Selections from Survival: Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (1972)

You’d think that the view of Nature as Monster so prevalent in Canadian literature would generate, as the typical Canadian animal story, a whole series of hair-raising tales about people being gnawed by bears, gored to death by evil-eyed moose, and riddled with quills by vengeful porcupines. In fact this is not the case; fangs and claws are sprouted by mountains and icebergs, it’s true, but in stories about actual animals something much more peculiar happens, and it’s this really odd pattern I’d like to pursue in this chapter. In the course of the hunt I hope to demonstrate that