Charlottetown on horseback gave him ”the alarming news that he had seen two young bears on the road that day”.814 Johnstone wrote in his journal that he slept little that night, since he would be travelling alone, and on foot, and with his only defence, his walking stick and his ”trust in Providence”. However, he survived the journey! — he wrote that he "passed all that solitary way without seeing anything to harm me”. Thus, almost two years later, he was able to include in his Letters a much more informed and objective

opinion of the danger from bears on the island:

Having mentioned that there are bears upon the Island, some will be ready to say we would not like to go to a country where these ferocious animals are; we might be torn to pieces. Well l can assure you that I never had the pleasure, or rather the alarm of seeing one of them alive, after all the solitary journies l made through the largest woods upon the Island, with no other instrument of self—defence but a walking staff. But the truth is, there are few of them yet in the woods, which are seen occasionally by the inhabitants. And now and then in certain solitary places in the woods, some of the black cattle and sheep are falling a prey to them . But I could never obtain positive evidence that one human being had ever been really killed by the bears upon the

1 Island. 8 5

This same contrast between the ’horrible imaginings’ and the actual reality is also evident in two extended retrospective ‘surveys’ carried out at almost the same time in the 18705: the first comprises ’bear stories’ collected from elderly residents by the Reverend Stephen Lawson that he incorporated into short histories of various settlements which he printed at intervals in The Presbyterian newspaper in 1877 and 1878.816 In these accounts, which, clearly, are written to entertain his readership, the “wild unbroken forest

. was inhabited by savage beasts”, with each of the stories being presented in almost folk-tale fashion, with a good deal of embellishment. Examples are the separate encounters that Mrs. Mclnnis of Belfast and Mrs. Gillis of Orwell had had with bears: both women lived in humble dwellings in the midst of the forest (one in a ”little cottage in the wild woods”); in both stories it is night, and for some reason the man of the house is away, leaving the women to fend for

8” Johnstone 1823 (p. 26, not extracted). This first journey

through the woods was on 5 July 1820, just over a month after his arrival on 26 May.

8‘5 Johnstone 1822.

816

[Lawson] 1877-1878.

122

themselves. The bears come out of the forest, and after giving the women a 'fearful’ time, either 'scamper’ into the "wild night-shaded forest” or 'hurry off’ to ”their home in the woods”. (We may contrast the more prosaic reaction of Mrs. McPhail, the ’Master’s Wife’, when as a girl she came upon a bear in the woods eating a sheep: ”she picked up a stick for her protection, and felt

quite safe”.817 8‘8

The other ’survey' presents a far less embellished picture than Lawson’s. It comprises the rather brief answers of fifteen elderly men responding to a question on bears contained in the history questionnaire circulated by the Historical Society in 1876: ”Were there bears 50 years ago, and were they dangerous?” Almost to a man the general consensus was that bears were ”not very dangerous” unless with their cubs. 8‘9

Even so, for people arriving from a country where their only encounter with a bear was likely to have been in a folk-tale, the presence in the early pioneer days of bears and other wild animals in the woods surrounding the log houses was a source of real anxiety; and the ready spreading about of ’bear stories’ such as those above would have served only to enhance the anxiety of anyone living on the edge of the woods. And, though I have not come across anyone who advocated the clearing of the forest as a method for bear control, it was evident to many that this was a desirable side—effect of the clearance of the island’s forests.

The difficulties and dangers of travel in the forest The forest made travel and communication difficult, especially in the early pioneer period before roads, or even blazed trails, had penetrated the interior of the island. Though the island’s hardwood forests were reported as easy to travel through, even on horseback”), special difficulties were presented by the wetter types of forest more prevalent in the east and west of the island (such

3” Macphail 1939.

8'8 Other examples of Lawson‘s embellishment are at Orwell: “Very frequently by night the settlers would be awakened by the squealing of pigs, the bellowing of cattle, and the cries of other domestic animals being killed by bears near their dwellings”; and at New London: “the heavy tramps of the brutes trotting around the little log homes would be heard by the inmates through the weary nights". It is the generality and frequency of such incidents that constitutes the exaggeration.

319 Questionnaire 1876.

820

See page 20.