Remy Marion - On Being a Bear: Face to Face with Our Wild Sibling

First published in English by Greystone Books in 2021 Originally published in French as Lours: Lautre de lhomme, copyright 2018 by Actes Sud, Arles, France English translation copyright 2021 by David Warriner

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Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada

ISBN 978-1-77164-698-7 (cloth)

ISBN 978-1-77164-699-4 (epub)

Copy editing by Paula Ayer

Proofreading by Alison Strobel

Indexing by Stephen Ullstrom

Cover and text design by Fiona Siu

Maps by Pascal Orcier

Author photo by Thierry Borredon

Greystone Books gratefully acknowledges the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples on whose land our office is located.

Greystone Books thanks the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, the Province of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit, and the Government of Canada for supporting our publishing activities.

by Lambert Wilson

BEAR,

I owe you an apology.

It turns out I knew nothing about you. Not before I read this captivating account of your life by Rmy Marion. Until then, I had fallen for all the clichs. You were a gentle, hungry giant, an endearing, clumsy clown. You and your kind had none of the elegance or mystery of the feline species, and none of their superior indifference. Noyou were a dull-witted, boorish glutton, but you were also a dangerous, voracious beast.

I may have lent you my voice in the movie theater when I was cast as Baloo in the French version of The Jungle Book film in 2016, and when I played Ernest the bear, companion to Celestine the mouse, in the animated film Ernest & Celestine, but I couldnt see that I had reduced you to a theme-park caricature.

This book has opened my eyes. Rmy Marion has followed you, spied on you, analyzed you, photographed you, and filmed you for years. He knows you inside out, and he never tires of observing you, watching out for you, waiting for you in every corner of the planet where you have survived.

You know, Bear, you and I are not so different. Sometimes Im afraid of people too. I want to run away from them just like you do. Once you lived alongside these people and they looked up to you like a god, but now they have hunted you, enslaved you, and invaded your territory. I dont blame you for keeping your distance. They can be dangerous. Not all of them, of course, but a lot of them are out to get you. They want your hide. Bears are good for nothing anymore, they say. They are a nuisance, so we have to get rid of them. And get rid of you they will, the same way they do with every kind of creature that stands in their way. I hate to tell you, Bear, but your days are numbered.

On behalf of the people, on behalf of all humankind, I would like to offer you the sincerest and most meaningful of apologies. Sorry for driving you away to places where you struggle to find food. Sorry for turning you into countless bedside rugs. Sorry for locking you up in cages to drain you of your bile, the way people still do in some parts of the world. Sorry for melting your pack ice. Sorry for pushing you to the edge of starvation, leaving you to fill your belly in our landfills. Sorry for all those hunts in the Pyrenees, where the shepherds hatred for you dates back to the time of their ancestors (were you not, however, in those mountain pastures well before their flocks?). Sorry for dressing you up like a circus animal, putting a ring through your nose, and making you dance with monkeys.

Stillnot that you know ityouve become something of a symbol, an emblem of lost harmony with the humans in whose midst youve managed to survive for thousands of years. Yet soon youll be swept away by the black tide of their excesses and caught in the trap of their greed and foolishness.

Dont let it go to your head, Bear, youre no more lovable than any of the other species in this world. Youre simply a part of the wonderful diversity of our planet that is so terribly fragile and likely headed for extinction. Unless...

Unless people choose to follow the path Rmy Marion has forged.

He loves you. He holds you dear to his heartfrom a certain distance, though sometimes he gets a little too close for your liking! His admiration for you is limitless, as is his fascination with you. But most of all, above all else, he respects you. I hope this fantastic book of his will open peoples eyes and help them to see who you truly are, so they can finally give you the love and respect you deserve.

LAMBERT WILSON

A magnificent female brown bear, fishing on Russias Kamchatka Peninsula

Bears are made of the same dust as we, and they breathe the same winds and drink of the same waters.

John Muir

IT MAY NOT surprise you that my fascination with wild life and my drive to travel the world and explore the great wide open are rooted in my childhood. As a young boy, I used to watch my father head out fishing every night. In the winter, he would don his heavy peacoat, woolen scarf, and navy blue cloth hat. After listening religiously to the shipping forecast on the radio, he would set off on an adventure to some unknown destination. Or thats the way it seemed to me. Utsire, Dogger, FitzRoy, Biscay, Dover, and Wight... the names of those places are still as fresh in my mind as the images of the fog, the fish, and the waves I conjured up. He never went that far, nowhere near those distant stormy seas, but the Baie de Seine, where the river that flows through Paris meets the English Channel, is far more treacherous than any open waters.

In the morning, after my father had returned, Id find live shrimp in a bowl or hermit crabs in a bucket that he had caught and brought back for me play with. These poor creatures, plucked so swiftly out of their element, told me tales of the tides, the currents, and the watery depths.

My childhood was a long voyage of discovery, spent searching for marine creatures and wandering the beaches of Honfleur alone. I didnt know it then, but these activities were laying the early foundations for my expeditions to the Far North. The ever-changing light in the Baie de Seine was a source of inspiration for the Impressionist painters, and it inspired me too. Having feasted my eyes on paintings by Marie Laurencin, Eugne Boudin, Claude Monet, Henri de Saint-Delis, and Andr Hambourg from a very young age, I developed a keen appetite for temperamental skies, clouds, and waves.