Bear with Me

Everybody is writing memoirs these days, including Margaret Atwood, whose recollections of her astounding career are expected later this year. Even so, it is hard to top the subject matter of the novelist and journalist Claire Cameron’s new book, which features a bear, the wilderness, and a life-threatening genetic mutation.

Cameron is no stranger to death or storytelling. She was only nine years old when her beloved father, Angus, died of metastasized melanoma on May 27, 1983. He was forty-two, a Rhodes Scholar, a distinguished academic at the University of Toronto, and the founder of The Dictionary of Old English. He was also a great teller of tales, whose favourite bedtime ritual involved recounting his version of Beowulf, the epic Nordic poem, which was written at least a millennium ago.

“My dad’s retelling,” Cameron writes in How to Survive a Bear Attack, “had everything: shining swords, brave acts, fierce battles, and gold cups.” As a child, she “fought alongside” his narrative with her “messy hair and drooping pyjamas” and “her imaginary sword held high” until she, like Beowulf, had slaughtered the fire-breathing dragon. Alas, she didn’t have the power to destroy the cancer that was killing her father, despite the surgeries and the horrific rounds of chemotherapy that were robbing him of hair, stamina, and lucidity.

Cameron’s grief was overwhelming until, as a teenager, she found solace in Algonquin Provincial Park, northeast of Toronto. Founded in 1893, it is the oldest provincial park in Canada and encompasses more than 7,500 square kilometres of forest, with roughly 2,400 lakes, rivers, and streams. It provides a habitat for snakes, wolves, moose, deer, loons, birds, fish, and more than 2,000 black bears. Cameron first went there on a wilderness course with Outward Bound, then on canoe trips and rock-climbing excursions with friends, and eventually as a counsellor with Taylor Statten camps. “I spent my best days exposed to the elements in blistering sun, downpours, and surprise hailstorms,” she writes. “I swatted mosquitoes, ran rapids, and portaged between the lakes on winding trails.” Algonquin was the place where she “found” herself.

Then stuff happened.

In 1991, a Toronto couple, Ray Jakubauskas and Carola Frehe, went camping on Bates Island in Algonquin’s Lake Opeongo on Thanksgiving weekend, only to be killed by a black bear. This was such a rare occurrence that it made headlines. Cameron became obsessed with the tragedy, not least because she would later lead young teenagers on camping trips to the very same lake. In 2014, she published a novel called The Bear, in which a family of four are attacked in Algonquin Park. The parents are savagely killed, while the children — a five-year-old girl named Anna and a two-year-old boy named Alex — survive: initially because their father stuffs them into a metal Coleman food container before he wages a losing battle with the rampaging bear and ultimately because the animal is sated by the time they crawl out of their hiding place. The story, which is told in the voice of Anna, is mesmerizing.

Four years after publishing her novel, Cameron, by then forty-five, married, and the mother of two young boys, was diagnosed with the same form of melanoma that had killed her father in 1983. Medical science, including genome sequencing, had progressed so much in the interval that a dermatologist could tell Cameron that she had inherited a faulty CDKN2A gene and that there was a 50 percent chance she had passed it on to her sons. Having spent thirty-odd years armed with bear spray, branches, and various noisemakers while climbing rocks, scaling glaciers, planting trees, and canoeing, she had a new foe: the sun. Her days in the wilderness, which had helped her recover from the devastation of her father’s death, were over. Her surgeon advised that her “ideal exposure to UV light is none.”

Metaphorically, the random bear attack Cameron had been obsessing about was now taking a human form, but the question was the same: Would she survive? “At its heart,” she writes, “this book tells the story of how I found the answer.” While recovering from the invasive surgery she underwent to remove three skin cancer sites from her body, she reread her novel and began an exhaustive research project on black bears and on the decline in their habitat in Algonquin Park because of logging, fishing, hunting, and camping. She also conducted a forensic dive into the particular bear that had killed the two campers and was then tracked, shot, and autopsied. As a result, How to Survive a Bear Attack is an account of one animal interspersed with chronicles of the humans who tried and failed to overcome its ferocity and of the author’s own attempts to survive the ravages of her rogue genome. Her faulty gene becomes the bear on her back.

This is not your typical memoir, to say the least, but I found the juxtaposition fascinating, especially since I read it alongside Cameron’s earlier novel.

Bears have been the subject of countless books. Setting aside the eponymous Winnie, beloved of generations of children and their parents (though I confess that I have always found him tedious), there is the randy omnivore of Marian Engel’s feminist novel from 1976 and the grizzly of The Bear’s Embrace, the heart-wrenching memoir by Patricia Van Tighem, who was mauled and disfigured while on a hike in 1983 in Waterton Lakes National Park in southern Alberta. She and her then husband, Trevor Janz, had stumbled on the animal while it was gorging on the carcass of a bighorn sheep. Startled, it lunged at them to protect its kill. Van Tighem, who lost her left eye, endured dozens of reconstructive surgeries and suffered from post-traumatic stress syndrome and drug dependencies until she finally succeeded in taking her own life in 2005.

Death haunts this memoir as Cameron analyzes why the bear attacked and killed the Toronto couple back in 1991, revisits her father’s cancer, and anticipates how, despite her sun-shielding precautions, she can prepare her children for the likelihood that her melanoma will return. She describes how one day she was summoned into her father’s bedroom, where he “lay propped on a pillow,” and “crawled onto the bed to lie beside him, careful not to jostle, knowing he was fragile.” She was “surprised to see tears in his eyes,” and confesses she didn’t know how to react when he told her, “I’m going to die.” Those were the last words he spoke to her.

I found this part of the book very moving — and how could I not? It wasn’t just the words on the page, though. Back in the early 1980s, eight months before Cameron’s father died, before palliative care or medical assistance in dying became options to ease the prolonged horror of a loved one’s wasting away, I watched my mother die at sixty-five, after struggling for more than a decade with metastasized breast cancer. Unlike Cameron’s father, she had sworn us all to secrecy. Nobody was allowed to know the havoc that cancer had wrought.

Which is better: dying in secrecy and shame, refusing to allow your grown children to share your fear, or speaking the brutal reality with a son or daughter too young to know how to respond? Cameron remembers she “stared at the ceiling and noticed a crack in the plaster,” so stunned she couldn’t even cry.

Talking about one’s own death to family and friends is a tough call, but it is a choice that Cameron confronts in this memoir. Now a decade older than her father was when he died, she refuses to abandon hope or the wilderness, though she has turned into a hiker under the shaded canopy of the forest, rather than a paddler in the noonday sun.

Unlike a raging bear, metastasized cancer “attacks in silence. In slow motion.” Cameron knows the difference: “There wouldn’t be a snapping twig, a musky smell, or a dark shape in the woods. I’d have no warning.” If the disease comes back, she would need to have the fortitude to tell her sons the truth about it and to respect their ability to find the courage to face her death and potentially their own.

As Cameron’s father had taught her so long ago, accepting the inevitable had given Beowulf the strength to be brave in his final battle against the fire-eating dragon. That is what Angus did when telling her he was dying, and that is what she too resolves to do with her own sons if, or more likely when, the cancer spreads. “I see their strength,” she writes in her closing chapter. “I trust them. Life can be hard and, with love, they will find their own ways to weather it.”

This is a brave book.