Pearly Everlasting
Pearly Everlasting Hazen is born in a cabin on Greenlaw Mountain in 1920, and grows up in remote logging camps, alongside a black bear she names Bruno (Brunnie), which her father rescued when abandoned as a newborn. As Brunnie grows to adulthood, greed inserts itself in the form of a cruel camp overseer who sells him to the Outside. Bereft without her brother, Pearly sets off to find him. Occasional logging-camp visitors Song-catcher and her companion, Ebony, collect stories and write articles about the remote mountain dwellers, and Pearly heads to their Smoke River home for help. Her short sojourn with them is poignant, heart-breaking and delightfully humorous. When Pearly feels it’s safe to find her way home again, her adventures with Brunnie prove more arduous and dangerous than she anticipated, as she is tested to the extreme. Brunnie is, after all, a bear!
Armstrong’s language is reminiscent of her poetic roots, yet highly colloquial, using unusual grammatical phrasing—‘dinnering out.’; ‘It queered things.’; ‘Howlish March and still storm-stayed.’; ‘mossed-up blowdown.’ —and unfamiliar words (shagamaw, wampus, wanigans, peavey, kinnikinnick). Snow? In March there are three kinds: Smelt, Robin and Grass. Many descriptive passages are understandably based on colour and weather, which plays such a vital role, and Armstrong’s skill at this is evident.
The story is based on an orphan bear suckled alongside a newborn human at a Maine lumber camp in 1903, and Armstrong’s eclectic cast opened their arms and lives to me in this barren, unforgiving world, introducing an uncomplaining, dirt-poor family eking out a living in Depression-era New Brunswick. This is a deeply felt tale about our connections with the natural world, in which kindness and mean-spiritedness walk side-by-side. Ultimately, a story of a courageous young woman, of hope, of family and belonging, written with obvious affection and tenderness.
