To Be a Bear

by MARGARET WHITLOCK

I want to be a bear. Bears have a clear purpose: to be a bear. It’s not like they have to choose a bear career; they just are what they are. Plus, they eat pretty well, except for garbage bears. I would be a classy bear if I was a bear, dining on salmon innards, manzanita berries, and ants. However, if someone were to leave a cookie or two in their car, as a bear, I wouldn’t mind a taste. Out of all the bears, I have the most devotion to black bears, though they are a common bear. A black bear was my first sleeping companion. He smelled of maple syrup and, through twenty-two years of love, has turned a shade of indigo. Despite the name, not all black bears are black. They can range from cinnamon to chocolate, from steel blue to white. In fact, they are the most colorful mammal in North America. Their eyes shift from blue to brown as they age, and underneath luscious, oily fur, their skin is gray. The black bear is a kaleidoscope, and so I want to be a bear.

I have seen four black bears in my life. Two in my yard, one dragging its paws leisurely across the front lawn and the other trotting away from the garbage, and the others, a mother and cub, who were momentarily surprised by me learning how to ride a quad deep in the woods of the Sierra Nevadas. These are not particularly good bear stories. If good bear stories are needed, ask my mom and dad. They have stories of coming face-to-face with bears and bears coming face-to-face with them. They have stories of bear tongues waking them up with morning kisses, and stories of crawling through brush to get away from an angry bear only to find themselves nose-to-nose with a red-haired bear sporting a white sock paw.

Stories of the bear are humanity’s favorite. The Indigenous peoples of North America all have their version of the bear archetype, many times associating them with medicine and magic. They believed bears were capable of healing wounds, as bears are known to continue fighting even after they are seriously injured. They are totems of strength and power, but also of family and spirit. Often a bear would be seen as an ancestor, a ghost’s sign of love from beyond. For centuries, we have looked to the night skies to find Ursa Major, the constellation bear rumored to move between the heavens and Earth, shouldering the Pointer Star that guides the wanderer’s eye to ever-bright Polaris. Stories of the bear portray them from wise and noble, to morally upright but obtuse, to intimidating and aggressive. Bears entice us. They captivate the human mind with their teeth and claws and their twitching round ears and bumbling bottoms. So I want to be a bear. I want to be draped in mysticism and love and legend simply because I exist as myself. I want to have lore in the twinkle of my young blue bear eyes and to leave narratives in my paw prints. For we all love a good bear story.

I want to be a bear because they have a lifetime pass to sleep when things get desolate. For five months, they get to slumber through the problems of the world. I could use that right now. Many people could use that right now. Also they gorge themselves before they sleep, eating up to ninety pounds of food per day during the fall in preparation. How I would like to drift off in a food coma, nose tucked under paw, snores reverberating around the den, into a deep sleep. Do bears dream during this sleep? Bears must be dreamers. When the world is cold and dead, the bear dreams of spring to come, always looking forward. They trust that when they wake, the world will be new and clean, their cubs will have grown from grapefruit size to fuzzy balls of joy and curiosity, and the past will be forgotten, for outside, there is transformation. If I were a bear, I’d be getting into winter. At twenty-two, I sit now at the end of gorging myself on the berries of college. I feel a deep exhaustion that wasn’t there yesterday, and I catch myself thinking of things to come rather than things in the present. However, the optimism and faith of the bear, that when I reawake after the season ends, I will come into a new world, green and ready for me to be a bear in, is hard to find. I want to be a bear to have unwavering bear instincts.

Bears harbor within them an ancient rage. It is an ancient rage that gives way to respect. It is the rage of a being that has fought and endured against time itself. It shares this rage with bull elk, wolverines, and war veterans. It is the rage of survival. A bear only attacks when provoked, and tries to talk about the problem it is having first, blustering and snorting, before anything happens, giving all a fair chance to leave. Bears were never the top predator, sharing their homes with saber-toothed cats and dire wolves, effectively breeding a relatively timid animal, all things considered. However, they are still warriors. Their fur is so thick it acts like armor, and a dense layer of fat adds extra protection if anything were to get through. They have muscle designed for strength and power, allowing some bears, like grizzlies, to bring down prey several hundred pounds heavier than themselves. With five claws on each dexterous paw, they are set with all the weapons they need. Their teeth are more suited to eating plants than tearing through meat, but their jaws could easily crush bones. They are dangerous when they need to be, and when they need to be, it is for life or death. So I want to be a bear. To stand the test of time, not through violence and anger, but through knowing when to attack and being prepared to win. I want to charge and swipe my bear claws, yelling out battle cries, yet also know when it might be best to explain the situation and talk about what could be done better. It’s about having good judgment and inclination. However, to be a bear, it is also about being able to fight my battles, and knowing my bear body is designed to be able to fight, even though I am not a top predator.  

Maybe I want to be a bear because a bear has a clear path that the bear has known for eons. The bear comes into world with ingrained bear instructions. The bear does not question what type of bear it will be when it grows up, planning life choices, like get hump implants to become a grizzly, or moving to the Arctic so that it can be a polar bear. It just is the bear. Maybe I want to be a bear because right now I am scared of my next step and bears know the next step is to be the bear. I am a bear questioning what type of bear I will become, instead of living my bear life. I want to be a bear because the bear has the freedom to be wild. Yet, the irony is that as a human, I have much more freedom than a bear. I do not have to live by any preset natural instructions. I can take certain aspects of the bear, of the tree, of the rock, and build myself from those influences. Maybe I don’t want to be a bear. I want to learn from the bear. I want to learn how to be the colors of granite, storm clouds, mud, and fallen leaves. I want to learn how to weave myself a life of stories and be part of the folklore that is humanity. I want to learn how to sleep cushioned by the optimism of change.  I want to learn how to have the burning coals of rage in my stomach and tactfully throw kindling upon them to make them flare. I don’t want to be a bear. I want the bear to teach me how to live as a human.