In the Bear’s House wins Canadian Rockies award

The Kootenay Plains is a powerful place.

With its broad valley stretching away from the Rocky Mountains, home to the North Saskatchewan River, the dry plains have called out to people for thousands of years.

And Calgary-born author Bruce Hunter, a professor of English and Liberal Studies at Seneca College in Toronto, is one of these people.

Throughout much of Hunter’s life, Kootenay Plains has haunted him. He has visited the plains many times in person and perhaps even more in his dreams.

“I know it is a magical place and I have been haunted by it. It was in my dreams for many years. I knew about Bighorn Dam and I knew about the controversy about it and I had dreams that I was wandering around Kootenay Plains and the water was coming up around my ankles,” Hunter told the Outlook recently.

Kootenay Plains and the development of the Bighorn Dam play pivotal roles in Hunter’s story and the effect both had on the people who lived at this magical place.

“This is a book about the mountains and this is a book about a holy place and it is also about this huge sociological and environmental impact of Bighorn Dam.

“Like the narrator in the book, I did live on Kootenay Plains, but nowhere near as long. As I say to people, the bones are mine but the flesh and the clothing and the adventures are fiction,” Hunter said, adding he stayed with his great aunt and uncle, who worked for the forest service.

Hunter drew heavily from his dreams, his own life experience and a substantial amount of research as he crafted the superbly written In the Bear’s House, a story that follows the lives of a deaf boy nicknamed Trout and his mother Clare. He wove fact and fiction together, telling a story that speaks of despair, loss, love, loneliness, but more importantly, discovery and redemption.

It is a coming-of-age story that blends the real and the imagined to such a high degree that separating fact from fiction is a challenge, as what appears to be real is in fact imagined, and vice versa.

This effective blurring of the lines is a testament to the level of honesty and research Hunter, who, like his protagonist Trout, is deaf, employed as he wrote this 455-page novel.

And it is a combination that obviously works as Hunter received the Canadian Rockies award – beating out 101 entries from 10 countries – during the Banff Mountain Book Festival, Thursday (Nov. 5).

Representing the award committee, Will Gadd wrote on the Banff Mountain Festivals website, In the Bear’s House “captures the transformative power of the Rocky Mountains… We initially had a hard time selecting this book for the Canadian Rockies Award as not all of it occurs in the Canadian Rockies. But the major transformations do, and the writing is as solid as the limestone in the Rockies isn’t.”

But the transformations Hunter quietly reveals throughout the book did not come easy.
In the Bear’s House only came together after a false start, writing from the third person about Trout.

But after his research, Hunter began to understand he needed to learn a number of powerful elements that would help drive the story.

“One is the anger of the kids, not so much that they can’t hear, but they’re not heard and that’s why I became a writer. But for a good part of it, I realized that unless I told the story, at least part of it, from the mother’s point of view, I wasn’t going to get the whole story,” he said.

Writing teachers will often tell their students to write about what they know, but in this case,Hunter willfully ignored that tried but true approach by including Clare in the first person, alongside a host of First Nations third-person characters.

Both techniques can be risky for a white male, but Hunter handles each with the same honesty and sensitivity he uses throughout the book. As a result, Hunter does what he set out to do, honour each of the different groups that play a role in the book, be it women, or the Wesley band of the Stoney-Nakoda First Nation, the Scots and deaf children.

In the Bear’s House is published by B.C.-based Oolichan Books. It sells for $22.95.