by Bruce Hunter
FRONTENAC HOUSE
2025/$24.95/320 pp.
As someone who grew up in Pincher Creek in the 1980s and Calgary in the 1990s, I found Bruce Hunter’s novel In the Bear’s House full of nostalgia: Red Rose tea and condensed milk; Coleman lanterns; Greyhound station coffee shops; the Lido Café, Cecil Hotel and Crown Surplus.
Originally published in 2009, Hunter’s wonderful novel, tracing the loves and travails of one Alberta family from the 1950s through the 1980s, has been released in a new edition by Frontenac House. The author of multiple poetry collections, Hunter has written an impressive and beautiful book, a poet’s book, full of rich language and stacked, metaphor-filled sentences, all without succumbing to florid and worn signifiers.
Trout (given name Will after the poet W.B. Yeats), who is called “water baby” by his mom, Clare, is born in 1952 into a Calgary caught between a wild-west past and postwar future. In this brief period, horse-drawn wagons and cars coexisted. His home in Ogden looks toward “the first farms on the edge of the city and behind them the raw bristle of brome, all that remained of the pale blonde prairie.”
By the time he reaches toddlerhood it’s clear Trout is hard-of-hearing, his deafness likely a result of medication given to cure a bout of pneumonia. Trout learns to manage his uniqueness, aided with cumbersome hearing aids and his best friend, Kenny, who helps him navigate the incessant schoolyard bullying. Without leaning too hard into the novel as biography, there are some close connections. Like Trout, Hunter himself was born and raised in Ogden and is deaf/hard-of-hearing.
Clare, the daughter of Scottish immigrants, falls in love as a teenager with Lowell, a young hood sent to jail (for reasons later revealed) while she’s pregnant with Trout, their first of many children. Clare keeps the growing family together, while Lowell, loving yet calloused by his prison experience, is away for long stretches working at the new gas plant in Pincher Creek.
The heart of the book and its best passages detail the year a 13-year-old Trout spends with his aunt Shelagh and uncle Jack deep in Kootenay country, west of Rocky Mountain House on the traditional land of the Stoney Nakoda. Here, Trout learns from his aunt and uncle how to live with the land and find humility among the Indigenous people there, and falls in love.
In the Bear’s House is a magical hybrid of Alberta history, adventure novel, coming-of-age tale and postcolonial history. It culminates in a curious, meta-like ending where we realize we’ve been reading about a writer becoming a writer, with Trout seeking to “find the sounds he couldn’t hear.” Hopefully this reissue will find readers who can hear those sounds too.
Bryn Evans is a writer and clinical social worker.
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