Camembear

Bear with me. 

This is translated from provincial Norman, handwritten by farmers, into modern English. It’s not a tale like the Canadian Winnie. Instead this bear had fur as brown as its heart was black, furious and jealous and maniacal about its boundaries deep in the heart of Normandy near the northern French coast.

The poor village then of Camembert found itself on the map only by way of its needing meagre tax administration after the bankruptcy of the Reign of Terror. Its one hundred people were kept in check outside of winter by this ravaging bear. When the children grew up, began to dream of, and then departed for the Paris they read about in the rare magazines that made their way down the dangerous one road in and out, they left indeed. In this way they lost a generation to this bear direct through violence and indirect by attrition.

When the grim bear first arrived the people offered him their very little food. They could see him coming from afar over the flat fields stretching south towards Le Mans in the distance. First, they gave the bear grains before the bear realised the village’s process of threshing wheat was something it could do for itself. This was years ago from this story when it was not a cub but it was younger. Now in its middle age, the weight of choice had caught up to it and its crisis was a new terror all over again gripping a barely-not-feudal part of old France.

Early on, a mayor newly elected on the promise of killing the bear fronted the situation personally. A war veteran with old links to the town, Guillaime was self-assured and he promised with blunderbuss and sword to destroy the monster and send it to hell where it belonged. Baiting the animal with fresh fruits and vegetables, presented as a platter in the courtyard in the centre of town where there was a well down into a reservoir deep in the earth that would become in time a statue to the defeat of the bear, he stood armed and waited. 

Over these fruits and vegetables they’d poured all the wine they had then. The liquid pooled at the bottom of the barrels they stored it all in. Guillaime bristled. The bear did not. The bear ate well while Guillaime waited behind the door of the church. When the bear sat, as it did, on its rump to gorge itself and began to slow down, the new mayor charged and roared and fired upon the animal. Primitive buckshot from the gun buried itself shallow in the bear’s thick flesh. Guillaime’s sword fell deep but at a bad angle. A man adept at killing men not monsters. He did some damage but not enough. And the bear returned with a single swipe that sliced Guillaime in two. He collapsed apart into the courtyard and he died what the villagers hoped was immediately. Then the bear ate his head.

Afterwards, when the bear had retreated as it did for the next three weeks into the forest, satisfied, no longer hungry, the townsfolk appealed to the King. They all signed, in blood and tears, a petition to hire a cannon they could hide inside the church and unleash upon the animal when it returned. They’d resigned themselves at least to one more feast and then, they hoped, they would be free. Instead, their plea to the Royal Army went ignored. An administrator somewhere in Versailles read their letter and compared the cost of the transport, the men, the food, the everything, to the tax the village had paid and found it would put the place in arrears for many years. That bureaucrat simply did not reply. Months later, many visits by the bear later, much fear and horror later, the Camembertians had resigned themselves to just waiting the monster out. It did not, that they could see in the forest or in its visits, mate. They would survive it if they could.

Instead the bear grew tired, the way we all do, of eating the same thing for every gluttonous meal. On its next visit it ripped apart right away the barrels provided for it and threw them upon the homes about the courtyard. It roared and ranted in its unpronounceable speech and it sniffed the air to find for the people misfortune upon it. The bear could smell something hidden, coffers unpilfered, food hidden away for safekeeping to keep the town afloat in the bear’s interim. Meals for children, for the infirm, something enough to give the town hope against the endless repetition of destruction and revenue for slights imagined and never given life. It smelled them on the breeze coming from beyond the church. Through the wooden doors. Made of stone not marble, not cheap but inexpensive, a favour from other parishes, a simple thing rectangular and single storey and beneath the rectory at its rear they’d kept enough for the winter. 

The bear was intent to tax what the King did not. The gathered surplus did not surface the bear ripping through the door to get inside, its rending of the pews, the bite through the edifice upon which sat the altar and the Holy Book itself, beyond which hid the priest inside the chamber, locked, that housed everything Camembert believed to be innate to God himself. Of course they would realise — like some would say many of us have now — that it was not at all. That God was the shared belief. The bear, the usurper, burst through the stone walls at the back of the altar. He crushed the priest Henri beneath the rubble and bit at what he could find as an entrée. It buried next through the stones to break through a hatch at the corner of the rectory beneath which the humble granary kept enough for the town to survive the cold. Instead of the season, it bought them three weeks. The bear burst then through the side of the church on its way out. Heavy and unsupported, it collapsed as the bear retreated from the town. With it came down the hearts of the people.

It was then, by the chance of birth elsewhere and the way life takes you places you never expect to go or even pass through, that towards Camembert marched Marie Harel. She had never fought or killed bears but she knew they, like the rest of us, enjoyed cheese. This she’d learned in studying beneath Bonvoust. The oncoming winter had set her on the circuitous road towards home for the first time in many years from a long absence on the many cattle farms blessed with more head than those on the Norman coast in the French north. She’d been intending to taste the salt air again, surround herself with the love of family, and with a refreshed clarity make up her mind about the future. The bear made for her that choice instead.

She came upon the village as the bear entered the forest and the people emerged into the rubble of the church where parts of Henri were left and still red drops of him dried on the road out towards the stone fence. She saw the fallen faces and broken hearts and the hopeless futures of the cursed folk. She saw in them her own mother and father. She saw in them herself if she’d not left. In terrified whispers the survivors filled her in one of the haunting of the village Camembert. The struggle against the bear for years now without reprieve and with a renewed bloodlust as the bear came of horrible age. Marie saw in the fields behind the town dairy cows, fattened and safe somehow, and she knew she could fight the bear with patience and a luring in and a plan that was, to those without faith, just seeing everything as a nail with her coagulated hammer.

Instead, she resolved to give the bear something new to taste. She had the village cheesemaker show her his process. It was not bad but it could be improved fast, she knew, despite protestations. As the village would find out — as she would buy on a mug from an Etsy store if she’d lived in the twenty-first century — she was often, if not always, right. This man made brie and it would be a good start. Before she’d departed Bonvoust she’d been working on her own amendments to a classic. She knew an easy way to reduce its fattiness which she thought the bear might like to know about given that priest Henri had been about the town’s largest. She worked at it with the cheesemaker and, just in time, had prepared wheels enough to fill a fresh barrel they placed in the courtyard as they saw the bear emerge from the treeline. 

They retreated then to shelter and but for Marie they hid. She watched instead unafraid from an open window, curtains drawn, sun bright but the day cool and her heart cooler. This was not for her a repeat. This was the changing of the guard. The bear scratched at the cask they’d presented. It looked about curious but not cautious. With the casual swipe of a paw the size of your chest it slashed through the wood and, in the process, filled the air with a fresh smell. Something new, something interesting, something over which it did not want to devour the rest of the people in town — as it had planned to do if it had come, again, to the same-old. Rather than a roar it grumbled for a lazy intimidation and sat itself down like you’ve seen in cartoons, beside what was left of the cask and it helped itself until it had eaten all the cheese and much of the barrel. As it did the people came then to the windows too, awed by the silence, by the passive beast, by too Marie standing and watching. 

She saw the bear eat it all. As she did she made, ever the scientist, notes. The bear, after hours, finally finished licking its claws and its paws and picking even its teeth with the iron from the casks, stood again and left the courtyard by way of the wornthrough stone fence. I had to double check this yesterday against the untranslated Norman. I remember reading it the first time but I was not certain. I should have been as certain as was Marie. She wrote that the bear, complacent for just long enough, its eyes filled with greed now and no longer even fury, had looked her right in her cold eyes as it left. She knew then it had embarked upon the first steps of a slope that would kill it in the end. Armed with purile rage it could be the prince of Camembert displacing the Dauphin as the royal animal. On a full, indulgent stomach it could not. She would provide.

Provide she did. The town swelled again with something like life, like hope, like purpose, as the useless terror of the bear began to give way to the idea that there was a way out. They would iterate upon this new brie to make a weapon. A treat first, a delight, a delicacy, evolving with each visit. She had three weeks between rendezvouses and she made them count. The three weeks after the bear’s first visit to what had become total cold war at Marie’s direction was fast and clinical and it went step-by-step, a recipe, delivering as required another barrel of cheese with a similar but distinct smell and flavour. What it did not have was an ingredient Marie had begun to prepare. It would take time to develop enough to have to hand. The weapon would not burst forth in black powder and red fire. 

How Marie knew all this about the thing, the way to clean it off your hands if you got some on you, what to do if ate even some, and the quantities of it that would kill a bear — calculated in reverse by extrapolating from the tolerance of a simple man — wasn’t something the town needed to know. Wanted to know. It was the best plan they’d had in years. The only plan. A carpenter with glory in his dreams began even between the bear’s visits to draw up new plans for the church. Not just restored but reborn like Christ and like, soon, Camembert.

The bear’s second visit was to plan. It ate well and it slumbered unafraid by the barrel after gorging itself. It did not this time destroy the barrel for which the blacksmith was thankful. He began afterwards to work on the first of the arms the village was, quietly, preparing to present Marie when she had succeeded. It had begun out there in the wild to get lazy. It had begun to rely upon its power over the people of the village. The Camembertian king crowned by splinters and blood and now, stuck in its teeth and really just wedged right in there where it wasn’t careful, cheese. Again it retreated from the town in a lethargy but a satisfied one and again it would return. This time, this last time and this first time for safe departures and for powerless trembling, Marie stepped outside of the home in which she was boarding. That home with the unbroken courtyard view and easy access to the road in and out of town, unused as they were. The bear did look at her now too. Marie looked at it. Eyes locked. And remarkably, I’ve translated from the chicken scratch of more than one surviving journal from that despondent Camembert, the bear looked away first.

It was a simple, satisfied, routine three weeks until the bear’s next visit. It came out of habit that third time more than out of curiosity. It returned to the woods after the second feast and it bashed around for three weeks because it was used to spending three weeks away. Time enough for the village to try to rebuild. Time enough for the bear to get bored, to get hungry again, and to return to something like, for it, a grocery store. A courtyard ripe with treats, with prizes, with power, with fear, and it came back with its shoulders tall and its feet flat and heavy. The way it always came: confident and striding. This time, this final third time, it found Marie Harel standing behind the well. Her arms were crossed and she faced the bear alone in the courtyard with reused barrel open atop, filled with wheels of the cheese he was about to make famous.

He grumbled at Marie as he crossed the pebbles of the stonework fence he’d worked through. She did not move. He growled as he stepped into the courtyard proper. She unfurled her arms. As he stepped up the barrel and he put a claw to the cheese atop it, he roared. It cowered the people at their windows watching with that renewed hope, refreshed zeal, suppressed again by brown fur and teeth and heft and a proven history. One last time. 

The roar cowered not Marie Harel. She knew how to pick fights and she had the foresight the bear lacked. Hers had been chosen already, decided already, placed already, scented and prepared with chemicals to discern it from the cheese with which she was most practiced, and it had been aged for three weeks while the bear waited and while the bear shat in the woods she’d poisoned this new curd with enough of the stuff to kill Hades. She retreated backwards from the well away from the barrel and she stood then in the weathered ruins of the doorway of the church. The bear stepped past the well towards her with a few heavy, long steps. But no further. Marie did not move. And the bear hungered this delicious invention, this unnatural aging, the thing he could not find in nature or in another town over if he finally changed his mind and decided to, like a mating partner had said to him once before in rough murmurings, “get out of here.”

Instead… He ate the cheese.

It was better, first, than last time. Richer, more full of flavour, and he was sure — at least, he would have been if he’d had the palate and the mind to be accurate — that it was the taste of the fat seeping through. He was glad then that he never killed the cows, tempting as they would. They would simply run and run. They would not persist here in a cursed home. He ate and he ate and he sat himself down on his rump to work through the rest of the barrel in the warm day, the cheese melting, scooping it out with his paw and licking it off with the same satisfied sounds we make over a dinner we will pay more than we’d like for. The bear would never have any idea of money. 

But he was discovering as the deadly cheese reacted with his stomach the idea of a price.