The Bear

Old Ben is the intelligent, powerful bear for which the story is named. Old Ben’s influence extends beyond his physical reach into mythical and psychological realms: “It [the bear] ran in [Isaac’s] knowledge before he ever saw it. It loomed and towered in his dreams before he even saw the unaxed woods where it left its crooked print” (183). One of a kind, the bear is described as “so long unwifed and childless as to have become its own ungendered progenitor” (199). To most of those affected by the bear, Old Ben represents a threat and a thief, a disturber of the peace and civilization as they strive to create it at the edge of the wilderness. Isaac and Sam, however, come to see Old Ben as an “anachronism indomitable and invincible out of an old dead time, a phantom, epitome and apotheosis of the old wild life” (183). Isaac’s respect for the bear deepens as he recognizes it to be “jealous and proud enough of liberty and freedom to see it threatened not with fear nor even alarm but almost with joy” (281). Old Ben therefore represents not only nature, but freedom and vitality. Although his death does not result in any immediate change to the forest, so powerful is his symbolic significance to Sam that Sam estimates the era of woodsmen like himself to be over—with good reason, as Isaac soon discovers.