Book Review: The Bears on Hemlock Mountain

Title: The Bears on Hemlock Mountain

Author: Alice Dalgliesh

Date: 1952

Publisher: Scribner

ISBN: none

Length: pages not numbered

Illustrations: black, white, and blue pictures by Anna Sewell

Quote: “There are no bears on Hemlock Mountain.”

Alice Dalgliesh explained this story as a local “tall tale.” If it’s based on anything that really happened, the happenings have been exaggerated in the proportion of the name of “Hemlock Mountain,” which is, as the story explains, not even a very big hill.

Young Jonathan’s elders told him all the bears in the vicinity had been made into steaks and rugs long ago. (Jonathan hoped there might still be bears.) Even if there were bears, they’d still be hibernating on the snowy day when Jonathan was told to walk across Hemlock Mountain alone and borrow an extra-large stew pot.

In the Appalachian Mountains, spring has always arrived in fits and starts that confuse everybody. It's not new, and not a reliable indicator of "global warming," that flowers sometimes bloom in the January thaw; it's not new, and not a reliable indicator of "the impending ice age," that frost can occur as late as the tenth of May. Bears wake up at some time in early spring, or during a thaw that may occur before the last heavy frost or even heavy snow. That’s when they’re most likely to be hungry enough to attack an eight-year-old human. Like most carnivores, bears usually prefer almost any other meat to humans...

Sure enough, Jonathan ends up thinking of a desperate, improbable way to avoid what he believes is danger.

This was not my favorite story by Alice Dalgliesh when I was growing up. I liked The Young Aunts, which has more words, fewer pictures, and more edifying stories like the one where the baby keeps crying because he’s been stung by a bee. My siblings, however, loved this picture book, because it’s short and funny and has bears in it. Suffice it to say that when we received some good but unwelcome advice about what others thought was likely to happen, all of us, and our parents, tended to recite: “There are no bears on Hemlock Mountain! No bears, no bears, no bears at all!”

Recent attention to “fake news” has caused some people to award themselves points for speed in spotting an unlikely story. My concern is that this is likely to mislead them. Many improbable things have happened, and do happen. The three worst weather disasters I’ve survived blew up out of nowhere and weren’t supposed to have happened. Neither of my parents was supposed to live long enough to be married, much less to be the active grandparents they enjoyed being. And—trigger warnings!—during the Gulf War people transferred from trains to buses or car pools in the parking lot, because of course nobody would be fool enough to attack the Pentagon! So I personally don’t like being the first to shout “It’s a lie.” There are some social and survival advantages, also, to forming a habit of assuming that most things people say are true in one way or another, and trying to work out what they’re true of.

After Hurricane Maria some Tweeps and I were “caught” by a claim later admitted to be fake news: “Trump proposed to bring hurricane victims from Puerto Rico to Florida, then hold their passports until they’ve paid the cost of the trip.” I’m not sure how many Tweeps seriously believed that Trump had seriously proposed that; I could imagine it as something someone might really have said during a brainstorming session. My immediate reaction was “That’s tacky.” Giving it a little further thought, I questioned: “They have passports?” Some Twits may think they’re “smarter” than I am, or than the other Twits who didn’t react automatically with “It’s a lie.” I don’t think so. My reaction to the serious proposal of regressing from letting poor people buy what they choose with food stamps back to sending them boxes of canned goods was also "That's tacky," and that one is being seriously considered by people who ought to remember how badly food handout programs worked in the 1960s.

So, with The Bears on Hemlock Mountain...“If a hungry bear intends to eat you, just pop a big stew pot over your head, and you’ll be safe”? Bzzzt. “If bears who have just eaten a whole deer, which you didn’t notice, look your way, just pop a big stew pot over your head, and the bears will wonder what this ridiculous-looking object might be, sniff at it, and go on about their business”? Stranger things have worked. Black bears are unpredictable, unless they’re hungry or rabid or afraid that you’re about to attack their young, in which case they are predictably deadly. Black bears can kill humans, but in most encounters they ignore humans. And what about, “If you’re out alone at night, and young, and scared, you just might mistake a big rock or stump for a bear”?

Laugh at this story by all means. Teach children that it’s not the kind of literal truth you want when you ask them what happened...but neither is it necessarily an outright lie.

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