Soon they are frolicking in the water, she naked, rubbing her hands and feet through his musky pelt, while, yes, his tongue takes on a life of its own.
Uh oh! We can guess where this is heading. Soon she is letting him off the chain, allowing him into the house and sleep by the fire near her, while she toils at her typewriter. She begins to observe ‘ his long, ridged, curling tongue’, while reading up in the library on the genitalia of Ursus, and discovering morels growing in the woods like ‘strange decayed phalluses’. An ancient local woman tells Lou that if she wants to bond with the bear she’ll have to defecate next to him, which she duly does. When Lou first encounters him, he is described as ‘ a dusty bulk of blackish fur’, with ‘ a long brown snout’, ‘ small sad eyes’, and though ‘ indubitably male’, also ‘ not at all menacing’.
When news that the legal wrangling has finally been settled over a bequest from a deceased benefactor, Colonel Cary, leaving the remote Cary Island in Northern Ontario to the institute, Lou is dispatched to catalogue the library and contents of the house on the island. The story is that of shy, friendless librarian, Lou, who has worked in the basement of the local Heritage Institute in Toronto for five years. She has weekly, joyless sex on her desk with the institute’s director, ‘her only human contact’, out of habit and convenience. Quotes are from Margaret Atwood and Daisy Johnson, with Atwood describing the story as “plausible as kitchens, but shapely as a folktale”. Not sure about the kitchens, but a shapely folktale it certainly is.
So good on Daunt Books for rising to the challenge with this new edition, boasting an ambiguous if tasteful cover depicting a hand ruffling an expansive brown furry surface that might just as easily be a rug.
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