Paw Print

Early in my first reading of Tammy Armstrong’s Pearly Everlasting, I found myself searching online for answers to questions like “Can bears be domesticated?” and “Do bears bond with humans?” I knew I was making a category error: Pearly Everlasting is a novel, after all. More than that, it is a novel imbued with a deep sense of mystery, particularly about bears — creatures, as one character observes, “of myth, of dreams and nightmares, of steel traps, and deep dens.” But Pearly Everlasting is also, Armstrong explains, inspired by a true story, that of William Lyman Underwood and his early twentieth-century memoir Wild Brother. Underwood visited a Maine lumber camp where he saw a woman “nursing her newborn daughter alongside an orphan bear cub.” The bear, known as Bruno, was placed in an animal sanctuary at age two. But Armstrong asks, What if he hadn’t been? What would it have been like for that baby girl, whom she names Pearly Everlasting...