The Bear and Ragged Staff by Mary Foxx

There is a story told by Thespians in Warwickshire: there was a hidden grove in the country, a clearing where those with a thirst for blood would meet to satiate their wicked appetites. There was a Bear, born and raised in the country, free-roaming until the bloodthirsty ones caught her and pinned her in place in her adolescence.

“Would you like to learn a dance?” They asked, and chained her to an awful post – a dead Yew, knotty and unsightly from the severed limbs, thrust into the soil where living roots once ran. Bound in heavy iron fetters, there was no escape from her bondage, and thus constrained the men taught her their dance: they took from the numbers of their hounds the most expendable, the runts, the rabid, the wounded and the weak – but best of all the bitches past breeding age. All these dogs were no good for hunting with, but oh how the violent men especially loved to set the vicious bitches to biting the she-bear, to watch her bleed and struggle, turning this way and that around her awful post, tripping over her unyielding shackles, goading her to fury and aggression.

When the torment came to be too much to stand, the she-bear would crush the skull of a dog with one blow of her heavy paws, and the men would cheer! “atta boy! Crush ‘em, kill ‘em!”, and money would change hands from furious brow to wolfish grin, and blood fell thick upon the forest floor.

So to her post and this dance the she-bear was subject – the ragged and ruined pole binding her to the place of fangs and humiliation, trapping her in her part and role, of violence and destruction. So she danced, and entertained the bloodthirsty, and bore the wounds of the bitches the men set upon her, for weeks, for months, for years.

Then, one day, the men came to the clearing and what they saw filled them with instant horror, and revulsion. The staff, buried deep as it was, had been knocked over, snapped at the base, and the post shredded to splinters, furiously mutilated: the stump bleeding anbaric orange resin, red honey nectar oozing from the gashes. The she-bear and her chains were gone, and cold panic filled their hearts, and they fled in their ones out through the woods.

Each, in their turn, as they ran through the dark and deathly quiet woods, heard as their last sound before being devoured whole, the rough clanking of iron chains. And so, those Warwickshire Thespians say: that which you bind, will come back to bite.

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Mary Foxx is a fabulist, poet, and storyteller whose work draws on folk and familial traditions of storytelling as a way of resisting dominant modes of knowing, with a particular interest in the unregarded/disregarded knowledge of women and queer folk throughout history.

@maryfoxxwrites