The Island and the Bear

I frequently overhear Eleanor and Graham reading children’s books to the Clerk of Works, and normally I more or less ignore them as I’m more of a Tolstoy fan myself. But one the other day made my ears prick up. I soon realised that this was another one about a bear, and fearing a repeat of ‘We’re Gangin on a Bear Hunt’ (see earlier post) I listened carefully from a high shelf.

It soon transpired that this was in fact a rather touching story about a bear who washes up on a Scottish island and struggles at first to find food and friendship, but eventually finds understanding from a small girl who feeds him and helps reunite him with his friends. The story is very nicely written with rhyming verse and a rhythm to read aloud. The illustrations also add to the atmosphere, once you get past the fact that the bear is brown rather than black.

On the front cover it says that the book is based on a true story, which made me wonder if this was maybe a biographical account of my time on Barra a few years ago. Eleanor and Graham lived there for a while, and I decided to go too. Like the fictional island, the real one is a pretty barren place and while it is very beautiful it’s a difficult place for a bear to find enough to sustain himself. The story in the book is reasonably close to the truth, although being for children it is a slightly sanitised version where the bear doesn’t actually eat anybody.