In the Bear's House by Bruce Hunter

From the coldest blue of a wintry night sky, below whorls of stars and northern lights, a snowy bear leads us home into his metaphorical house in the wilderness. He ushers us into that virgin territory of the pages of the heart inside the cover of Bruce Hunter’s novel, what I can only call a prodigious work of literature, indeed one of the truest Canadian classics of our times.

First published in 2009 by Oolichan Books, In The Bear’s House was the winner of the Canadian Rockies Prize in the Banff Mountain Film and Book Festival out of over a hundred entries from Canada and abroad. Bruce Hunter says “it was a sweet win for an intergenerational novel about a family raising a deaf boy who finds love and redemption in the mountain wilderness.” In the spring of 2025 the novel was reissued by Frontenac House, as well as in Andrea Sirotti’s Italian translation, Nella Casa dell’Orso, by Italian publisher Il Bardo Editore.

In The Bear’s House captures and holds the reader’s heart right from the get-go, as the story unfolds in captivating tales braided by two unforgettable and endearing narrators we come to root for and love. The novel begins with teenage Clare giving birth to her son in a Calgary hospital, alone because her husband is in prison. Helped by her mother, she raises her child in her home, surrounded by the nurturance of a deeply loving extended family. After a serious infection, Clare’s baby loses his hearing and we are led into his silent world, first by his young mom, and then by Trout’s own detailed narration. It is a child’s world filled with magical thinking, wonder, a heightened sensitivity and intuitive perception.

“This was the place he’d hide, the deaf boy named Trout. A broad band of aquamarine all around him, whiffs of sand, shreds of net, two bright glass floats, hand blown and carried across the current from the nets of Japanese fishermen. There, the dry delicate carcasses of seahorses, noble heads reined by invisible riders. Here, the warrior’s helmet of a glossy Nautilus shell, beside the pink whorls of the conch, its knobby crown chipped and its peak gone. Several dried starfish, their arms lifted slightly, like the roofs of marine pagodas beached in the sand. The mottled cowry, the fragile whelks, the coolies’ hats of limpets, the service station logo of the scallop, the bright Sanskrit wrapping the cone shells alongside the baroque curves and flutters of giant clams. The only living fish swam nearby, a dozen blue-banded barracudas and a pair of guppies in separate tanks where life-giving bubbles burbled unheard to the water’s surface. His private sea.”

In an interview for The Miramichi Reader, Bruce Hunter explains that he wrote the book in 1998. In that time of limited internet, he had searched for novels that dealt with growing up deaf, but couldn’t find one. He therefore decided to write one himself. He says “the book is a fictional memoir that blends historical fact with imagination told in parallel plots. In an epic, intergenerational tale, told in third person omniscient, it reaches back into history to the 1880s through the 1950’s to the early 1960s.” The story’s setting is post-war Calgary Alberta and the high eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountain grasslands of Kootenay Plains. He tells us “it is rooted in the ethos and sociology of the times which were not always kind to those who were judged as other.” In an incident at school, Trout learns of that difference as he is finally able to hear by wearing his new hearing aid contraption.

“English was a foreign language now for Trout. Hearing brought new words with sharp flint edges that sparked when they struck. The order and conjugations became confused. Trout knew that some words were sticks and stones and they were meant to hurt him. His mother told him he was special. But not like the Special class at the school downtown. That special meant Dense or Thick, Odd or Different. As in Slow. The stones of adults were wrapped in cloth.”

Through Trout’s dreams, filled with icy water rising up to his ankles, the book also prophetically divines the Upper North Saskatchewan River Valley’s flooding, which without consideration for the many First Nations living there for 5000 years, was carried out by the government of the times, to make way for Alberta’s biggest man-made lake and hydro dam. As a result, the Stoney Nakoda peoples who lived there, lost their sacred land and, in essence, their entire world. In the Bear’s House is not only the story of a young deaf boy and his family’s journey, but also the tale of Canada’s aboriginal and ecological losses due to socio-political issues and industrialization . It is a coming-of-age story, heartbreaking and sobering, a story of innocence, of a paradise lost in our own times, a poetic witnessing of what matters and what can and cannot be reclaimed. Most of all it is a tale underscored by the beauty and power of nature, of love and family, of heritage and history, of strength of character and the redemptive salve of friendship and spirituality.

“Jack told Trout about the different tribes: the Kootenay, Shuswap and Carrier from B.C., the Sarcee and Blackfoot from the south of the province, the northern Cree and the Plains Cree from Saskatchewan, the Nez Perce from Idaho, the Sioux from Montana, and the Spokane from Washington State. “These are a powerful people. I’ve learned much from them.” Jack looked at Trout with one eyebrow arched high, as if he were reckoning through the scope of his rifle. Trout nodded blankly. “They were warriors. And they’re gonna rise again, someday. They teach you in school about the great chiefs? Big Bear?”

We are told that the title “is a backcountry analogy for the wilderness” because “when you’re in the bear’s house, you mind your manners” and perhaps” the author says, “Everyone in the book could be seen as a bear.” I believe the bear is such an apt metaphor for this story: innocent and loveable yet fierce, his iconic beauty, symbol of the Canadian wilderness, now endangered by institutional colonialism and industry. Similarly, Trout, the name of the main character, is an iconic image evoking views of lakes and landscapes of a pristine Canada we hold dear in our hearts. From a description of the water appearing as if magically at Two O’Clock Creek we glean how “Trout wondered at the magic of water wrung from clouds and wind, somewhere between the highest point of land and the sky.”

Away from the limelight of the most hailed and promoted works of Canadian literature, enters a novel so beautifully written, it literally kings them all. From the silent universe of Trout, in his basement room of painted blue water, sand and shells, to the upper realms of his family, school and community of friends, to the wider world he experiences on Kootenay Plains with his uncle Jack, a land now flooded for a hydro dam, we are made privy to the experience of submersion. We experience it first with Trout’s deafness, then by family circumstances, then by institutional oppression both at the personal and societal levels, and finally by emotions, most of all grief for people and places loved then lost. In reading we are transported and become immersed into the reality of a world, which under Bruce Hunter’s rich, sensorial language sparks to life.

The leitmotifs of water, sand, shells and conch repeat throughout the novel, threading the characters and action to the elemental beauty and life-giving essence of nature in the Canadian wilderness. The names Trout and Clare ignite images of clear Canadian lakes where fish swim freely beneath the shade of mountains and evergreens. The bear emerges from this landscape as a pivotal symbol of wilderness, benevolent, fierce yet endangered by man’s want of prosperity and progress. After reading the novel and allowing it to percolate in the mind and heart, an allegorical tapestry of a loved, lost universe emerges, complete with every tangible detail of description and dialogue so veritably real, we imagine ourselves part of it. Upon finishing the book, I cried, emotion welling up from the grief of having to leave that world behind, a fictional place I will forever carry in my heart. Perhaps having visited the bear’s house, I too have become one. Each moment of the living essence we are submerged by and we call reality, is water appearing and disappearing like Two O’ Clock Creek. All we can do is enjoy ‘the reverie’ as Clare lovingly advised Trout to do, for it is, as all poets know, ephemeral and while we’re entranced by it, it is precious.

“Trout shivered, as much from the sound of the drums as from the excitement of the day. Around him, the sharp plates of the ancient seabed rose into the sky. The evening stars appeared, and in the west, the tops of jagged ridges glowed with the remnants of sun. The wind rose and rustled through the forest, rushed over the river and the distant drummers. He listened to the trees. In his sleep, the drummers drummed, and the dancers danced. And the Stoney babies turned with him in their sleep and Red Wilson and Trout listened to the voices of the trees through his conch.”

A seasoned poet, Bruce Hunter’s writing unlatches the reader’s heart to follow Trout and Clare through their miraculous life journeys. His clear yet detailed and lyrical descriptions craft symbolic images of unforgettable characters and places. There is so much imagistic power in this wonderfully written tale, it must belong to that rare category of classics that should be read in schools and libraries everywhere. In a very moving last paragraph of the afterward at the end of the novel, the author invites us to join him in the reverie of his story. He tells us: “We’re in the bear’s house now with Silas and John, and Kathy too. My Auntie Kathy died in 2010, the year after In the Bear’s House was published. Suffering from dementia and in a care home, she was not able to read her story, but it was told. As a young prairie boy, I loved the magic of a high mountain montane teeming with wildlife and history, and a creek that appeared at two o’clock as the sun warmed a distant glacier’s crowfoot. How the creek slept at night, after sundown, its water frozen at high altitudes. The Upper Saskatchewan ranger station, that boreal valley, the old road, and the Cline Bridge, on the last curve home. All are gone now, deep under the lake. But if you look carefully, you can find the concrete abutments of the Cline Bridge below the David Thompson resort. And across Lake Abraham, the Cline fire lookout still watches over the Plains. Kootenay Plains is where I come to in my dreams. Someday I will return to the sweat lodge, and to the sacred places of my youth to drink from the clouds.”

Bruce Hunter is a writer, editor, speaker, and mentor. In 2024, his novel, Nella casa dell’orso, was published in Italy by iQdB edizioni. In 2023, his poetry collection, Galestro, was published in Italy, following the release there in 2022 of A Life in Poetry, Poesie scelteda Two O’clock Creek, also by iQdB edizioni. In 2021, his memoir essay, “This is the Place I Come to in My Dreams” was shortlisted for the Alberta Magazine Publishers’ Awards. In 2024, his long poem “Dark Water” from Galestro won Gold for poetry for the Alberta Magazine Publishers’ Awards. And he is a proud new grandfather of Alice, Julian and Lucas.

Publisher: Frontenac House (May 2025)
Paperback: 9″ x 6″ | 432 pp
ISBN: 9781989466988

Josie Di Sciascio-Andrews

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Josie Di Sciascio-Andrews is the author of two books of non-fiction and seven poetry collections. Her latest collection of poems “A Nomenclature for Light” was published in 2025 by Mosaic Press. She is the first place winner of the Antonio de Ferraris International Poetry Prize for poets writing in English, in Rome.