In the Bear’s House by Bruce Hunter

Posted by Pearl Fiction Friday, September 3rd, 2010

In the Bear’s House was selected out of over 100 books from 10 countries as the 2009 Canadian Rockies Prize winner at the Banff Mountain Book Festival.

Part fictional memoir, part social history, In The Bear’s House details the lives of two Scottish immigrant families in Calgary, the Dunlops and Lockes, and their raising of a deaf child.

The novel opens as seventeen-year-old Clare Dunlop gives birth to a son while her husband serves a penitentiary sentence for a serious crime.  Clare Dunlop’s own dreams as a gifted student are now thwarted. She turns her creative spirit to her family, naming her deafened son and four daughters after poets she loved.

The deaf boy nicknamed Trout aged seven is punished for his insolence in ignoring a teacher.  He is sent to stand in the corner of his classroom and soon comes to prefer it, as it has its own rewards.

His ninety-nine year old great-great aunt gives him a conch shell she brought overland to Alberta by ox cart and stagecoach before the railway.  It becomes a kind of hearing aid in which he hears not the sea, but the stories of those around him.  Nicknamed Trout for his family’s love of the wild and his own attachment to the watery and silent world of fishes, he is traumatized at the death of his aunt and spins out of control.

His mother, who now has five children and is pregnant with another, can no longer cope with her deaf son.  She sends him to live with relatives in the wilderness.  There he thrives, bonding with his partially deaf forest ranger uncle and his wife.

Trout finds unexpected gifts in the wilderness.  He learns that while he cannot always hear the world, he can feel it.  Living on historic Kootenay Plains near Rocky Mountain House, a traditional Kootenay and Stoney hunting and holy ground, he becomes infatuated with a young Stoney girl.

In The Bear’s House features a cast of those who inhabit the corners of society because of fear and prejudice.  And for whatever reason they may find themselves there, their imagination and generousity sets them apart.

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