THE WOMAN WHO MARRIED A BEAR
The Story
Once there was a little girl, about ten years old. She used to go pick berries every summer. Every summer she would go with her family and they would pick berries and dry them. Sometimes they would see bear droppings on the trail. Girls had to be careful about bear droppings, they shouldn’t walk over them. Men could walk over them, but young girls had to walk around them. But she loved to jump over the bear droppings, and kick them. She would disobey her mother. All the time she would see them and kick them and step over them. She kept seeing them all around her. She did this from childhood.
She grew up. One summer they were all going out to pick berries, dry fish, and camp. She was with her mother and aunts and sisters all day picking berries. It was toward the end of the day, and she saw some bear droppings. She said all kinds of words to them, kicked them, and jumped over them. The ladies were getting ready to go home, lifting up their burden baskets of blueberries. The young woman saw some extra-good berries and was picking them as the others went ahead. As she started to catch up she slipped, and spilled some of her berries on the ground. So she was bending over and picking them off the ground. The others went on down.
A man was standing there, dressed up fine, his face painted red. She saw him in the shadows. She had never seen him before. He said, “I know where there are lots of big berries, better than those. Let’s go fill your basket. I’ll walk you home.” And they picked a while. It was getting dark. But he said, “There’s another good place” — and soon it was dark. He said, “It’s too late to go home. Let’s fix a dinner.” And he cooked over a fire, it looked like a fire. They ate some gopher. And then they made a bed in the leaves. When they went to bed he said, “Don’t lift your head in the morning and look at me, even if you wake up before I do.”
Next morning when they woke the young man said to her, “We can go on. We’ll eat cold gopher. We won’t make a fire. Let’s get lots of berries.” The young woman talked about going home, about her father and mother, and he said, “Don’t be afraid. I’ll go home with you.” Then he slapped his hand down right on top of her head and put a circle around the woman’s head with his finger, the way the sun goes. Then she forgot and didn’t talk about home any more.
Then she forgot all about going home. She just went about with him, picking berries. Every time they camped it seemed like a month to her, but it was really only a day. They kept traveling from mountain to mountain. Finally she recognized a place. It looked like a place where she and her family used to go and dry meat. He stopped there at the timberline and slapped her head, and made a circle sunwise, and then another on the ground where she was sitting. He said, “Wait here. I am going hunting gophers. We have no meat. Wait till I come back.” Then he came back with the gophers. In the evening they made camp and cooked.
Next morning they got up and traveled on. At last she knew. It was getting near fall, and it was cold. She knew he was a bear. He said, “It’s time to make a home” and started digging a den. She really knew he was a bear then. He got quite a ways digging the den and then he said, “Go get some fir boughs and some brush.” She broke the branches from up high and brought him a bundle. He saw that and said, “Those limbs are no good. You left a mark and the people will see it and know we were here. We can’t stay here.” So they left.
They went up to the head of a valley. She recognized this valley. It was where her brothers used to go to hunt and eat bear. They would take the dogs there in April and hunt bear. They would send the dogs into the bear den, and then the bear would come out. That’s where her brothers used to go. She knew it.
Her husband dug a den again and sent her out for brush. He said, “Get some brush that is lying on the ground — not from up high. No one will see where you got it, and it will become covered with snow.” She did break it from low to the ground, but she also bent some high-up branches too. She let them hang down so her brothers would know. She rubbed sand on herself too — all over her body and limbs. And then she rubbed the trees around, so that the dogs would find her scent. Then she went to the den with her bundles of brush.
When the man was digging he looked like a bear. That was the only time. But the rest of the time he looked like a human being. The woman didn’t know how else to stay alive, so she stayed with him as long as he was good to her.
“This is better,” he said, and he carried the brush inside and fixed the den. After he fixed the den they left. The Grizzly Bear is the last to go into the den; they like to go around in the snow. So then he spent more days hunting gophers for the winter. She never saw him do it; she sat in the late autumn sun and looked down the valley. He didn’t want her to see him digging up gophers like a grizzly bear.
Nearly every day he hunted gophers and they picked berries. He was just like a human to her.
It was really late in the fall. He said, “Well, I guess we’ll go home now. We have enough food and berries. We’ll go down.” So they went into the den and stayed there and slept. They woke once a month and ate, and then went back to bed. Each month seemed like another morning, just like another day. They never really went outside, it just seemed like it.
Soon the woman found she was carrying a baby. And then in the middle of the winter, in the den, she had two little babies — one was a girl, and the other was a boy. She had them when the bears have their cubs.
Her husband used to sing in the night and she woke up to hear him. The bear became like a shaman when he started living with the woman. The song just came upon him, like a shaman. He sang it twice. She heard it the first time. The second time he made a sound, “Wuf? Wuf?” and she woke up.
“Don’t do it! They are your brothers-in-law! If you really love me you’ll love them too. Don’t kill them. Let them kill you! If you really love me don’t fight! You have treated me well. Why did you live with me, if you are going to kill them?” “All right,” he said. “I won’t fight, but I want you to know what would happen!” His big canine teeth looked like swords. “These are what I fight with,” he said. She kept pleading. “Don’t do anything. I’ll still have my children if they kill you!” She really knew he was a bear then.
They went back to sleep. When she woke again he was singing his song. “It’s true,” he said. “They are coming close. If they do kill me I want you to get my skull and my tail from them. Wherever they kill me build a big fire, and burn my head and tail and sing this song while the head is burning. Sing it until they are all burnt up!” And he sang the song again.
Then they ate some food and went back to bed. Another month went by. They didn’t sleep well that month. He kept waking up. “It’s coming close,” he said. “I can’t sleep well. It’s getting to be bare ground. Look out and see if the snow is melted in front of the den.” She looked out, and there was mud and sand. She grabbed some and made a ball and rubbed it over herself. It was full of her scent. She rolled it down the hill — then the dogs could smell it. She came in and said, “There is bare ground all over in some places.” He asked her why she had made the marks. “Why? Why? Why? They’ll find us easy!”
They slept for half a month, and then they woke. He was singing again. “This is the last one,” he said. “You will not hear me again. Any time now the dogs will be at the door. They are close. Well, I’ll fight back! I am going to do something bad!” His wife said, “You know they are my brothers! Don’t do it! Who will look after my children if you kill them? You must think of the kids. My brothers will help me. If my brothers hunt you, let them be!” They went back to bed for just a little while. Next morning he said, “Well, it’s close! It’s close! Wake up!”
Just when they were getting up they heard a noise. “The dogs are barking. Well, I’ll leave. Where are my knives? I want them!” He took them down. She saw him putting in his teeth. He was a big Grizzly Bear.
“Please don’t fight. If you wanted me, why did you go this far? Just think of the kids. Don’t hurt my brothers!” He said, “You won’t see me again!” and went. At the entrance he growled, and slapped something back into the den. It was a pet dog, a little bear dog. When he threw the dog in, she grabbed it and shoved it back in the brush under the nest. She put the dog there to keep it. She sat on it and kept it there so it couldn’t get out. She wanted to keep it for a reason.
For a long time there was no noise. She went out of the den. She heard her brothers below. They had already killed the bear. She felt bad, and she sat down. She found an arrow, and she picked it up. Then she fitted the little dog with a string around his back. She tied the arrow on the little dog and he ran to his masters. The boys were down there dressing out the bear. They knew the dog. They noticed the arrow and took it off.
“It’s funny,” they said. “No one in a bear den would tie this on!” They talked about it and decided to send the youngest brother up to the den. A younger brother could talk to his sister, but an older brother couldn’t. The older brothers said to the young one, “We lost our sister a year ago. Something could have happened. A bear might have taken her away. You are the youngest, don’t be afraid. There is nothing up there but her. You go and see if she is there. Find out!”
He went. She was sitting there crying. The boy came up. She cried when she saw him. She said, “You boys killed your brother-in-law! I went with him last summer. You killed him, but tell the others to save me the skull and the tail. Leave it there for me. When you get home, tell mother to sew a dress for me so I can go home. Sew a dress for the girl, and pants and a shirt for the boy, and moccasins. And tell her to come and see me.” He went back down and told his brothers, “This is our sister. She wants us to save the bear’s head and tail.”
They did this and they went home. They told their mother. She got busy and sewed. She had a dress and moccasins and clothes for the children. The next day she went up there. The mother came to the place, and put clothing on the little kids. Then they went down to where the bear was killed. The boys had left a big fire. The woman burned the head and the tail, then she sang the song, until all was ashes.
Then they went back to her home, but she didn’t go right in. She wasn’t used to the human smell. She said, “Get the boys to build a camp. I can’t come right into the house. It will be quite a while.” She stayed there a long time. Toward fall she finally came and stayed with her mother. All winter the kids grew.
Next spring her brothers wanted her to act like a bear. They had killed a female bear that had cubs, one male and one female. They wanted their sister to put on the hide and act like a bear. They fixed little arrows. They pestered her to play with them, and they wanted her two little children to play too. She didn’t want it. She told her mother, “I can’t do it! Once I do it, I will turn into a bear. I’m half there already. Hair is already showing on my arms and legs — it’s quite long.” If she had stayed there with her bear husband another summer she would have turned into a bear. “If I put on the bear hide, I’ll turn into one,” she said.
But they kept telling her to play. Then the boys sneaked up one day and threw the bear hides over her and her little ones. She walked off on four legs! She shook herself just like a bear — it just happened! She was a Grizzly Bear. She couldn’t do a thing. She had to fight against the arrows. She killed them all off, even her mother. She didn’t kill her youngest brother, not him. She couldn’t help it. Tears were running down her face.
Then she went on her own. She had her two little cubs with her. They walked up the slope and back into the mountains.
So a Grizzly Bear is partly human. Now people eat Black Bear meat, but they still don’t eat Grizzly meat, because Grizzlies are half human.
On “The Woman Who Married a Bear”
Salmonberries, Crowberries, Nagoonberries, Cloudberries, High Bush Cranberries, Low Bush Cranberries, Thimbleberries, Raspberries, Soapberries, Blackberries, Serviceberries, Manzanita Berries, Red Huckleberries, Blueberries . . .
The salmonberries ripen early, and most of the others toward the end of summer. The berries’ sheen, aroma, little spike of flavor, sweetness, all handed down from long ago. Who is it for? The berries call the birds and bears to eat. It’s a gift, but there’s also a return, for now the seed will be moved away. The little seeds buried in the sweet globules will go traveling in birds’ craws, in raccoon bowels, across the rocks, over the river, through the air, to be left on other forest soils to sprout anew.
Picking berries takes patience. The bears draw over the shoots and delicately rake through the clusters with their claws. People make wooden rakes that look like bear-claws and gather them into a basket, or beat the bushes with a wooden spoon toward a winnowing basket held in the other hand. Some women are fast! Picking with all the fingers of both hands, never bruising the berries. When the berries are ripe people go out picking every day, and then dry or pickle them with sourdock for the winter. Eating them does no harm to the bush or the seed. Maybe this story starts with berries.
From long ago the Brown Bears, the Grizzlies (but we wouldn’t speak of them directly by such blunt names), have come to the berry fields. They have been out ranging and feeding since spring, ranging dozens or hundreds of miles, often alone. When they gather to the best slopes for berries, there may be many bears picking berries close together, so they manage not to wrangle.
They eat all summer building fat for winter. If for some reason they don’t put on enough weight by late fall, the mothers’ bodies will abort the little fetus, since midwinter nursing might draw down her strength. After they are done with the soapberries and blueberries on the mountains they go to the streams and rivers for the fall-run salmon.
(Chinook or King, Sockeye or Red or Nerka, Pink or Hump-backed, Dog or Keta, Cherry or Masu, the salmon come into rivers from as far south as the Sacramento and go all the way around the North Pacific to Korea. At every river on the rim there are bears.)
For a long time only the bears and birds were at the berry thickets and the rivers. The humans arrived later. At first they all got along. There was always a bit of food to share. Small animals might be as powerful as big ones. Some, and a few humans, could change skins, change masks. From time to time they all would cross into the spirit world for a Big Time or a contest. The human beings in the original time weren’t so bad. Later they seemed to drift away. They got busy with each other and were spending all the time among themselves. They quit coming to meetings, and got more and more stingy. They learned a lot of little stuff, and forgot where they came from.
Some animals started avoiding human beings. Others were concerned because they liked the human people and enjoyed being near them for their funny ways. Bears sort of cared. They still wanted to be seen by people, to surprise them sometimes, even to be caught or killed by them, so they might go inside the houses and hear their music. Maybe that’s why bears leave droppings in the trails. It’s a way to warn people that they’re near and avoid scaring them. If bears or people get a fright, someone might get hurt. When people see scats they can study them and see how new they are, and check what’s being eaten. If it’s berries this week, you should know. Scats are a window into a bear’s life: they show where she’s been. Then when the people go to the mountain they can whistle and also mind their minds, because everybody knows what humans are thinking.
Young girls like to run and jump and sing. Some of them like to poke fun, but it’s not usually mean. Jump-rope, they jump and sing — hopscotch, they jump and sing. Still, a girl or woman shouldn’t jump over bear droppings, or any droppings really, and neither should men. It’s fine to look at them and think about such signs, but it would be foolish to have opinions about them. But this girl always stepped over them and kept talking about it. Perhaps she was being naughty, but we also have to say that she was an exceptional little girl who somehow felt drawn to the wild place.
Drawn to the wild. Bears are so powerful and calm. At the same time, they are the closest of all animals to humans. Everybody says, “After you take a bear’s coat off, it looks just like a human.” And they act human: they fool, they teach their cubs (who are rowdy and curious), and they remember. They are confident. They will eat little trifles, or knock down a moose, with equal grace. Their claws are delicate and precise: they can pick up a nut between two tips. They make love for hours. They are grumpy after naps. They can lope a hundred miles overnight. They seem to be indestructible. They know what is happening, where to go, and how to get there. They are forgiving. They can become enraged, and when they fight it’s as though they feel no pain. They have no enemies, no fears, they can be silly, and they are big-hearted. They are completely at home in the world. They like human beings, and they decided long ago to let the humans join them at the salmon-running rivers and the berryfields.
This girl must have known some of that, and in a way she was calling to the bears. Most people know that breaking rules is bad, and when they do it in a sneaky way they feel they’re doing wrong. Some people break the rules because of muddy hearts and greed. Certain people are clear, and break the rules because they want to know. They also understand that there’s a price to pay, and won’t complain.
The rules are matters of manners that have to do with knowledge and power, with life and death, because they deal with taking life and with one’s own eating and dying. Human beings, in their ignorance, are apt to give offense. There’s a world behind the world we see that is the same world but more open, more transparent, without blocks. Like inside a big mind, the animals and humans all can talk, and those who pass through here get power to heal and help. They learn how to behave, and how not to give offense. To touch this world no matter how briefly is a help in life. People seek it, but the seeking isn’t easy. Shapes are fluid here. For a bear, all the beings look like bears. For a human, they all look like humans. Each creature has its stories and its oddities — all the animals with their funny natures acting out different roles. “When dragons and fish see water as a palace, it is just like human beings seeing a palace. They do not think it flows. If an outsider tells them, ‘What you see as a palace is running water,’ the dragons and fish will be astonished, just as we are when we hear the words, ‘Mountains flow’ ” — Dōgen. And sometimes those who have the power, or a reason, or are just curious, walk across the borderlines.
So this young woman was grown now, and was picking berries with her family. The bears knew she was there. When she happened to fall behind to pick up the berries she had spilled from her basket, a young man stepped forward from the shadows to introduce himself and help her out. He was in his finest clothing, dressed like one who was going visiting. He was a human to her. And so she entered the in-between world, not exactly human, not exactly animal, where rain might look like fire, and fire might be rain. And he put her more sharply, more solidly, into it, patting her on the head so she forgot. They went under the tangled windfalls, and when they came out they had passed beneath a range of mountains. Each day is a month, or years.
But she didn’t entirely forget. We are always in both worlds, because they aren’t really two. But even though she remembered that she had a family and a home behind her, it was not too strong a pull, because she was in love. He was a strong, handsome man, and he loved her too. They were in the most beautiful of mountains, in the grand golden weather of late summer, with ripe berries on every slope. Her young maiden dreams were fulfilled. If she has learned to love a bear, he has had to overcome his prejudice against humans, who are weak, light, unpredictable, smelly. So they join in passion and conversation. They live at timberline.
But winter comes. Bears put on weight and grow thick coats. If they are making a new den, they select a place on a slope, dig downward and then up, putting the chamber under a mat of alpine tree roots or under a great slab of rock. The entrance passageway may be three to ten feet long and the chamber eight or ten feet wide. And then the bears break off limbs: they bend them over one arm and break them off with the other and so they gather bedding and place it up in the den. With the den made, the Grizzlies walk around, still hunting, as long as the weather’s mild. When snow comes down in earnest, right while it’s falling hard, the bear goes into the den, and the falling snow will cover up its tracks.
In the den bears cease to drink or eat or urinate or defecate for four or five months. They are alert and can wake up fairly quickly. Their bodies somehow metabolize their own waste. Though losing fat they increase their lean body mass and conserve their bone volume as though they were awake and active. They dream. Perhaps their dreams are of the gatherings in the Inner Mountains where Bear as “Lord of the Mountain” hosts a great feast for all the other animals. For the young woman, this is a time of flashing back and forth between selves. The landscape reenters her story: she recognizes a valley. She sees her lover, her husband, first as a bear digging the den, then as a human who sits and chats with her. She helps him gather Balsam Fir boughs for the den and cannot keep herself from leaving marks, leaving signs, for her brothers who will seek her. With annoyance, sadness, and a certain fatalism, he sees this, and without growing angry with her, simply moves on and digs a new den, where she still leaves her scent.
And so they go down into the den. She’s not a bear yet, so they put up food for her need. She gives birth to babies in the winter just like bears do. And then it comes that they must grapple with their fates, with their task. He “became like a shaman when he started living with the woman.” He was no ordinary bear to be able to change forms and accept humanity, but the power is still coming on him. Elder bears watching over him from afar? Knowing that powers would be needed? A shaman sings songs of power. He sang such a song. If he hadn’t known before what was coming, he senses it now: her brothers, and a battle. He could kill them certainly, and keep his wife and children, and move deeper into the mountains and be safe. That is a temptation: he flashes between realms with the huge grizzly canine teeth that are swords/teeth/ swords/teeth to her eyes.
But having come this far into the human realm, he has obligated himself to human custom too, and there is a firm rule which says that brothers-in-law must never fight. The children’s name passes down on the mother’s side, and the children will be raised by her brothers more than by their father. If they could only accept him as a brother-in-law! That would be an ideal family unit, odd only in that half the unit would be bears (for she is changing into one) and the other half human! What a moment of Utopian dream it must have been for him.
She is practical. She knows her brothers will never accept him, and she feels her children must be raised as human. But she loves her husband — not just the handsome human, the bear body. She is getting hairy herself. For several weeks they must live with these choices and the fate that approaches them. He sings in the night again: it is the song that must be sung when a bear has been hunted and killed. He gives the instructions to her: “Wherever they kill me build a big fire, and burn my head and tail and sing this song while the head is burning. Sing it until they are all burnt up!”
So that is the reason they came together: for him to pass this instruction from the bear realm to the human, via her. They both know it now. But he can’t quite let it go — he says, “Why? Why?” — and even the final day there’s one more thought of fighting back. She always stresses brothers and he can’t go against that. Out the door he goes on the way to his death, knocking the little Tahltan bear dog behind him with a swipe of the paw. The pet dog is somewhere between wild animal and human, and helps prepare her to rejoin the human. Her husband dies out of sight, but she can hear the barking of the dogs. She sits and weeps, letting the loss and sorrow she was holding back come forth: she pours it out on her younger brother — “You boys just killed your brother-in-law!” which is a grievous thing for them, as well.
(Bears emerge from the den in the spring gaunt and hungry, and fill up on Spring Beauties or such if they can’t find a winter-killed elk or moose or caribou carcass.)
She burns the head and tail and sings the song.
She cannot go back to her mother’s house. She spends all summer getting used to the human smell — and mourning. That fall and winter, living in the village, she is teaching her relatives what she learned — to burn the skull and tail of a bear after you kill it — and she teaches them the song. There is much more that she learned from her husband about the proper hunting and the ceremony of the bear, and she teaches it all — to be indirect, not to boast, not to point at a bear, to talk slow.
It’s not an easy winter. The children don’t fit in, nor does she. People don’t talk comfortably to her. The brothers are carrying dark and difficult thoughts about their sister who knows so much about bears. They set out the following spring on their annual bear-hunt and come back with the pelt of a female and two cubs. They push, push, their sister to play bear. Secrets not to be told are bothering them: their sister, a bear. What did they eat? What did they speak of? What does she dream? What was it like? How much power does she have now, can she be trusted? What will her children become? Her power and the mystery that surrounds her now go beyond what is comfortable for the humans.
She tries to get her mother to stop them, knowing what will happen, her hair already growing longer. But it happens: the brothers cannot stand this ambiguity: they push her over the line. She turns back into a bear and kills them all except the younger brother. So now they have paid for killing their brother-in-law, and paid for teasing and pushing, and the mother has died too. The young woman and her children are irrevocably bears now: the human world will not accept them. They must return to the wilderness, having accomplished their task — to teach humans the precise manners in regard to bears. Perhaps all this was planned by the Bear Fathers and Mothers, who chose an intrepid young male to be the messenger. For each of the actors there was a price: the bear and the woman’s family lost their lives. One cannot cross between realms without paying a high price. She lost her lover and her humanity to become a bear with two rowdy cubs alone in the wild.
That was very long ago. After that time human beings had good relations with the bears. Around the top of the world many peoples have hunted and celebrated and feasted with the bears outdoors in the snow every year in midwinter. Bears and people have shared the berryfields and the salmon streams without much trouble summer after summer. Bears have been careful not to hunt and kill humans as prey, although they would fight back when attacked.
Their story had further consequences: the bear wife was remembered by human beings as a goddess under many names, and there were many stories about her children and what they did in the world.
But that period is over now. The bears are being killed, the humans are everywhere, and the green world is being unraveled and shredded and burned by the spreading of a gray world that seems to have no end. If it weren’t for a few old people from the time before, we wouldn’t even know this tale.
Maria Johns and the Telling of This Story
This version of “The Woman Who Married a Bear” is based on a telling by Maria Johns to Catherine McClellan, an anthropologist and ethnohistorian. There are many versions of this story, and eleven of them are examined in McClellan’s study The Girl Who Married the Bear: A Masterpiece of Indian Oral Tradition (1970). Of Maria Johns she wrote:
“Maria Johns was born probably some time in the 1880s. The first time she saw a white man was when she and her family challenged the coastal Chilkoot and crossed the Chilkoot Pass to trade at Wilson’s store in Dyea. This was in the eighties, and Maria was a young woman. Maria belonged to the tuq’wedi or decitan sib, and she traced her ancestry ultimately to the coastal Tlingit town of Angoon. While her first language was the Tagish dialect of Athapascan, she also spoke a good deal of Tlingit, which became, in fact, the chief native language of Tagish. She had little command of English.
“Although she seems to have led a rather rich, full life, she was in poor health and partly blind during most of her adult days. When I met her in 1948 she was totally blind and spent most of her days in bed covered with a gopherskin robe. Maria composed at least three songs of her own and she evidently told a great many stories to her children, judging by the repertoires of her two grown daughters.
“Maria volunteered the bear story on the morning of July 16, 1948. I had visited her in her daughter Dora’s house, and had been asking if there were any ritual observances for bears.
“Maria was obviously a good raconteur. She pantomimed frequently, changed her voice to indicate that different characters were speaking, and imitated the sounds of the dogs and bears. She hurried the tale a bit at the end for she was worried that I might miss the train taking me from Carcross.
“Dora Austin Wedge, the interpreter, had been to school, and she speaks excellent English. Dora’s daughter, Annie, was the only other person present. She was much interested in the story, which she evidently had not heard before.”
Arkadia
Brown Bear, Ursus Arctos.
Arktos, Greek for bear, in Latin called urs, in Sanskrit rksha, in Welsh arth (King Arthur) — the Sanskrit probably yields Rakshasas, night-wandering demons who roar and howl and eat corpses. The proto-proto root, D. Padwa suggests, is “Rrrrrr!”
The “arctic” is where the bears are.
Arkas was the son of Zeus and the Bear-goddess Callisto. He was supposedly progenitor of the Arkades, people of Arkadia, “Bear People.” They were worshipers of Pan and Hermes and Artemis, lady of wild things, also associated with bears.
Arkadia: the inland upland plateaus and ranges of the central Peloponnesus, with seven-thousand-foot peaks along the northern edge. Originally it was pine-oak forest and grassland. The other Greeks thought of the Arkadians as an aboriginal population who had always been there, and in fact they remained a tough and independent people throughout Greek history. They were not affected by the Dorian invasions. They were gardeners, herders, and hunters. Urban Greeks and Romans took them as the model of a resilient vernacular subsistence culture that did not lose its connection with nature. In the early centuries A.D. deforestation and soil exhaustion reduced the population, and in the eighth century Slavic immigrants brought something of an end to the old culture. Some of the original Arkadians doubtless knew and told some version of the story of “The Woman Who Married a Bear.”
At the Bear Dance
A grandmotherly woman in a print dress is speaking to a grizzled hard-worn elder in logger jeans and suspenders: “There are spirits in everything, right?” He nods. She smiles, “You don’t look too convinced.”
The old man is tall and powerful, though a bit stooped. He has curly steely-gray shoulder-length hair, pants half out of ten-inch ranch boots, heavy rough hands with a broken thumb. He says, “The old-time people didn’t have all the right words we have now from science, so they just called the sun’s rays ‘spirits.’ They called a lot of things ‘spirits.’ It wasn’t that they were dumb, but they called these power-things and energy-things ‘spirits.’ ”
A young Anglo is listening in. The woman is intense, clear-eyed, good-humored, and continues her own exposition: “There are a lot of things forgotten. I found a lot of it out. It’s not for everybody, it’s for our people. We need to teach the young ones.”
In the dusty dance area, a circle of children is being formed. Marvin Potts in old felt hat, denim work jacket and jeans, scuffed work boots, is shaping them up, explaining gently. An eight-foot pole is set up in the dance area, with a bear-pelt hanging from it. At the base of the pole is a heap of freshly gathered, still-damp-from-rinsing, sagebrush (artemisia) stems and leaves. Everyone is helping themselves to little bundles of it. A ways up the slope is a shade-shelter with a handgame in progress, the constant rhythm of the drumming on the logs, and the singing rising and falling.
The woman and the two men stand on and on in the hot sun, the crowd washing around them, the older man’s voice so soft we can barely hear. The younger man listens and only occasionally questions.
“Science went up so high,” the old one says, “that now it’s beginning to come back down. We’re climbing up with our old-ways knowledge, pretty soon we’ll meet science coming down.” A young native woman has joined the group, and the older woman is saying, “Don’t call me a Maidu or a Concow, I’m a Tai. That’s our name for ourselves.” The old man turns back to her and says “What’s a Tai?” “That’s what I am,” she says, “but you don’t know it.”
“Well, I’m a Maidu just like you,” he says. She laughs easily, says “You’re really a — — — — — ” and speaks a rich native word. “It means Middle Mountain.” He repeats the word easily; he clearly knows it: “Yes, it means Middle Mountain. So that’s what we were?” — “Yes, your group. The white anthropologists gave us all the name Maidu.” — “OK,” he says and he turns back to the younger man. “I’ll go dance now. Come see us some time. We have a lot of trouble keeping people from robbing our graveyard.” “What do you do?” the white man asks. “I work part time in a sawmill.” And he departs, gathering three tiny grandchildren and leading them into the children’s inner circle of the Bear dance.
Marie Potts is in her wheelchair by a standing pole adorned with strips of maple bark that dangle down around it. A portable PA system is now working and Frank begins to sing: “Weda . . . weda . . . weda . . .” There are two circles, an inner one of children and an outer ring of adults. Both begin to revolve. Slowly, going clockwise, people waving their little bundles of wormwood in rhythm. Young and old, lots of whites, lots of native people, lots of colors in between.
Pretty soon the Bear Itself comes forth, the great head held far forward, the thick black pelt covering the back. The two front legs are arms with canes. The lower body of the Bear is wearing cut-off white jeans with the seams half open. He moves well, truly bearlike, weaves in and out through the dancers, goes in circles between them, cutting through, going backwards. He takes a child and leads it along with him under the bearskin, and then turns the child free. A little one bursts into tears as he comes near, while a small boy behind him whops his back with artemisia. He runs up at women, bothers them, they squeal and slap the artemisia at him. At times the song stops for a moment, and the singer gets a few breaths. The Bear goes over to Marie in her wheelchair, puts his paw around her shoulder, and nuzzles her. Her eyes glisten, her smile is intense and delighted.
Marvin meanwhile leads the circle of dancers, holding the maple-bark streamer pole aloft, (He had said that the twisted curls of bark are to be rattlesnake rattles, and that we play with Rattlesnake and Bear and give them good spirit and humor, so that we’ll all get along through the summer.)
The round dance continues in its stately revolutions. Finally Marvin leads the circle out and away from the dance ground. The line of dancers, native men and women, children, middle-aged white ranchers in wranglers and resistols, weaves through the densely parked cars and pickups. It goes down between the cinnamon-brown trunks of shady Jeffrey Pines and around the handgame ramada (songs still going strong side by side with the music of the Bear dance), and then over a grassy slope to a fast-running stream where everyone spreads out along the banks and washes their hands and face with cool water. They let their bundles of artemisia float free with the creek. The bundles will flow through the pine forest, back down to the sagebrush, and disappear into the Great Basin.
This is the end of the Bear dance. The bearskin is hung up on the pole again, the people drift toward the whole-steer barbecue pit and the salmon that was a gift from some people on the coast. The power songs of the handgame players continue without break.
At Wepamkun, in Notokkoyo, Shasta, June of 40077