A coastal Pacific Northwest indigenous story, with abundant variations, this telling is ripe with forbidden love, eros, and tragedy. A woman and bear meet and mate, for the benefit of their people, but the benefit is not known until it is too late…
I’ve taken the liberty to scrounge together my favorite versions of this tale, wherein the Bear is benevolent, and the love between he and the human-woman is sincere. There are other versions that retain a fear of bears, making the husband out to be some sort of captor, as though he lured and trapped the woman into marriage, but I do not feel in my heart that it is so. Because there are enough stories like that. And this one is sadder, and simpler, for the truth it reveals: that as separate species, we are afraid to love each other…
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