A heavy load to bear

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This article was published 29/03/2025 (499 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

An unexplainable wildlife attack, the legacy of loss and how it inhabits a body and the redeeming qualities of nature, all rolled into one — that’s the beauty of Claire Cameron’s stunning new memoir, How To Survive a Bear Attack.

At the age of nine, Cameron’s father calls her to his bedside and tells her he is dying. Everything she knows about life changes in a flash. After her father’s death, even her reliable doll named Daisy offers no comfort. “The blue of her painted iris seemed dead, almost creepy. Something had changed between us. There was no going back to how we were before,” she writes.

Cameron’s healing, when it comes, takes on the shape of adventure. “I still missed my dad. My grief could be sharp, but the wilderness held so many ways to divert my attention,” she writes.

Her neck of the woods becomes, predominantly, Algonquin Park, which is part of a granite shelf known as the Canadian Shield that stretches from the Great Lakes to the Arctic. There is enough ore in the Shield, Cameron notes, to affect a magnet from across the continent, aptly providing a metaphor for the nature of a haunting.

Close to Cameron’s healing wilderness, on Oct. 10, 1991, a couple named Raymond Jakubauskas and Carola Frehe leave Toronto for a weekend of canoeing and camping deep in the Algonquin backcountry. Late in the afternoon, just as they are setting up their rustic campsite, an unprovoked black bear attack ensues, leaving them both fatally wounded.

Everything about the mauling flies in the face of Cameron’s logic. She sees it as a contradiction of epic proportions — how could a creature she’d come to view as mostly a nuisance also possess the ability for such a gruesome attack?

“Between these points lies my obsession. I love bears,” writes Cameron, noting her numerous bear encounters while also studying the ways they have adapted to human encroachment into their territory.

“Black bears have the capacity to be incredibly forgiving. It’s easy to focus on the moments when something horrific happens and overlook all the times it doesn’t.”

That’s not to say Cameron gives the bear a pass. Through honest exploration, she attempts to understand its true nature while also reconciling with the worst of its traits.

The Toronto author embarks on a lifelong journey that is as much a haunting as a quest. She wants to land on an anomaly, something to explain the inexplicable ways of nature. Years later, after receiving news of her own stark condition in the form of a diagnosis, she faces another unreconcilable fact of nature.

She is struck by the same deadly skin cancer that claimed her father’s life, forcing her to grapple with the worst of ironies: her beloved outdoors is no longer a place of healing, as her ideal exposure to UV light is none.

Told in three distinct timelines, How To Survive A Bear Attack braids Cameron’s recovery with the story of the couple who met their tragic ending on the shorelines of a beloved provincial park and the species that made it so.

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Cameron writes as she returns to the woods in hopes of uncovering clues to a decades-old mystery, “but the campsite where we stood felt heavy with loss.”

Then, while sitting by a lake with the afternoon sun shining down, she notices its reflection becomes like a mirror.

“The world split in two, one up top and a replica below. They both looked true.”

This debut memoir by the bestselling novelist of The Bear and The Last Neanderthal offers nature writing at its finest.

At its heart, How to Survive a Bear Attack is an unforgettable story about finding the courage to face even the wildest of natures within and around us all.

Rochelle Squires is an avid book reader who traded her government briefing binders for novels and can be found at home reading from her growing to-be-read pile.