I just finished reading The Bear by Claire Cameron.
Don’t be fooled by the cover, or the fact that the narrator is 5-year-old Anna. This is not a book for children.
Goodreads Summary: While camping with her family on a remote island, five-year-old Anna awakes in the night to the sound of her mother screaming. A rogue black bear, 300 pounds of fury, is attacking the family’s campsite, pouncing on her parents as prey.
At her dying mother’s faint urging, Anna manages to get her brother into the family’s canoe and paddle away. But when the canoe dumps the two children on the edge of the woods, and the sister and brother must battle hunger, the elements, and a dangerous wilderness, we see Anna’s heartbreaking love for her family–and her struggle to be brave when nothing in her world seems safe anymore.
I have been camping ion places like the setting of this story and my brother and twin sister have a scary canoe camping story that involves a bear. My most memorable canoe camping trip took place on the May 24th weekend in 1990. My brother Brian and his family (wife & 4 kids) took my sister, her boyfriend (Tom, now her husband) and I to Shark Lake in the Haliburton Highlands. We started out at Long Lake, near Apsley, Ontario and made three portages in to get to Shark Lake. It was a cold and rainy weekend. There were no bears but we did hear wolves. They were close and I remember my sister-in-law being frightened. We joked that because we were camped on an island, they couldn’t get us unless they were scuba wolves. I remember drinking lots of hot tea and trying to keep the fire going. Tom and Brian actually paddled to a cabin to see if it was open and contemplated breaking in. Hypothermia was a real concern. Here is a picture of me with my pyjamas over my clothes. It was so cold we wore all the layers we had. In spite of the terrible weather, I have very fond memories of this trip. This was the last canoe camping trip I was ever on. That summer I moved to Colombia, then to the US and I never moved back to Canada.
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