The Last Bear

A haunting and compelling novel set one thousand years ago in the remote northwest Highlands of Scotland, The Last Bear recounts a tale of ecological and spiritual crisis from the viewpoint of one extraordinary woman.

Taking the story of the extinction of the brown bear as its focal point, a story of love, jealousy, family and faith unfolds as Brigid, the last in a long line of medicine women, tries to live out her life in a time of upheaval without losing her cultural roots. Her personal struggle is set against a transforming world, as powerful Viking families clash with Celts and old pagan beliefs are challenged by Christian faith, changes that reach even into the timeless depths of the forest.

Haggith weaves evocative descriptions of the natural world into a narrative that binds the characters ever more tightly into intrigue. Who killed the last bear in Scotland, and with what consequences?

Praise for The Last Bear:

‘The Last Bear is as much poem as prose, a lament for the last bear in Scotland, and the human ways of life that died with her. With the imposition of an alien religion the old harmonies are disrupted; the last bear is the final sacrifice of the old order. The Last Bear focuses on a pivotal historical moment, yet the results echo on down the centuries: the pain and loss of the last bear is, in fact, our own.’ Margaret Elphinstone

See review on the Vulpes Libris book blog at: http://vulpeslibris.wordpress.com/2008/04/18/the-last-bear-by-mandy-haggith/

About Mandy Haggith

Mandy Haggith first studied Philosophy and Mathematics and then Artificial Intelligence and spent years struggling to write elegant computer programs that could help to save the planet. A decade ago she left academia to pursue a life of writing and revolution, and has since travelled all over the world researching forests and the people dependent on them and campaigning for their protection. In 2003, she returned to Glasgow University to study for an MPhil in Creative Writing, gaining a distinction. A pamphlet of her poetry, letting light in, was published in 2005. Her first full collection of poetry, Castings, was published by Two Ravens Press in March 2008. Mandy lives on a woodland croft in Assynt.

Mandy's blogs are at http://top-left-corner.blogspot.com and http://cybercrofter.blogspot.com

An Interview with Mandy Haggith

When did you first begin writing, and what inspired you to do so? Have any specific books/authors served as inspiration for you?

I write out of wonder. Life – nature in all its many forms and rhythms – is my core inspiration. For some reason it is not enough for me to perceive the many little miracles of nature. I need to point them out and say ‘Look! Look!’ So, writing’s first function is communication of awe.

And then I find myself writing to explore answers to compulsive questions, and when that exploration gets too big for a poem, I find myself resorting to prose. I have never managed to write successful short stories, and I think that is because if the issue can fit into something that short, I deal with it in a poem.

I take Philip Pullman’s advice and ‘read like a butterfly, write like a bee’. My first love was The House at Pooh Corner. Herman Hesse was my guide into adulthood, although arguably I learned nothing from him and wasted a decade in my own Glass Bead Game. Barbara Kingsolver has been a huge inspiration in recent years and Margaret Elphinstone and Rose Tremain taught me how to bring stories back from times long gone.

Can you tell us something about the inspiration behind this work in particular? And about what you were trying to achieve; what ideas you were trying to convey?

One question has obsessed me for decades: who killed the last bear in Britain? For as long as I can remember I have been mad about bears. They are furry and dangerous, and a thousand years ago people wiped them off the face of this island. But unlike the killing of the last wolf, which has been the source of numerous myths and legends, we seem to have forgotten the story of the last bear. It was clearly my mission in life to find that story, and I wrote The Last Bear in order to discover it. In doing so, I realised that I was telling the bigger, deeper story of extinction in general, which is not only about nature, it is fundamentally about human culture. All over the world, the loss of biodiversity goes hand-in-hand with the loss of indigenous cultures. I surmised that the reason we in the UK had lost the story of the last bear was because the people who had lived with the bears, and who might have kept that story alive, were destroyed along with it. I had to tell the tale of those people, and one woman in particular, Brigid, became the lens through which I could see the bear.

The time of the loss of the bear was a period when the local, indigenous society of the extreme north of Scotland where I live unravelled in response to two other social threads: the Vikings who had political control and the Scots who were trying to take over from the south and bringing their religion, Christianity. These three societies are represented in the story’s love-triangle: a Viking man loved both by indigenous, pagan, Brigid and Margaret the Christian Scot.

Scotland’s pre-Christian people, if they wrote at all, would not have written using roman letters. They would have used the Ogham alphabet, and this alphabet became the core symbol of their culture, and along with all of its tree, bird and mythic associations, it gave me both the formal structure and conceptual shape of the story. The use of the Ogham letters and their associated trees as the chapter headings is therefore not just cosmetic: it is the book’s architectural principle.

From a human perspective, the heart of the last bear’s story is that she had no offspring. Her human parallel, Brigid, had to face the same predicament. The story is an exploration of what childlessness feels like. Girl, mother and crone are the three phases of a woman’s life and the earth goddess is represented throughout much Celtic mythology in these triple roles. The failure to achieve motherhood is therefore a kind of ‘breakdown’ of the Triple Goddess.

How do you go about creating your voice on the page?

I first wrote The Last Bear as a fairly standard third person narrative, but it transformed when I decided to try writing from Brigid’s point of view. I’ve retained the third person narrator for events when Brigid is not around. I’ll try writing from all kinds of different perspectives. I even tried the bear’s view of the world, but finally decided writing first person bear was impossible, so the reader is spared a talking bear!

How and when do you write?

I write long-hand every day with a silver fountain pen and blue ink. Whatever comes. That’s the easy bit.

Writing the novel was achieved with great difficulty. I wrote most of it in a tiny bender by the shore of Loch Roe, on the croft where I live in Assynt. I would go there every morning and make myself write one page. It took about six months to write the first draft and I had to promise myself I would not allow anyone else to read it. It took about two-and-a-half years of editing to reach something like completion, and a further two years of polishing to get it right. All of that rewriting has to happen on the computer, and it involves countless hours of painful time at my desk, which fortunately looks out into the woods.

What do you enjoy reading? What are you reading that you can recommend at the moment?

I start every day by reading poetry, and at the moment I am alternately absorbed by a book of Sufi poems, The Drunken Universe, and Kathleen Raine’s collected poems. I am also reading Giving Voice To Bear by David Rockwell, and a lot of non-fiction environmental and travel books, none of which has been better than Kathleen Jamie’s Findings. Novels are a treat in between, most recently Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson –great swashbuckling fun.

An extract from The Last Bear

From the knoll that sheltered my hut from the brunt of storms, I watched the harvest festival. On the south side of the loch, silhouette people danced around a fire. In any other year of my life I would have been there. When I was little I used to help my mother run the ceremonies, and in recent years I had led the sacred dancing. Now, banished from the village, I was no longer even part of it.

Sounds and scents tugged from my memory. Drumming. Rhythms for dancing. Birch wood smoke. Roasting meat, the taste of mead, the smell of sweat. Dancers twirling and stamping. I scrutinised the images for details: the shine of wet skin in firelight, green and blue flames sparring in the heart of the blaze.

I knew exactly what it was like to be beside that fire, under the full harvest moon. I could picture how the dancers’ boots were laced, and the stitching on the drummer’s bodhran. I could hear the cheers and see the smiles on the dancers’ flame-eyed faces. I would never forget the pattern of sparks as we threw the pine branch on to signify the end of the dancing.

Even from here I could see it was a big one this year. Since the villagers had begun clearing the woods for pasture in what James the monk called ‘improvements’, they seemed to have been overtaken with a frenzy for burning, and the fires marking the seasons had grown ever bigger.

Across the loch, the fire shuddered and swelled. The flickering movements of people stopped. I guessed that the ceremonies had begun. The villagers would be giving their harvest offerings, figures and animals twined from barley straw. Mothers would be encouraging their children to hurl their corn-creatures up to be consumed by the highest flames. They would be giving thanks for the food that had nourished them and their animals through the summer, thanks for the grain and hay now safely stored in the barns for the winter to come, thanks for the heather honey that would heal their wounds and salve the bitter times ahead. The great cup of mead would be passing from mouth to mouth, to remind everyone of the sweetness of Mother Earth as they blessed her for the harvest gifts.

I cursed to myself. Now that the ceremony was led by the monkish James, I could only guess what was done and said. But one thing was for sure: it would not be Mother Earth to whom thanks would be offered. It would be the new god, the god of the night sky and underground fires, the god of heaven and hell, of mastery and power.

A great copper bowl engraved with the sacred bear had been the drinking vessel for as long as anyone could imagine. I shuddered at the thought of it being used to toast this cruel new god. I wondered if Bjorn was there, joining in the Christian prayers.

I looked up at the sky and tried to calm my anger by gazing at the moon, dodging cloud creatures chased in from the sea by the west wind. I called out to her, ‘At least no priest can overthrow you, Sister Moon. They can steal our sacred things, destroy our sacred places, take over our ceremonies, but they’ll never silence the rhythm that you dance to; they’ll never still your tides.’ I felt better after speaking out loud, and smiled as the moon shone through a scampering cloud and the motion in the sky made her glide and roll. In her light I could make out Beithe and the calf lying by the shore, chewing the cud.

The fire on the far side of the loch damped down. That would be the peats. I had been there in the spring for the peat-cutting, and helped to stack the turfs so they would dry over the summer months, but I would miss the sharing out of the precious fuel after tonight’s moon fire.

In the traditional harvest ceremony, the burning of the peats was always the moment of deepest worship. They were a gift direct from Mother Earth, slices of her very flesh, to keep us warm through the winter. I did not like to think what the priest would be saying to the villagers at this moment. Til the hunter, one of the few villagers I ever saw these days, told me that the priest encouraged them to sing the old songs of praise, but that he insisted that they change the words. It was always the father, not mother, who should be thanked. Instead of earth, it must be heaven. Instead of trees, their branches full of the patterns of life’s struggles, it must be crosses, upright and regular, cut by man at his meanest.

I sighed. I was chilly, but the memory of the peat burning had galvanised me. ‘I, at least, shall honour the Earth,’ I declared, and turned away from the loch towards my hut.