This story was a primary complaint of most of the reviews I read about the Polar Horrors collection, however, I adored it. As a great fan of an unpleasant protagonist, I found the bald moral self-assurance of the narrator set against his behaviour viciously entertaining.

The 1939 film ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ starring Basil Rathbone is set on a Dartmoor so bizarre it is my belief they did not use even one (1) accurate visual reference of the landscape. So, too, this Arctic survival story set in 1764. Much like the 1939 film (and a Dartmoor that is both the moon, but also the Acropolis) I consider this tenuous polar experience one of the story’s charms.

The narrator has been drunk for a month at the point at which he first meets a bear – whom he takes, at first, for a naked woman, “I was sure I saw her bare feet and toes and from her form, she appeared altogether without clothes.” He kills the bear, and is devastated to find “milk in her dugs”, but what can be done? He carves it up for meat and skin, after all, he is in a survival story. Lo, a starving, whimpering bear cub appears, bleating with joy to find its mother’s skin.

He names his cub Nancy, after the only girl he ever loved. Nancy changes his life. She sleeps in his cabin, and he raises her with much affection. She proves to be a great companion and resource for him. However, when he is taken in by a “colony of Norwegians”, he is delighted to be with females of his own species again, and thinks “some of the young ones the most bewitching creatures in the world.” Nancy’s jealousy of his new woman(s) is untenable, and so on to the disturbing ending, where the bear’s behaviour is the least of the savagery in this chilly rendering of eighteenth-century imperialism and misogyny.

Published in Tales and Sketches, Volume I, Blackie and Sons, 1837. Collected in Polar Horrors: Strange Tales from the World’s Ends, British Library, 2022