind locked doors. So the commotion on the

street the night before Elizabeth left the island attracted me

immediately.

   I hurried to join the crowd in front of the post-office steps.

An old woman lay there, thin and exceedingly ugly. I had seen her

before on the reservation: a scrawny, malodorous  creature with

malevolent eyes, who seemed to enjoy the suppressed repulsion she

inspired in those who met her. But now she looked merely pitiful,

for she was dead.

   An RCMP officer had been lounging in the hotel opposite the

post-office. Allan could scarcely have chosen a worse place to kill

the old woman if he planned to escape. That is, if he wanted to.

   I saw Elizabeth at the door of the hotel, and I went to join

her.

   "What's happened?" she asked

   "An Indian woman has been killed. She was a bear walker."

   The Mountie had put handcuffs on Allan and was leading him

away. As he passed, he saw us and grinned at Elizabeth,

half-apologetic, half-defiant.

   The pieces fell into place. "I guess that was the bear walker

that was going to kill his mother," I said.

   I shall never know if she ever really loved him, but something

in her was deeply wounded. It was not, I think, that she was

carrying Allan's child, but that he was her research project: the

man she had planned to remake. She turned away without a word.

   "Would you like to go out for coffee later, Liz?" I asked.

   She paused a moment at the hotel door, thought of it,  and said with

finality,

  "Not tonight, Jack. I leave tomorrow."