174OF HYBRIDITY AND THE HYBRIDIn late winter
I sometimes glimpse bits of steam
coming up from
some fault in the old snow
and bend close and see it is lung-colored
and put down my nose
and know
the chilly, enduring odor of bear.That the story the poem tells might be something that happens more
than once is contradicted by the end of the poem, in which the speaker
appears to have been dramatically altered by the experience the poem
describes. This disorienting of reader and speaker marks the cultural
otherness of the speaker, that he is in some sense foreign to the language
and form of the poem, and intensifies the transformation that his story
describes. The speaker’s hunting of the bear is ingenious and slow, rely-
ing on the hunter’s intelligence and patience. The bear (presumably a
polar bear, though it is also unidentified) is “stabbed twice from within”
by the wolf rib it has unwittingly eaten, and the hunter tracks the bear by
following and eating its bloody scat. After seven days of tracking the bear,
“living now on bear blood alone,” the hunter finally comes upon the dead
creature, eats a portion of “his thigh,” cuts the bear open “down his
whole length,” and wraps himself in the carcass for warmth and shel-
ter as he sleeps.
The full power and meaning of the poem come from the fact that the
story of the hunt is told twice, in the first four sections from the perspec-
tive of the hunter, and in the next two from the perspective of the bear
as seen by the hunter in a dream he has while asleep in the bear. Both
accounts are rooted in the physical details of each experience, giving a
sense of the hunt’s necessity and inevitability, even though the bear’s
account is framed as a dream. The human speaker must hunt, and the
bear must try to escape and yet die. The two accounts are thus radically
different—the human is the driving force of the hunt, and the bear has
little idea of what is happening except that it is bleeding from inside—
and yet they are also oddly similar, linked by the idea that the speaker