Gary Paulsen: Brian's Hunt

The bear was on him, rolling him, cuffing him. The bow was knocked out of his hands, flying ahead, arrows spewing out of his quiver, the bear strangely silent, pushing, pounding him as he first rolled in a ball and knew that wouldn’t work, not now, not with this bear. This bear had come to kill him and he was going to kill him and there wasn’t a thing Brian could do about it. He tried for his knife but the bear knocked it out of his hands, knocked his arms sideways, grabbed his left arm in his jaws and flung Brian back and forth the way he would worry a small animal.

I’m not going to make this, Brian had time to think. He’s going to win again, he’s going to kill me, and then he heard the ripping growl of the dog and it landed on the bear’s back and grabbed and the bear turned to hit the dog, knocked it sideways twenty feet where it lay, stunned, and then the bear turned back to Brian.

But there had been that second, two seconds, and Brian was lying on the ground well away from his bow but the arrows that had flown out of his quiver were all around him and he grabbed a broadhead with his right hand — his left hung useless — and dove, following the arrow, into the center of the chest of the bear.

He was amazed at how easily it slid in and he saw only six inches of arrow showing and thought, There, that’s it then. .

But it wasn’t. The bear snapped at his chest, at the arrow, broke it off, and Brian tried to get away in that instant but the bear wasn’t done and grabbed him by a leg, pulled him back, and as he slid over the ground he came across another arrow and he grabbed it and turned and jammed it up into the middle of the bear and it still wasn’t enough and the bear cuffed him, slammed him alongside the head, and he went down and the last thing he saw was an enormous wall of fur coming over him and he thought, All right, this is how it ends.

This is how it all ends.

And everything tunneled down to nothing but a point of light and then that went dark and there was nothing left.

• • •

Sounds, soft whimpering sounds. For a second, he thought, That’s me. Everything was still dark, he was being crushed under some great darkness and then he smelled the bear, on him, around him.

And heard the sound again. It was the dog, licking his face, pulling at his shirt. The bear was on top of him, lying still, dead where it had fallen. The second arrow had, finally, brought death.

Brian pushed, pulled at the ground and the bear and finally got free. It was dark, though not pitchblack, and in the early light, limping and holding his left arm in, he found wood and got a fire going.

With the light he looked first to the dog. The original stitches had held, unbelievably. But she had a new wound about four inches long across the top of her head. There didn’t seem to be any other obvious injuries and with the dog settled Brian turned to himself.

Bites in the arm, on his leg, but not great tearing wounds. His left shoulder seemed to be dislocated and as he tried to raise his arm he heard a pop and it snapped back into place with a burst of pain that put him on his knees and brought splashes of color to his vision.

“Oh man. .”

But no other serious damage. He didn’t quite believe it. Not at first. The bear had seemed to be all over him, hitting and biting, and he’d thought the wounds would be much more serious. .

He turned to the bear. The dog had walked around the carcass, her hair still up, growling with bared teeth, but when the bear hadn’t moved, and was obviously dead, she had moved closer, peed on the bear’s leg, back-kicked dirt onto the body and walked away to sit off to the side licking her left rear leg where she had a small cut.

The bear lay dead and Brian tried to find some feeling of triumph, as the dog had, some sense of victory, but all he could think of were David and Anne and the great loss that Susan and her brother and sister had in their lives now. He had thought there would be more. He even hoped that he would feel more. But there was nothing but the loss of his friends.

And a dead bear.

Not a villain, not an evil thing. Just a dead bear. Like any other dead animal that he might have hunted. Killing the bear did not bring back his friends, did not ease the pain for Susan and her brother and sister.

It was just what it was, a dead bear.

And he would have to clean it now, skin it, pull the carcass down to the lake and get his canoe and take it back to camp and use what he could, not waste any more than he had to because in the end it was as wrong to waste the bear as it was to let it live after what it had done.

In the firelight he found his bow and arrows and knife and small aluminum pot. The pot was dented but he pulled the edges apart and made it serviceable. It was not far to the lake and he brought water up and boiled it and gave some to the dog and drank some himself. Then he boiled mud and put it on his cuts and the dog’s head to keep morning flies away and then took the knife and turned to the bear.

There was much work to do.

I can almost hear the voices: “You said the last Brian book was the last Brian book,” and I did say that. But the response from readers is still profoundly overwhelming, hundreds of letters a day, all wanting more of Brian, and so this book, and I will no longer say that I will write no more about Brian and the north woods. . In some way he has become real to many, many people and they want to see more of him and so, and so. . we shall see.

As to the subject of this story, it is hard to imagine any animal as evil — only man would seem to have a capacity for true evil and deliberate cruelty. And bear, especially, lend themselves to seeming likable. They have been romanticized to a point far beyond reality. What bears truly are has been lost in concepts like the teddy bear and Winnie the Pooh and I can well understand how some people will view the bear and the attacks in this story. Some years ago, just after the movie Free Willy —a film about a captive killer whale that a boy helps to freedom — had come out, I was interviewed on a radio call-in show and mentioned that I had seen two killer whales playing with a baby seal, throwing it back and forth like a toy before killing it and eating it, and the phone almost jumped off the hook. Killer whales are friendly, people said, which is sometimes true, and they only eat fish, which is not true — they not only eat seals but often dolphins as well, and off the coast of New Zealand a female and her calf attacked a scuba diver. They are wolves of the sea, if you will, and for a killer whale to eat, as with wolves, something else has to die.

And so to bear: the truth about bear is that they are cute and smart and, sometimes, lovable, and they also kill things and have on more occasions than some people like to admit attacked and killed and eaten human beings.

I have had bear come into my sled-dog kennel and kill dogs to get at their food — one particular dog, Hulk, was killed with a single blow in the middle of the night. My wife has been chased from the garden to the house by a bear, which almost caught her. It had a small terrier named Quincy hanging on its neck fur all the way. And I have a friend whose nephew was in a scout camp in Wisconsin and a bear pulled him out of his tent at night and tried to carry him off and eat him and only let go when dozens of scouts attacked the bear with rocks and sticks and forced it to drop the boy, who had to get hundreds of stitches and has not fully recovered the use of his arm.

And the attack in this story, a couple killed and the woman partially eaten, happened almost exactly as I describe it; the bear attacked them on an island in a lake in the Canadian woods where they had come in a canoe to fish, killed both of them and dragged the woman off to feed.