By a stretch of the imagination (which some might call escapist), there is a place untethered to the weight of the inorganic. That place can be found in Andrew Krivak's novella, The Bear, where a father and daughter live within the hinterland of some unknown northern wood, surviving as the last two human beings on Earth.
Whether the narrative encapsulates a dystopia or utopia is hard to say. The hardships taken to survive on the land, without the tools of modern man, are harsh, even brute. The inability to know the future even more so. The young girl learns skills passed down from her father early on, making it through times of scarcity and treacherous weather. But though hunger and continuous labor (hunting, creating shelter) lie nearby without end, there are moments of satisfaction, tenderness, and care that thread the way from the beginning of the story to its' end.
"And yet no matter how long winter lasted, spring followed, its arrival soft and somehow surprising, like the notes of birdsong upon waking, or the tap of water slipping in a droplet from a branch to the ground." (p. 15)
The father and daughter are not alone in this world, though "human civilization"is nowhere to be found. There is a bear that speaks to the girl, and the girl somehow innately knows how to communicate back, a rare ability that most others forgot or lost. And death is always present, the mother's passing never gone, but carried with them, through story, silence, and the memory of object kept and treasured.
Evil itself, however, is not within this book's pages. It is completely hidden or absolutely unknown. The violence is the violence of nature: the need to kill for food and warmth, the sadness borne by life's disappearance. A warning is given once, when the father goes into a hole, down below the earth's soil, looking for something useful to be wielded on their journey. As he searches in the darkness, he is bitten by a creature neither him or his daughter can see. They never go back into the hole. The unseen, like the unfathomable, is right there, but it is not, as the story seems to teach, to be tampered with.
The subtle movement of each phase within the narrative, the landscape moving with its' characters, is almost painterly, held within a frame that slowly reveals the layered symbolism it holds, as if trying to teach us how to read beyond the pages' words.
"There were many questions she still wanted to ask, but she left them to the silence now of her father, who sat before the embers of the fire and gazed at them as though they were tiny suns setting on a world of sand and water and he was given this moment alone to see them in the evanesence of their warmth." (p. 90)
The Bear might sadly be a complete fantasy, for it is true that this world presented as "off-the-grid"- or a world without "a grid" to start - is hardly possible. Still, this is not a sad sanctuary. In deep contemplation and mesmerization, perhaps awe, too, the human as such fully merges with its own nature, as human animal, brimming with thought that remembers how to forge its reality with the gifts already present.
"Beyond that the surface lifted and fell but seemed never to move forward, a surface that stretched as far as a horizon almost indistinguishable from the water silvery blue, so that it looked to the girl as though sea and sky curved up and over to cover the earth like a dome." (p. 80)
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