After their parents’ death, a twelve-year-old girl cares for her baby sister. Forbidden from playing the “Bear!” game, the younger accidentally compels her sister to transform into an enchanted bear. Mocked by villagers, the bear destroys them in anger. When forced to reveal where her heart is hidden, the sisters’ secret leads hunters to fatally trap her on poisoned stakes, leaving the child sister bereft.
Source:
History and Folklore of
the Cowichan Indians
by Martha Douglas Harris
The Colonist
Printing and Publishing Company
Victoria, British Columbia, 1901
(Chapter: “Folklore of the Cree Indians”)
► Themes of the story
Transformation: The elder sister is magically changed into a bear, driving the entire narrative through this metamorphosis.
Forbidden Knowledge: The villagers coerce the younger sister into revealing the enchanted bear’s hidden heart, a secret meant to protect her.
Revenge and Justice: The bear avenges her unjust treatment of both sisters by attacking the mockers, and the villagers’ plotted revenge leads to her tragic end.
► From the same Region or People
Learn more about the Cree people
In a very large village there lived two sisters. They had lost their parents when the younger child was but a babe and the eldest a child of about twelve years of age. This good girl took entire charge of her little sister, and also worked for the women of the village, and they gave her food in return for her help. When the little girl was old enough to play with the other children, her sister begged her never to play the game that the children were fondest of, and that was calling out, “Bear! Bear!” and frightening themselves with pretending that they were being chased. So the little girl was very careful to obey her sister, as she loved her greatly; and when the game was to be played, she would run back to her sister. At length the children noticed it, and said: “Now, it is your turn to be bear.” She begged them not to ask her to play it.
► Continue reading…
Children are sometimes cruel, and they insisted on her taking her turn, so she had to submit or be cruelly used. Well, she went into the hiding place, and when the children shouted “Bear! Bear!” out she came, growling at them, and chased them and then ran home to tell her sister what she had been compelled to do. There, owing to this unfortunate game, when she reached home she found that her poor sister had been transformed into a bear. The poor bear was crying at this horrid change, and asked her sister to go with her to the river side and live in a cave in the bank. They both wept together, and then they went to find this cave and make it their home. Then the people heard of the sister being changed into a bear, and came and mocked the little sister, and out rushed the bear and destroyed many of the people. The rest got very much alarmed, and tried in many ways to kill the bear, but all their efforts were in vain. At last they tried making a fire before the cave’s mouth, but she only rushed out and attacked them. They could not kill this enchanted bear. They waylaid the poor sister and asked her where the bear kept her heart.
“Oh, I don’t know; indeed I don’t,” she would say. At last they insisted on her asking the bear where her heart was. So one evening she began asking questions, and at last came to ask where the bear’s heart was kept. “Now, my sister, the people have told you to ask me.”
“No, sister, they have not.”
At last she told where her heart was. It was in her forepaw, in the little toe of it. So the next day when the little sister went to draw water, she was waylaid and compelled to tell where the bear’s heart was.
For many days the men were very busy making little sticks, pointed at both ends, and when they had finished they went towards the bear’s cave, and stuck these sharp points into the ground, as closely together as they could. Then they shouted to the bear to come out, and roused the bear at once, who came rushing out, right on these sharp sticks. One pricked her little toe, and she fell dead, to the bitter grief of her younger sister.
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