A bare bear story

[xela]

Something on MIT zephyr just randomly triggered a memory of a story my mom used to tell.

Ten years or so before I was born, when my sisters weren't in school yet, my dad (or perhaps my mom's uncle Jesse) shot a bear in the woods the other side of the pasture. We had about 12 foot ceilings in our basement, so naturally enough my dad skinned and dressed the bear and hung it in the basement, in preparation for butchering it and smoking, canning and/or freezing the meat.

Now my mom grew up on a ranch in Oregon, and her dad made part of his living as a government trapper. So a bear hanging in the basement didn't strike her as an especially odd thing. So the next morning at breakfast time, without giving it much thought, she sent my sister Jo to get something out of what we called the fruit room — a rodent-proof room in the basement where we kept canned goods and various foods that were amenable to storage in a cool dry place.¹

My sister emerges a few minutes later at the top of the basement stairs, with a jar of whatever it was and eyes the size of, in my mom's telling, milk-bottle caps.²

Mommy? Is that a people down there?

---

¹ We moved off the farm when I was eight, so at this juncture the only foods I'm sure I remember us keeping in the fruit room without preserving them are root crops: beets and potatoes, in particular. Perhaps because they were the ones in bins low enough for me to get at.

² Unless you're familiar with old-school glass milk bottles, that's probably bigger than you think. Call it 6 cm or so.

Comments

[siderea]

That's awesome! But I'm dying to know what she said when your mom said, "no, it's a bear".

(Assuming, of course, your mom said, "no, it's a bear". In my family, that wouldn't be a safe assumption, but we didn't keep corpses in our basement, best as I can tell.)

[motodraconis.livejournal.com]

smoking, canning and/or freezing the meat.

The bear got eaten? I didn't know it was customary to eat bear, what is it like?

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

It's not exactly customary to eat bear — but the way I was brought up, to kill an animal that size and then not fully utilize it would be the worst sort of vandalism. By the time I was growing up, all we saw were occasional signs of foxes, bobcats and coyotes, and as long as they didn't come after the livestock, we didn't go after them, so this is all before my time. But my understanding is that even animals generally considered inedible (most predators and scavengers) would be butchered and used for animal feed. As for the taste of bear: I don't know — to the best of my knowledge, it's the only bear ever taken on our farm, and it was well before I was born. My recollection, though, is that it's supposed to taste like rather strongly flavoured pork, but tougher.

[yakshaver.livejournal.com]

Well, I didn't tell that pert of the story because it's not very interesting, save perhaps as an artifact of what kids growing up on farms will take in their stride. Mom explained it was a bear; Jo said something to the effect of "Not a man?" — "No, sweetheart. Just a bear."  — And Jo sat down and ate her breakfast like any other day.