Tag: 260507

(Pegasus Books, 297 pages)

When she was 5, Trina Moyles’ father brought home a black bear. A wildlife biologist in Alberta, Canada, he often took possession of orphaned wildlife while trying to place the animals with zoos and rehabilitation facilities; the 3-month-old cub had lost its mother to a forester’s excavator. As the cub tumbled around the family’s basement, Moyles and her older brother looked on, entranced.

The memory stayed with her and shaped her into a girl who played with toy bears instead of Barbies, and later a woman whose fascination with bears grew as she took a job monitoring forests in a fire tower.

In her new memoir, Moyles entwines her knowledge of bears with the deeply personal story of her tumultuous relationship with her drug-addicted brother. The pair, just three years apart, were close in childhood even though Brendan was an extrovert, “collecting friends the same way I sought the company of books.” Moyles was naturally reserved but willing to be led on risky adventures by the brother she revered.

Theirs was a wildish childhood: building forts out of tree limbs in the woods, jumping off boulders into rivers, grouse hunting with their dad. When Moyles was a teenager she bought a horse with money she earned working at her town’s rec center; on one afternoon trail ride with a friend, they encountered a cinnamon bear (a subspecies of black bear), standing upright. “It was,” she writes, “the first time I’d ever come face to face with a bear in the wild. Everything my dad had taught me couldn’t prepare me for the shock of it. My mind and body flooding with fear and awe.”

She would soon come to another kind of fear, however, after Brendan moved out and she watched from afar his descent into alcohol and drug abuse. Hard partying was, she writes, a common pastime for young people in their area, and she herself edged close to the thin line between recreational use and full-blown addiction. But Moyles was able to stop before crossing that line; her brother did not, despite a car accident, a family intervention, AA and finally a spell of sobriety during which Moyles hoped she’d finally gotten the brother she loved in childhood back after a period of complete estrangement.

When Brendan had a baby daughter with his girlfriend, Moyles was the first person he texted, writing, “You had to be the first to know, Treen.”

All the while, Moyles was getting more obsessed with bears as she worked as a lookout at a 100-foot-high fire tower in northwestern Alberta, at a location so remote that she and her dog had to be flown in by helicopter. There was an electric fence around the cabin to keep bears out, although the bears occasionally broached it and she became familiar with them, even giving them names.

She begins to draw parallels between them and her own life.

When, for example, she observes an enormous bear dubbed Oscar rub against a tree, imbuing it with his scent and ostensibly increasing the chance he will find a mate, she reflects on her romantic prospects, or lack thereof. “As a woman in her mid-thirties, I’d been choosing to live alone in the forest, removing myself from civilization, from letting my scent be trailed by potential mates in grocery store aisles and cafe lineups, from parties and potlucks, from swiping left or right on dating apps.”)

When she encounters a bear hibernating in a ditch not far from where she is living, she approaches the den, hoping to hear the bear snoring. Later that night, she writes, “I felt comforted by knowing that the bear was there, so close, burrowed into the road. As I climbed beneath the covers of my duvet, I thought of the bear, curled in her den, and my loneliness softened.”

As her bear encounters multiply, Moyles learns of their curiosity toward humans, but she maintains a healthy fear of what they can do. One of the more distressing aspects of the memoir is the recounting of fatal and near-fatal bear encounters — there is no more dangerous bear than a mother with cubs, we all know, but Moyles writes that there is such a thing as a “good bear” — bears that exist peacefully alongside humans without conflict. She has such a relationship with a bear she observes for years, and a friend remarks at one point the bear, which she named Osa, probably knows Moyles better than she knows herself.

Brendan, who works in the oil industry, comes and goes in the narrative but returns with devastating effect at the end, and Moyles must come to terms with their loving but troubled relationship. It seems to take a very long time to get here; one must have a lot of interest in bears to stay with this story, and a high tolerance for tales of bear romance.

Most of us will never encounter a bear in the wild or in our yard, but if we do we’ll be better equipped to deal with it for having read this book. Far more of us know someone struggling with addiction and will relate to not just Moyles’ observations, but her pain. B

Featured Photo: Black Bear: A Story of Siblinghood and Survival, by Trina Moyles

(Harper, 222 pages)

The titular short story in Python’s Kiss is ostensibly about a dog named Nero whose job is to guard the 8-year-old narrator’s grandparents’ grocery store. The grandfather sleeps beyond locked doors “with my grandmother on one side and a loaded gun on the other. This is not a place where a child got up at night to ask for a glass of water.” The 8-year-old is staying there because her mother is about to have a baby, and she forms a bond with the dog. Nero, however, is infatuated with a cocker spaniel who belongs to a woman the narrator’s uncle is infatuated with. As events unfold, they intersect with the narrator’s memory of a traveling show of exotic, dangerous animals that went amok at her school.

This story, like the others in this imaginative collection, offers a smorgasbord of memorable characters. They are ordinary people in strange circumstances, often with an animal involved.

In “The Feral Troubadour” we meet a man enamored of poetry and stray cats. He lives alone in an apartment where he is decorating the bathroom with black and white tiles on which he writes excerpts from poems with a permanent marker. One day, like the narrator of “Python’s Kiss,” he receives what he perceives to be a sign from the universe, this one telling him “You must change your life.” The events that transpire are a confluence of absurdities that, against all odds, ends on a positive note. Not every story does, so enjoy it while you can.

In “Wedding Dresses,” four dresses stored in a basement closet are ruined by mold after a water pipe bursts, and their owner is confronted by her visiting niece: Why were there four wedding dresses? Who had she married and why did they divorce?

“This was suddenly like being a real parent. Having to explain her own past to a child, and do it in a way that would have little impact, either negative or perhaps overly positive.” The four-time bride goes through the story of each dress. Along the way we learn what she tells her niece and what she doesn’t. It’s a brilliant bit of storytelling.

In “Domain,” there is an afterlife controlled by corporations, which charge people for the privilege of uploading their consciousness into the one of their choice, or rather, the one they can afford. The narrator has been injured in a free-climbing accident and applied for early admission to an afterlife called Asphodel (also the name and subject of another story in the collection). When she arrives there, she sees what’s left of her carcass, but it’s not upsetting because “I have a new body now and it’s made of thought.” And she now has one overwhelming thought: how to find and eliminate — for good — her father, who she holds responsible for the death of her son.

The final story, “The Stone,” is as strange and riveting as the rest. It involves a woman who found a large, smooth stone as a child and adopted it as a kind of talisman, taking it with her to college, carrying it with her to concerts when she became a famous pianist. Stroking the stone gives her a sense of calm — until the day she has something that resembles a quarrel with the stone, and it breaks in two. As she slips from its emotional grip, we see the highlights of the stone’s existence over a billion years, the other lives it’s been part of.

There are 13 stories here, of which seven were previously published, in The New Yorker and elsewhere, but for anyone unfamiliar with Erdrich’s work this collection is a gateway drug to more. They are a great distraction from the everyday world, if there’s anything going on that you’d like to tune out for a while. A

Featured Photo: Python’s Kiss, by Louise Erdrich