Wild Faces Open Access

Abstract

Investigations of “the face of the animal” have emerged primarily from the work of philosophers Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida and their respective anecdotes about the semiferal internment camp dog Bobby and Derrida’s domestic cat. If the face is the site where ethics comes into play, how can an ethics be worked out that takes those creatures we denominate “animals” into account? For a species who communicates primarily through human languages, the face is the prime semiotic surface, but for animals who communicate with one another through what we term calls, howls, scent marks, posture, or gesture, “the face” may be dispersed more generally over the body. In a reading of several face-to-face encounters in Sid Marty’s books Switchbacks: True Stories from the Canadian Rockies and The Black Grizzly of Whiskey Creek, this article analyzes the specific differences between bear faces and bare faces, asking questions pertaining to nakedness, animality, speciation and identity, transspecies relationships, and knowledge. What might happen if philosophy were taken out of the Parisian bathroom and into the Canadian Rocky Mountains? If Derrida’s cat poses questions such as the above, then those posed and the rejoinders made by the bears accompanying Marty through the back country also deserve attention.

Introduction

Recent philosophical investigations of the face of the animal emerge primarily from the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, who in turn have drawn their insights from the lives of Bobby, an internment camp dog of Levinas’s acquaintance, and Derrida’s cat. If the face is the site where ethics comes into play, then how can we work out an ethics that takes those creatures we denominate animals into account? However, as Barbara Jane Davy notes, “discerning Levinas’s views on animals is complicated by the fact that when he is speaking of animality, it is usually the animality of humans to which he is referring.”¹ The face in Levinasian ethics functions as both a metaphor and a synecdoche for the body of the human Other. Levinas also uses the word faces as a verb in the sense that what matters is the Other who faces. In his usage, the face refers as much to bodily proximity and position as to the human visage. Matthew Calarco defines what Levinas means by the face as “an expressivity and vulnerability that calls my thought and egoism into question and that demands an alternative mode of relation.”²

However, if Levinas excludes the possibility that animals have faces,³ philosophers such as Derrida, multispecies studies scholars, and eco-theorists have productively extended his work on how the human face evokes an ethical response to moments of encounter with other-than-human species. For example, with respect to Derrida’s work on ethics and the animal, Calarco writes that “‘The question of the animal’ is thus a question deriving from a singular ‘animal,’ an animal whom I face and by whom I am faced and who calls my mode of existence into question.”⁴ Davy, Calarco, Derrida, and others concur that the face cannot be restricted to humans alone.

For a species such as ours, which communicates primarily through language, the face is the prime semiotic surface. As Paul Shepard writes, “Perhaps because our own personal consciousness seems to be in our heads, the head is widely regarded as the place of sentience, or of the spirit, and . . . the face is its primary aspect.”⁵ As members of “an eye-oriented and face-watching order of mammals,”⁶ we watch people speak “in a way that listening to the bugling of an elk or the call of an owl does not require.”⁷ However, the face is not just the manifestation or appearance of consciousness or spirit. It is, to use Shepard’s word, a “relic” of the ecologies in which a species has lived: “The ears, lips, teeth, and position of the eyes on the head reflect food habits. . . . The faces of animals are therefore a key to their ecology. . . . They condense information which is a clue to appearance, not only of themselves, but of the world in which they lived.”⁸ As relics, in other words, faces are fossils. The face is both the site of identity and the identity of the site where a creature and its ancestors have eaten and made their living. A face is both a map and a menu. To most contemporary humans, the seemingly unchanging faces of wild animals signify lack, an absence of intelligence, emotion, self-awareness, individuation, and indeed most of the traits we call ours.⁹ As such their faces make us uneasy and arouse deep suspicions: “Does the fixed visage of the animal signify a singularity, or does it hide its true state, like us who put on a happy face? How can we reconcile the masklike deception on the one hand and the tacit revelation of the face on the other?”¹⁰

However, for animals who communicate with one another through what we language beasts term, variously, calls, cries, chirps, roars, songs, and howls but also through scent, dance, gesture, and physical play, the face may be dispersed more generally over the body. Where are the boundaries of the face? Does the face end at the jawline, the base of the neck, the collarbone, the shoulders? Does a face include, in some circumstances, a tail? David B. Dillard-Wright invites us to “Consider also the expressiveness of a cat’s tail: like the human face, it is the ‘transparent envelope’ which reveals the attitudes of the animal.”¹¹ Can there be a generalized notion of the face, or is the face to some extent species specific? What are we to make of faces covered in fur? Does fur blur the borders of the face or even disqualify one from having a face? Does fur that extends over the face and the rest of the body as well confound Western culture’s mind-body split? Is it the fur itself or the continuity of fur that robs one of face or facedness? Are faces confined to the anterior half or three-quarters of the head, or does the notion of the face refer to a given animal’s sensorium? If the face is the site where ethics comes into play, the site where we work out an ethics that takes into account those creatures we denominate other-than-human animals, then it is essential to be able to locate the face and its whereabouts.

Most contemporary humans’ lack of experience with and concomitant inability to tell one wild animal from another restricts and conditions our general notion of the face.¹² Moreover, the extirpation and extinction of so many species worldwide also haunt the philosophical question of the animal. Of course, many wild animals are also generally disinclined to show their faces to humans: their ethic is such that most would rather not encounter us face-to-face. Levinas’s exemplar is a dog and Derrida’s a housecat: wild animals seldom seem to show their faces in philosophical debates over the question of the animal and animal ethics. To begin to address this aporia, I propose to engage the matter of the face of the animal by turning to two literary texts largely about bears.¹³

In full acknowledgment, then, but bracketing Levinas’s work for reasons sketched above, in this article I will analyze representations of the faces of black bears and grizzly bears in two works of literary nonfiction by Canadian environmental writer Sid Marty—Switchbacks: True Stories from the Canadian Rockies and The Black Grizzly of Whiskey Creek—in relation to Derrida’s influential essay “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” in which he muses on his cat having followed him into the bathroom and seen him step naked from the shower. Out of this interspecies encounter between Derrida and his cat flow many provocations about self-consciousness, shame, fear, nakedness, speciation, animality, identity, epistemology, and ontology, all of which arise in almost uncanny parallel in Marty’s texts. What can these masterful narratives by the former Rocky Mountain park warden teach us about how specifically wild faces inflect our relation to facedness?

While, as Davy states, “the properties of the face are irrelevant to the ethical relation,”¹⁴ does this extend to the faces of wild animals to whom we barely, if at all, concede face, and does it apply to the properties of fur, feathers, or scales? In juxtaposing Marty’s essays with that of Derrida, I will examine whether thinking about black bears and grizzly bears might provide a generous supplement to Derrida’s meditations on his cat’s perceptions. While I have no quarrel with Derrida or his essay, Donna Haraway does chastise him for the lost opportunity to “ask, even in principle, if a Gregory Bateson or Jane Goodall or Marc Bekoff or Barbara Smuts or many others have met the gaze of living, diverse animals and in response undone and redone themselves and their sciences.”¹⁵ Haraway finds his essay unsatisfying in these terms and takes him to task for being unable, in his philosophizing at least, to return the gaze of his cat—to look the cat in the face.¹⁶ While it would be fair to say that my setting up of a symmetrical inquiry into the question of the face of the animal in two of Marty’s texts has a very loose parallel in Haraway’s longing, my agenda here is instead to extend the scope of Derrida’s inquiry by analyzing texts about nondomestic, nonpet animals.¹⁷

Interspecies Encounters

In Switchbacks Marty outlines the complexities, difficulties, and stakes involved in reading the face of a bear. As he observes, bear faces are simultaneously legible and illegible surfaces to most human observers:

This passage attests to the fact that most humans cannot discern one wild animal from another. We tend to regard their faces as more or less indistinguishable masks, not mirrors, of their psyches. More pressingly, to get close enough to bears to try to distinguish individual faces would be an extremely foolish and potentially fatal maneuver.¹⁹

The added level of sensing necessary in such an encounter must include the tacit awareness that it is precisely the face—both the bear’s and one’s own—that is at stake. Facing a bear forces one to confront the facts that, first, bear semiosis is not confined to the face alone but includes sight, smell, sound, gesture, and motion and, second, that what one stands to lose in such an encounter is one’s face. In his essay “The Uncanny Goodness of Being Edible to Bears,” James Hatley writes:²⁰

In other words, in such a situation one stands to be radically de-faced by a bear. In the worst-case scenario, a human may even become bear flesh. She may herself become radically Other. Only by fully entering the moment—and relying on bears’ overall good nature and their ursine codes of etiquette—does one have a chance of leaving such an encounter unscathed, unscarred, corporeally intact, and human.

In juxtaposition with the well-known scene in Derrida’s bathroom in which, to use his word, his “pussycat”²² looks at him in his nakedness, several roughly analogous scenes of interspecies encounter occur in Switchbacks. One essay in particular, “Black Bears, Poem Bears,” about his work with black bears during his employment as a park ranger, unfolds as follows. Marty recounts coming home one day to the tin trailer where he and his wife Myrna were living in Jasper National Park, Alberta, and noticing that the rear door was ajar. Once he is standing inside, as he writes, “that’s when a matched set of black claws appeared over the edge of the white fridge door and Blackie stood up to peer at me in the dim light. . . . It is amazing, really, how wild and scary a mere black bear looks, standing on your kitchen floor while outlined against a home appliance.”²³ In this scene, markedly comparable to that of Derrida, naked, noticing his cat, perhaps outlined against a white porcelain bathtub, the warden’s first sight is not the eyes or face of the other animal but its long, dark claws draped over the edge of the open fridge door. Only secondarily does the bear show its face. The same bear that on the previous page Marty refers to offhandedly as such a familiar presence around the warden station “that I no longer took much notice”²⁴ of him provokes quite a different reaction when he encounters him inside the dwelling.

However, in this moment it is not only the distinctions and tensions between outside and inside, wild and domestic, bear territory and human territory that come instantly and powerfully to the fore. The white fridge door, which initially conceals and then partially reveals the figure to be not his wife unexpectedly returned from town, a hobo, or a hitchhiker—in fact not human at all but a bear—becomes a specular device. In a flash the door, insofar as it both obscures and then reveals the bear, becomes the very frame of representation. The refrigerator—signifier of human domesticity, the receptacle of human food and beverages, the raw versus the cooked, and the triumph of human technology over nature’s decomposition—becomes a representational screen for staging difference, especially that of speciation. Of course, the possibility of eating and drinking and living on versus being oneself eaten or at least scalped, seriously clawed, or bitten comes into rapid focus on that same screen along with the crucial difference between being outside versus inside of a bear.

As the scene unfolds, the situational ironies do nothing but compound. Marty discovers the bear inside precisely when he heads into the trailer to grab some old wieners to use as bait to entice the same bear into a culvert trap. The irony of that bear peering into and attempting to raid the fridge in which the stale wieners are languishing just moments before the warden arrives to collect them as bear bait is clear. Equally clear is the irony of using human food to attract and entrap a “problem” bear who is such because he has become habituated to humans and our food, all in the name of relocating and rewilding him. Given the strength and power of a bear and the extreme danger posed by an encounter between the two species within such close quarters, and given that the trailer is a metal one, the bear has effectively trapped the warden in a long, rounded metal structure more capacious than but not so very unlike a bear trap.

This bear already has a complex relationship with the trailer. For one thing he enjoys scratching on its surface at night right outside the Martys’ bedroom window. Second, prior to the accidental showdown at the fridge, Marty describes how in the summer luna moths would plaster themselves to the screen door, where mice would prey upon them, and one black bear “seemed to enjoy licking both mice and moths off the door screen, late of a summer evening.”²⁵ Drawn to the trailer by the insects that are attracted by the light and the rodents that are attracted by the insects, the bear eats both the insects and the rodents off the screen door, the purpose of which is to keep such unwanted creatures out. The door demarcates the boundary between outside and inside, bear country and human domicile, bear food and human food. However, as such the screen door is less than effective. Several varieties of mice invade the trailer, and the bear, possibly also enticed by aromas discernible to his acute senses despite the fridge door being closed, also trespasses into the space designated strictly for humans. Furthermore, given that the bear was visible in the trees when Marty drove into the warden station, he in turn had almost certainly seen Marty setting up the metal culvert trap. Not only had he probably watched the man going about his activities, he had circled around while the warden was preoccupied with that task—which included climbing into the trap to clean out previous bears’ feces and urine and maggots growing on old bait—to enter from the rear door of the trailer. While the park warden is inside the bear trap, the bear enters the humans’ abode and opens the fridge.

But this is not the end of this dramatic interspecies recognition scene. Once the bear stands up and its claws and then its face gradually appear on the other side of the fridge door, Marty makes the snap decision to exit the premises, posthaste: “Trouble was, Myrna had waxed the floor the day before: my cowboy boots spun out and down I went, expecting the bear to run over top of me.”²⁶ The arts of domesticity—not food preparation and cooking in this instance but good housekeeping—conspire to down the man, leaving him entirely at the bear’s mercy. Fortunately, however, the slippery floor and the bear’s own surprise at the turn of events combine to produce a sort of slapstick reaction on the bear’s part too:

The aluminum door—the second boundary and demarcation between bear and nonbear—is yanked off its hinges and travels as an ersatz necklace around the bear’s neck out into the bush. The door becomes temporarily a kind of bizarre picture frame or frame of representation around the spooked bear’s neck; the bear caught with its head in the forbidden fridge is “framed.” Fleeing the encounter scene, he becomes a portrait of himself, his own mugshot, as captured by the mechanism of the door. The bear finally frees himself and takes out his frustrations on the metal door by bending it around a tree, thus rendering it unsalvageable. In all of its contours this scene is a striking face-to-face encounter between species in which both parties seek to exit as quickly as possible in order to conceal their faces from one another and to save face in the gravest of all possible terms.

However, Marty’s storytelling prowess and in this scene his debt to the conventions of slapstick humor ought not to blind us to certain commonalities with Derrida’s cat story. It is important to note, for instance, that Marty distinguishes this particular bear from others in a way analogous to Derrida pointing out that the cat in question is not a generic, representative, or symbolic cat.²⁸ Marty’s reference to the bear as “Blackie” is simultaneously an act of naming and unnaming because immediately following this anecdote, he describes an encounter with another black bear whom he also dubs Blackie. Naming is always complex and potentially problematic. To refer to the bear as “the animal” or “the bear” is to essentialize. To choose a unique name for the bear would risk anthropomorphism, if not also anthropocentrism. By selecting the generic “Blackie,” a device that bestows a name, albeit not a unique name, Marty simultaneously denominates the bear as a member of a species (black bear) and unnames him. “Blackie” is a shifter, a name under erasure.

Reading the black bear in Marty’s kitchen in relation to the cat in Derrida’s bathroom might easily be perceived as an unusual, disrespectful, or even hyperbolic move, but it is strategically necessary in order to neutralize the widespread tendency, despite Derrida’s own repeated insistence in his essay that the cat is an actual and particular cat, to read her, or his encounter with her, as somehow exemplary. As he writes: “I must immediately make it clear, the cat I am talking about is a real cat, truly, believe me, a little cat. It isn’t the figure of a cat. It doesn’t silently enter the bedroom as an allegory for all the cats on the earth, the felines that traverse our myths and religions, literature and fables.”²⁹ Even while acknowledging Derrida’s insistence that his cat is a specific cat, our Western tendency to extract and abstract leads us almost inexorably to accord his encounter with her a nonspecific quality and, more problematically, to relapse into thinking solely in generalities about animals. While in my analysis here I risk appearing to equate or conflate the cat in the bathroom with the bear in the kitchen, my purpose rather is to demonstrate that Derrida’s account is, like Marty’s, a nonfiction story involving specific actors.

Bear Faces

But where, one might legitimately ask, is the element of nakedness, the male nudity in Marty’s encounter with Blackie? Where is the parallel with Derrida’s self-conscious nakedness in the light of the cat’s eyes? Where, to be blunt, are the naked male genitals in this scene? In addition to the mirror-effect of reading Derrida’s bathroom scene in juxtaposition with Marty’s kitchen tableau, in the anecdote of encounter immediately following this one but in the same chapter of Switchbacks, Marty describes an incident in which he, like Derrida, converges with an other-than-human animal while he is unclothed. The analogy is uncanny and pertinent to theorization of the face. The Miette River warden cabin at Jasper National Park had been built on a traditional bear trail,³⁰ and while the Martys lived there one particular bear declined to waver from his trajectory and, as he followed the “ancient pathway,”³¹ would simply walk up onto and down the cabin porch. The warden’s wash basin was directly in his way, and he would routinely take offense at this sign of human occupation on the ancient trail and “backhand it out into the meadow with a loud clatter and wake me up.”³² Marty records that just as the bear obstinately refused to deviate from his own path, he himself was too stubborn to move the basin to another spot. Instead, when the bear whanged the metal basin out into the meadow, Marty would routinely “rush out—stark naked, as a rule—yelling threats at Blackie, who retired to the meadow to watch my performance.”³³ In Marty’s depiction of this oft-repeated scene, however, there is no mention of self-consciousness, unease, or shame at being seen naked by the bear. The point of connection between Blackie and Marty seems to be one less of shared nakedness though than common bad temperament, stubbornness, cantankerousness, and indignation. Marty himself interprets their respective responses as follows: “A bear is like a wild man of the woods, his expression frozen from facing into solitude. You can’t tell when he’s laughing at you, but I wonder now if I wasn’t providing him with comic relief—or just a bit of company. . . . Maybe to Blackie, I was just a strange, naked bear whose den this was.”³⁴ Marty’s nakedness, however, does seem to connect the protagonist and antagonist in these recapitulated scenes. Running bare-assed out into the night and acting out his irritation at his interrupted sleep and his loneliness, isolated from his wife and infant son on work-imposed twenty-four-day shifts in the backcountry, Marty performs for the bear the spectacle of the offended and enraged human whose dwelling has been invaded, and for his part this bear performs the role of the bear offended and outraged at human occupation on bears’ traditional trails. Reflecting on their mutual reenactments of this scene, Marty figures the bear as a “wild man” and the wild man as “a strange, naked bear.” As a warden, Marty is the civilized man whose job is to manage the wildlife, and to do so he must go and live as solitary as a male bear in the backcountry. In Marty’s diction, from the bear’s point of view the “naked bear” is strangely naked not because he is unclothed but because he is unfurred.

This scene of Marty’s antic naked dance that the bear triggers over many nights certainly exceeds the exchange of a look or a stare.³⁵ It goes well beyond mere reaction or even clever rejoinder to a kind of corporeal dialogue or interspecific theater. Whereas Derrida’s contemplative reflection on his encounter emerges from his encounter with his cat in and beyond his bathroom, Marty’s running naked out into the dark, cavorting and swearing in the general direction of the bear who is watching him from his own safe distance, might also count as a form of attentiveness, one moreover that might take us beyond the metaphysics of the gaze to another rich form of engagement, albeit one in which traces of self-consciousness, fear, and shame are noticeably missing. Given that it is where the warden keeps his washbasin and performs his ablutions, the porch is effectively Marty’s bathroom and therefore in functional terms identical to the setting of Derrida’s own naked encounter with his housecat. While Marty’s naked riposte would not be regarded as mannerly by our customary terms of attentive engagement with humans or cats, it might be an appropriately embodied response to a bear. Obviously, tolerating bears traipsing across his porch and slurping moths and mice off his door, he goes quite a long way toward détente with bears. Nightly the bear summons the warden to parley, and Marty, his willing interlocutor, responds with vigor and enthusiasm.

Bare Faces

If, as bears can teach us, the face can be dispersed over the body and if, as Shepard advises us, the face extends outward to the surrounding ecology, and if the question of the animal derives from “an animal whom I face and by whom I am faced,”³⁶ then what happens if I am in the other-than-human animal’s territory and it comes to me and swipes its claws or snaps its jaws across my face and renders me thereafter unrecognizable, abjectly so? Marty’s subsequent nonfiction book The Black Grizzly of Whiskey Creek is a forensic reinvestigation of a series of bear attacks on humans within an eleven-day interval during the summer of 1980 and how the mystery as to which individual bear was responsible was compounded by the extreme difficulty attack-victims, witnesses, and wardens alike had in telling one bear from another, even across the two species of black bears (Ursus americanus) and grizzly or brown bears (Ursus arctos horribilis), a difficulty compounded by the idiosyncratic appearance of each of the two individual bears, one an anomalously black grizzly bear and the other an unusually large and unusually brown black bear. Marty writes: “Few wardens had ever seen a black grizzly in the park: some even denied they existed.”³⁷ In his book Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance, bear biologist Dr. Stephen Herrero describes how even differentiating between these two bear species can be confusing, let alone telling one individual from another.³⁸

Bears themselves have a complex relationship to faces or at least the eyes. Writing about what it might be like to be a grizzly bear, Marty states that for Sticky Mouth, as he calls him using the English translation of the Blackfoot alias for the grizzly, “No creature he meets on that trail is his peer; none can look him in the face without turning away to show their deference.”³⁹ Later in the text Marty elaborates on the power dynamic associated with bear faces:

Complicating such claims as that of John Berger that the animal cannot return our gaze is the fact that bears sometimes forcefully demand that we avert our gaze.⁴¹ Bears do not have to tolerate our stare and in one swipe of a paw or a single bite can remove forever our ability to look at them or anything else. When surprised or attacked or when they feel their food cache might be threatened, bears may attack the face, and due to their physical power when they do attack they sometimes remove a portion of the human face, often including at least one eye.

In one such event described in The Black Grizzly of Whiskey Creek, after a bear attacked Ernest Cohoe, “Most of his face was gone.”⁴² The dispatcher’s log recorded his injury as a “partial decapitation.”⁴³ Eventually wardens located the mauling scene, where they found “part of the victim’s face, including the nose and nine upper teeth, which had been removed with a part of the underlying bone.”⁴⁴ Marty describes the scene as follows: “This mask of tragedy lay there like a forgotten Halloween disguise, bitten off then abandoned by the bear, who if it saw even its own visage reflected in a pool might slash the offending water with a heavy, indignant paw.”⁴⁵ At the risk of gruesomeness, one might pause to ask parenthetically what the meaning is of a face that can be partially bitten off and left lying on a forest floor while its former possessor is in hospital intensive care an hour and a half away. What is the meaning of a precious face so violently detached from the rest of the body?⁴⁶

While one can only speculate about its significance to the maulings Marty investigates, it is worth briefly noting the detail that the black grizzly himself had a scar on his face. If, as seems likely in Marty’s estimation, the black grizzly was the same bear Herrero had trapped three years earlier in 1977, that bear had injured his face when he charged the trapdoor.⁴⁷ Herrero, writes Marty, “got a very good look at the bear after it charged out of the trap much faster than he anticipated and climbed part way up on the hood of his truck, and stared through the windshield into his eyes.”⁴⁸ Surely few more poignant examples of an animal not only entirely capable of returning but dramatically initiating and holding a human gaze could be found. If a bear can sever a face and even slash at its own reflection in water, then surely the face is a site of some power and importance for them too.

One of the most brilliant elements of his narrative technique is how Marty writes so convincingly as if from the individual bears’ points of view, thereby implicitly and metaphorically acknowledging their faces. In tracing the narrative’s events partly from the bears’ respective points of view, the reader not only witnesses events more completely but also gets a strong sense of the unique individuality of specific bears. While most of the text is written in third-person singular Homo sapiens, at chapter intervals Marty switches voice and narrates the same series of events as if from the point of view of the bear in question.⁴⁹ In the author’s note that prefaces the text, he addresses his choice to try “to tell part of the story from a bear’s point of view”:

One such passage details from the bear’s point of view the events leading to the aforementioned attack on Cohoe. In Marty’s forensic reconstruction of the sequence, the face and specifically the eyes and mouth play a crucial role:

Marty posits that the bear’s associational memory links the glint of the man’s eyes with the metallic shine of a gun (this bear had previously been shot and has memories of the resulting pain) and the metal garbage bins in which tasty restaurant scraps were tossed. Once he makes those connections (eyes, metal, pain, fraught access to food) the bear attacks Cohoe’s face. Similarly, Marty’s rendition of Sticky Mouth’s view of his attack on the two Swiss tourists reads as follows: the bear “remembers their eyes, their strange light. Stop it. When they stare at him and there is no place to go. Stop it. Attack.”⁵²

Of course, if a bear swats the ground, bares the teeth, bluff-charges, charges, strikes, or bites a human, the bear may or may not be reacting to the person as a human per se. After all, it is we, not they, whose thinking is caught up in our Linnaean species taxonomies. Perhaps for bears, as for Levinas in Calarco’s elucidation, “The human . . . is an ethical concept rather than a species concept.”⁵³ While bears may not share our taxonomic table, they may have taxonomies of their own. For example, in Sticky Mouth’s point of view following the attack upon a drifter whom Marty refers to as Joe Dodge, Marty encapsulates the way a bear might waver in or doubt his or her own system of classifications. As Dodge lies in a shallow backwater pool of Forty Mile Creek, in the bear’s mind:

As Sticky Mouth runs through his taxonomic system—prey/not prey, fish/not fish, unclassifiable, food/not food, food/not yet food—and his appropriate response, it is the eyes that, in Marty’s portrayal of the bear’s thinking, perturb him. While their faces may seem to us immobile and inexpressive, for bears too the face does seem to be a site where power relations and hierarchies are contested, maintained, or demolished.⁵⁵

But for bears such as the black bear known as B054 and the grizzly bear, Sticky Mouth, the whole landscape is essentially their face. Not only are bears dominant within their habitat but their territory is their face; their faces are their territory. When a Banff National Park bear is tranquilized and relocated far away from his or her home range, he or she often returns within a short time period (on average, within seventy-two hours).⁵⁶ The bear comes back partly for the rich protein and succulent fat of accessible human food sources and its familiar berry patches but also, I venture to say, because the home territory is its face. While we tend to think of an animal’s range in terms of coordinates on a map or land as surveyed from a plane, a bear’s intimate knowledge of the terrain may be so detailed, comprehensive, and sensuous as to constitute or be commensurate with its sense of itself. From bears’ intricate geographical knowledge, abetted by their almost unimaginably acute olfactory sense, a bear’s territory and its sense of itself are metonymically and inextricably linked. When Shepard states that faces are relics of ecologies he is referring to paleontological research, but during the life of an individual bear its intimately known spaces and places also function as its face—as, that is, its sense of its own being and aliveness in relation to the world.

In conclusion, The Black Grizzly of Whiskey Creek begins with Stoney elders John and Nora Stevens’s statement that “the earth is the bear’s ear,”⁵⁷ and I have argued here that we might speculate along comparable lines that the earth is the bear’s face. Indeed this literary nonfiction text could be read, variously, as a natural history narrative, a story of Rocky Mountain ecology, a history of parks management, a forensic mystery, an ursine whodunit, a bear biography, maybe even a ghostwritten bear autobiography, or as a study of the differences between two very different kinds of faces—the human and the other-than-human, the bare face and the bear face—and the troubles that can erupt when those faces unexpectedly meet. Writing alternately in third-person limited Homo sapiens and third-person limited ursus and with a lifetime’s experiential, hands-on knowledge of natural history, bear biology and lore, and Indigenous knowledge such as that of the Stoney people, Sid Marty attempts to inhabit each of these strange faces. In doing so his text illuminates that Homo sapiens is a very narrowly limited narratorial point of view, that faces are not merely outward manifestations of a hidden inner identity, that faces reflect food habits—where, what, and sometimes whom we eat, and that faces are places. The bear’s face is both habitat, in the scientific sense of the term, and inhabitation.

The front jacket cover of the hardcover edition of The Black Grizzly of Whiskey Creek features an extreme photographic closeup of the face of a bear. However, the book ends, tragically, not with Sticky Mouth’s face but with his beheaded, furred hide, skinned and displayed in a tourist museum in Banff, Alberta. Sticky Mouth lives on only as an abject remainder and melancholy partial reminder of himself and his story. As Marty writes: “I have a picture of him taken in death, looking forlorn and beaten, betrayed by his own appetite for flesh, by his overpowering need to fatten for winter hibernation. It is as if he demands that I answer a very simple question: ‘Why?’”⁵⁸The Black Grizzly of Whiskey Creek and the pertinent essays in Switchbacks are Marty’s attempts not so much to speak for as to Sticky Mouth and the other bears, to address their importunate question and to revivify with vibrant metaphorical flesh their stories.

While we owe significant debts to Levinas’s Bobby, the semiferal concentration camp dog, and to Derrida’s Parisian housecat for their importance in the development of the ethics of the face, as I have argued Sticky Mouth, Bear 054, and other wild North American animals can and ought to be productively factored into our theorizing as well. Not only is an ethics without animals unnecessarily abridged; an ethics without wild animals is severely truncated. If we are going to live on during the Sixth Great Extinction, we need a philosophy open to the wild faces of those who live or attempt to live largely beyond the human pale, practice their own forms of inhabitation, and try to avoid encountering the bare faces of those of us who have repressed the old accords.

Notes

References