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Overview
Benjamin Brooks tells Rand how his grandfather’s second wife explained the name of the Mooin, or Bear, family to which she belonged. An orphan with no settled home becomes lost while gathering berries and follows a light to what he perceives as a lodge. A woman and two boys welcome him. The narration identifies them as a female bear and two cubs, although the child continues to understand them as people. Through the winter the foster household feeds him stored meat and berries.
At the spring smelt run, a hunter notices a child’s footprints beside those of a bear and two cubs. Watching from concealment, he sees the boy talking with the cubs. The hunter understands the boy’s words but hears only ordinary bear sounds from his companions; the boy understands both. The bear catches fish and throws them onto the bank while the child helps drive the smelts toward her. This asymmetry of understanding is central to the encounter: the whole community is not said to share the child’s perception.
The villagers surround the fishing party and seize the boy. He bites and scratches, while the bear growls defiantly and withdraws without attacking or fleeing outright. They let her go unharmed. The child, whose body has begun to sprout small black hairs, later adjusts to village life and becomes the ancestor associated with the Bear family name. The narrative concerns a particular ancestral account; it does not characterize living descendants as bears or claim that the child completed a bodily transformation.
A separate addition, credited to Mrs. Jim Paul at Dartmouth on 10 May1870, calls the foster mother Mooinaskw. Before the boy leaves her den, she asks him to persuade hunters not to kill her. To distinguish the bears’ dwellings, she tells him to climb a tree and look for smoke: the largest smoke columns mark the homes of mothers cooking for their families. This addition supplies a conversation absent from the main rescue scene and is preserved with its own teller, rather than silently inserted into Brooks’s chronology.
Origins & earliest records
Rand XLIV credits Benjamin Brooks’s recollection of an explanation from his grandfather’s second wife, who belonged to the Bear family; her personal name and the date of that earlier conversation are not supplied. The addition is separately attributed to Mrs. Jim Paul, Dartmouth,10May1870. Both appear in the1894 Webster edition.
Records & interpretation
Complete XLIV, A Child Nourished by a Bear, pp.259–261, and Addition to the Bear Story,p.262. Historical oral-family attribution is preserved without claiming external verification of the narrated ancestry. No ordinary bear zoology is inferred from the speaking and domestic episodes.
Selected bibliography
Documented works and useful reading. This is not a list of every appearance.
- 01
Legends of the Micmacs
Complete XLIV259–261: Benjamin Brooks relays his grandfather’s second wife’s account; separate Addition,p.262: Mrs.Jim Paul,Dartmouth,10May1870.
Family, evolution & connections
The bear’s cubs and the child she nourishes — Rand XLIV
The complete main account, pp. 259–261; the separate addition on p. 262 names Mooinaskw.
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- She-bear; named Mooinaskw in the separate addition
- Her two unnamed cubs (bear offspring)
- Human orphan, later Mooin (nourished child; not biological offspring)
Two child-group branches distinguish stated cubs from a human child cared for in the den. The human branch denotes nourishment and shelter, not biological birth or a formal adoption ceremony. The main story is attributed through Benjamin Brooks to his grandfather’s second wife; the separate addition is attributed to Mrs. Jim Paul at Dartmouth, 10 May 1870. No birth parents or subsequent named descendants of the human child are supplied.
The unnamed human orphan later named Mooin
The she-bear shelters and feeds a lost human orphan throughout the winter alongside her two cubs. The boy later returns to human society and is said to found the Mooin family. This is the telling’s care and family-name explanation, not biological bear-to-human descent.
Her two unnamed bear cubs
The narrator identifies the two apparent boys in the den as the bear’s cubs. The human visitor initially mistakes their mother for a woman and them for boys; that perception does not supply human biological parentage or a separate transformed family.
Located primary passages
Specific passages supporting details in this entry, grouped by their published witness.
Legends of the Micmacs
New York and London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1894, Wellesley Philological Publications; Silas Tertius Rand’s English translations edited by Helen L. Webster. Preface dated November 1893 read completely; selected episodes independently read from retained original-volume OCR.
- The boy’s foster care by a bear is distinct from his later human family name and from the independently credited addition.
XLIV, A Child Nourished by a Bear, pp.259–261; separate Addition, p.262, both complete
English mediated historical witness; narrator-specific versions preserved. No original-language manuscript collation, literal ethnographic proof or adoption of collector’s colonial speculation. Separate additions and reconstructed endings are not silently merged.
References
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- Primary textRand1894 original collectionResearch access: 2026-10-05
Image credits
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