Bears Are Bad News / Literature

"The thing about a bear," his father had always said, "is that it can move as silently as breath. It could be watching you from ten paces away and you'd never know. Against a bear you have no defenses. You can't run faster. You can't climb higher. You can't fight it on your own. All you can do is learn its ways, and try to persuade it that you're neither threat nor prey."

— Wolf Brother

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• Above the Timberline: With the world in the middle of an intense ice age, polar bears are one of the greatest threats to explorers. Wesley mentions that his military academy offers a course on surviving encounters with the beasts. He later befriends a pack of intelligent polar bears, but it's ultimately one of these bears that kills the villainous Wilkes by shoving him off a ledge.
• The Adventures of Strong Vanya: Grand Duke Dimitri keeps three wild, hungry Siberian bears in a pen behind the palace's gates to deal with unwanted visitors. It is said that whoever gets to deal with them will not need a coffin afterwards.
• All American Pups: In the first book, Claude Coyote leaves the pups alone and runs when he thinks he hears a bear, and Jake is worried about having to deal with it. Turns out, the bear noises were only Fritz's hoarse barking.

• Angela Nicely: Discussed in “The Tidiest Tent!”, when Angela, Laura, and Maisie are camping and hear noises and they worry that it’s a bear.
• Animorphs: Rachel's favored combat morph is a male grizzly bear. She acquired it specifically because she knew the team was taking on their most dangerous mission yet. The characters also consider their polar bear morphs (biggest land predator, to Rachel's outrage until she acquired one) to the baddest of their badass. They only bust them out for serious shock value and mayhem (and a polar bear-morphed Controller killed Rachel). A boy named Julio later also takes a grizzly bear as his battle morph. Rachel is a bit offended about that.
• Bard: In "Fugitives in Winter", Felimid tricks the enraged king hunting him into following a false trail into a bear cave. He wasn't expecting the inhabitant to be a two-headed monster that refused to stop at killing just the king, though...
• The Bear Kingdom takes place in an world where Humans Are Not the Dominant Species and bears have taken over, and humans are nothing more than slaves, pets, and sometimes food.
• The Belgariad: Males of a certain family possess the power to spontaneously become bears when the Rivan King is threatened. Given that they're already from the local Viking analogue, this just makes them more dangerous. Fittingly, they're from a culture that worships Belar, the bear god. It's not certain whether this is just a happy coincidence or a very direct blessing from Belar himself, but it is definitely awesome. There is also an extremist sect devoted to Belar known as the Bear-Cult. In the Belgariad they're a mild annoyance, but in the Mallorean they definitely make things worse. Belar, meanwhile, generally appears as a young blond-haired warrior, and not a bear.
• The Bloody Road To Death: Rasputin, a former circus bear which can drink beer and throw hand grenades, is adopted by the 27th Penal Panzer Regiment. Porta is distraught when it gets killed in action. This, by the way, is based on fact (though the bear is fighting on the wrong side).
• Borne: The ruined city is ruled by Mord, a three-story tall biotech bear who can fly, and who is served by an army of nonflying, normal-size "Mord proxies" with superspeed and enhanced senses.
• In the Cambridge Latin Course series of plot-oriented textbooks, a bitter British chieftain attempts to kill his rival chieftain with a bear he has spent a year training for murder. The bear breaks free of control and goes on a rampage, nearly killing the king. The rampage is stopped by Quintus, who has a penchant for heroic animal abuse. Nobody ever said it made sense.
• The Chronicles of Ancient Darkness: The first book has a giant, evil, demon-possessed bear that exists to kill things. If you suddenly can't see or hear any other animals, start praying.
• Colonization: The Ursoids ('bear-like') are one of the alien powers bordering human space. They never get a day in the limelight, but they're variously described as expansionist and willing to bash your brains in if they think you've gone back on a deal.
• Combat Team: The wildlife is so dangerous that the only way people can survive on the planet is with the help of domesticated mutant Kodiak bears.
• Crabbe: Franklin Crabbe runs afowl of a bear while out in the woods. He manages to survive the encounter by making himself as small as possible, causing the bear to just bat him around a bit before losing interest.
• The Dresden Files:
  • Death Masks: the Denarians are first introduced. The first of them? Ursiel, a monstrous demonic bear rampaging through the alleys. It takes all three Knights of the Cross to take him down. Compare later battles where the Knights go one-on-one with the Nickelheads, or when Ivy takes on a large group singlehandedly. Some Tropers have blamed Conservation of Ninjutsu... but good grief, it's a bear!!
  • Turn Coat: they threw fireballs at the naagloshii, they threw lightning bolts, werewolves, vampires, heavy arms fire, the fires of creation that angels use. Nothing worked. What kicks its ass? Someone turned into a bear. A bear the size of a minibus.
• Fighting Fantasy: If you meet a bear in a gamebook, it's likely going to attack you.
• The Fox and the Hound: A bear tries to attack the hunter, but Chief saves him. This is one of the few aspects of the book that are actually somewhat carried over into the Disney movie, albeit at the climax of the story instead of towards the beginning as in the novel. The Disney film avoids the Groin Attack the dog gives the bear, as well.
• The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon: A little girl lost for weeks in the forest is bad enough. This is also the Appalachians.
• His Dark Materials has panserbjorne, sapient polar bears with opposable thumbs who forge suits of plate armor from meteoric iron. The name means "armored bears", but colloquially could be taken as "tank bears".
  • In The Movie, they are called "Isbjorne", meaning "ice bears" or polar bears. Not as intimidating, but you do not want to run into a polar bear anywhere.
  • They are morally neutral, with their current king Iorek Byrnisson as a friend to the protagonists. Nonetheless, one should pity the ones that are enemies to the bears. Besides being giant polar bears in sky iron armor that can think and talk like humans, the panserbjorne have flamethrowers. Armored Polar Bear Vikings with Flamethrowers.
• Hoka: The aliens look like teddy bears, but they are indeed a menace. To your sanity, at least.
• Subverted in the first book of ''The Other'' : Natan spots a bear in the woods but avoids being attacked by just going around the bear's territory… then later purposefully runs into it, while chased by a lycanthrope, to goad it into attacking the bear. The Lycanthrope gets torn to shreds while Natan escapes unscathed.
• Early in Hollow Kingdom (2019), S.T. and Dennis run into a grizzly bear with three cubs that have taken up residence in a library. The mother bear injures Dennis and is only driven off by the actions of the neighborhood murder of crows.
• Hunted A True Story Of Survival: A literal Mama Bear goes after the writer for killing her cub and it only ends when the writer manages to crush the bear under tons of ice. The kicker? It's supposed to be based on a "true story"
• I Want My Hat Back: In this children's book, Rabbit steals Bear's hat. This ends very badly for Rabbit.
• Inheritance Cycle: Urzhad are cave bears native to the Beor mountains, which can grow to the size of a house and are stated to be dangerous foes even for dragons.
• Joe Pickett: A subplot in Trophy Hunt concerns a rogue grizzly that has wandered far out of its usual range and is wreaking havoc in Joe's bailiwick. Joe is rightful very worried about the idea of having to track the bear down and confront it.
• Judge Dee: In The Haunted Monastery, the judge, faced with a villain whose reputation and connections at the Imperial Court make him untouchable by the law, locks him in a room with an angry bear.
• A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear is a nonfiction book that catalogs the troubles faced by the town of Grafton, New Hampshire due to bears driven hungry by drought and lacking an aversion to human contact, due to some residents ignoring regulations prohibiting feeding of bears. The bears damage property and even harm livestock.
• Line of Delirium has the Bulrathi, a race of huge ursine Proud Warrior Race Guys, who are obsessed with melee combat despite almost everyone else using all manner of ranged energy weapons. During the Vague War, the Bulrathi would often interrogate captured humans, then hit them in the liver and send them home. After a few days, the person would die. In a quirk of evolution, Bulrathi speak with falsetto voices. On the other hand, they make excellent tenors, but good luck trying to watch a Bulrathi performance without bursting into laughter (unless you're afraid of having your head torn off). True to their nature, the Bulrathi even managed to use their voice as a weapon, specifically against the Silicoids, who use focused EM fields to move, communicate, and attack. The high-frequency sound emitted by Bulrathi warriors resonates with the Silicoid EM-emitting organ, requiring a single punch to disable it. One of the few Bulrathi featured in the series has become a Combat Pragmatist since the war, though. He never goes anywhere without his blaster and will take hostages if necessary, only engaging in honorable combat if he's sure he has the advantage.
• Mad Amos Malone: In one story, Amos takes a British Great White Hunter out hunting for jackalopes, because the man is looking to bag an animal he's never gotten before. Unfortunately, they run afoul of a flock of the jackalope's primary predator, the owlwolf, and have to retreat into a nearby cave. Then the owlwolves suddenly retreat, and it's not because of the two hunters and their guns, it's because they've woken up the cave's owner, a grizzephant, which is a bear the size of a woolly mammoth.
• Maerchenmond: Zigzagged. Kelhim is a huge bear who is a feared fighter, but actually has a soft heart and a friendly personality. He is a talking animal, and one of the hero's best friends. He also helps him to fight the armies of evil. In the second volume, magic disappears from this world, and Kelhim transforms into a raging beast that chases not just animals, but humans as well. In his cave are numerous skeletons. The hero does not know this when he visits Kelhims cave, and is attacked by him immediately. Kelhim is eventually killed by an android, but soon returns to the one he was before.
• Monster Hunter International: In Monster Hunter Vendetta, the MHI compound is attacked by an army of zombie animals, including at least one zombie bear that Owen and Agent Franks have to kill at close range.
• In Navigating Early, a large black bear has been menacing hikers along the Appalachian Trail. It even ripped out one would-be bounty collector's eye. When Jack and Early find the bear, it mauls a man to death in front of them.
• Nightfall (Series): Myra, Tristan, and Prince Vladimir encounter one during Myra's first hunt. It leads to one of the most tense action sequences in the first book.
• Old Yeller has the title dog saving his humans from an angry mother bear after the youngest kid tried befriending a bear cub.
• Paddington Bear: Played with. Paddington is on the whole a very polite, friendly, courteous and helpful sort of bear. However, having recently made his way to London from Darkest Peru, his lack of understanding of both human and English cultural mores can result in him causing plenty of trouble for the people around him unintentionally. Downplayed, since Paddington is not a vicious bear and so the trouble he causes tends to be more along the lines of "social faux pas and clumsiness-induced inconvenience".
• Prince Caspian: Lucy is attacked by a non-talking bear when traveling to meet the Narnian army. It serves as a warning that Narnia as a whole is not the nice place they were once rulers of.
• Prospero's Daughter: Logistilla's bear is her guard, and it menaces some of her family on occasion.
• Quest for Fire: The protagonists are terrified of bears, particularly the "grey bear" (probably Ursus arctos). They even regard their enemy Cannibal Tribe as descendants of the bear. Even the herbivorous cave bear can be nasty when provoked by starvation or sheer anger.
• Reverend Huuskonens Beastly Manservant: Zig-Zagging Trope. Subverted in that the titular reverend adopts a bear cub, then a complicated series of events leads to him taking a grand tour or Eastern Europe all the way down to the Black Sea, training the bear to be an excellent manservant (unpacking suitcases, ironing and folding clothes, helping him during the sermons and running a bar with unrivalled efficiency). Played straight in that the bear's name is Beelzebub, and if you should threaten his master, he is still very much an adult male brown bear.
• Roys Bedoys: In “Don’t Feed the Wildlife, Roys Bedoys!”, a grizzly bear shows up, scaring all of the kids.
• Rudyard Kipling:
  • "The Truce of the Bear" in which a blind Indian beggar explains to hunters why they should not pay attention when they have a bear cornered and it stands on its hind legs and seems to beg for mercy. The flesh of his face is withered "like slag in the furnace" because of a blow from "Adam-zad, the Bear that walks like a Man".
    • Which Kipling explicitly said was to be a deliberate political warning: Don't Trust Russia! (He wrote it in 1898, and meant Czarist Russia.)
  • There's also a couple of lines from another famous poem of his:
    But the she-bear thus accosted rends the peasant tooth and nail
    For the female of the species is More Deadly Than the Male.
• Sacrament: The main character is mauled by a bear and ends up in a coma.

• Seven Brothers: Inverted. The Hunter Trapper brothers are bad news for bears, although they know to treat this game with respect. Their father, too, killed over fifty bears during his lifetime, and when he was finally killed by one himself, it was a Mutual Kill.
• Shardik features a bear which is believed to personify the power of God. Whether or not this is true, the bear only ever seems to maul the bad guys.
• Small Game mentions a mother bear and cub early on, but the survivors know enough to stay out of its way. When one of them later stumbles into the path between the mother and cub it's an Oh, Crap! moment with lethal results.
• Snuffles, a novella by R. A. Lafferty, initially subverts this. Snuffles is an somewhat intelligent alien creature that resembles a bear and is very friendly until the second chapter where it's played straight, then taken to extremes.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • When the wights attack The Fist in A Storm of Swords, they have a reanimated undead bear in tow. Cue pants pissing. Also the famous scene in which Brienne the Beauty is dropped into a pit with a bear that's angry, starved, and has been trained to kill and devour men. Her only weapons? A blunted sword and a lacy pink dress. She holds her own until The Cavalry arrives.
  • In A Clash of Kings, the loathsome Amory Lorch is thrown unarmed and naked into the aforementioned bear pit. He dies horribly.
  • The bear is also the totem for the Northern House Mormont, a House which boasts a Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, as well as Daenerys Targaryen's former right-hand man, who killed at least two Dothraki warriors in combat..and that's just what happened "on-screen". They're also one of the two houses that still openly swear fealty to the King in the North (the other, House Reed, has a "lizard-lion" as their official animal). House Mormont's women are also warriors because they had to protect their children and lands from raiders while the men where elsewhere — it is, in fact, a point of family pride that if you even think of harming their holdings or the kiddies, Mormont lasses will quite professionally go all Mama Bear on you. Many are even rumoured to have slept with bears (which handily dodges questions about paternity).
• Spellsinger: Bears are among the most physically-formidable of all Warmlanders. Several of the bad guys use bears as Mooks, or recruit a bear as The Dragon. In one book a bear warlord gets zapped to our world into a group of non-anthropomorphic bears. When he tries to take charge of them, they promptly maul him to death.
• Holo of Spice and Wolf finds out that her hometown was destroyed by a gigantic bear spirit.
• Star Risk, Ltd.: Grok is a nonhuman whose species strongly resembles bears. And he's not above using the resemblance to his advantage.
• Survivor Dogs:
  • Bears are called "giantfurs". They're scary enough to make Alpha terrified. According to him, even wolves fear bears.
  • Subverted with the first bear depicted. A black bear appears when Daisy and the Fierce Dog pups are on a test in the mountains. It's large and frightening, but it isn't remotely interested in the dogs. It's looking for honey in a nearby tree. Everything goes south when Grunt tries to attack the bear, causing it to get angry.
• The Terror: The infamous real-life Franklin expedition run afoul of an Inuit spirit called Tuunbaq, which takes the form of a gigantic polar bear with a long writhing neck. The men assume it to be a normal polar bear until it starts killing them and butchering their bodies (including their commander, Sir John) in ways a bit too intelligent for a normal animal. For example, it takes two crewmen, cuts them in half, and then places the upper part of one man onto the lower part of the other. Oh, and it also sucks out their souls.
• Three Dark Crowns: Arsinoe tries to get a bear familiar with low magic. The first one is some kind of undead abomination that nearly kills her. The second one is controlled by her The Beast Master foster sister and best friend Jules. Jules loses control of the bear right smack in the middle of a celebration, causing several deaths and nearly killing one of Arsinoe's sisters, Mirabella.
• Tolkien's Legendarium:
  • The Hobbit: The protagonists stay in the home of Beorn on their journey, and are warned not to go outside at night. The reason? He turns into a bear. Even worse is his appearance at the Battle of Five Armies. "He came alone, and in bear's shape, and seemed to have grown almost to giant-size in his wrath." He charges through the entire Goblin army to retrieve Thorin's body, then does it again to chase down and kill Bolg, the Goblin Chieftain.
  • The Lord of the Rings: However, unusually, Beorn and his descendants are good folks. They are also the prototypes for D&D werebears, whose alignment is lawful good.
• The Traitor Son Cycle: One of the species of Wild creatures (the local Fair Folk) are golden bears, which are giant, intelligent, capable of speech and absolutely capable of wielding weapons.
  • In the first book, when a golden bear breaks out of captivity with her young, she slaughters an entire village that trapped her and proceeds to utterly destroy everyone chasing after her until she dies of the accumulated wounds.
  • Inverted in book three, when John Crayford and his company are rescued from certain death by a pack of golden bears.
• Valentine And Oursson: An abandoned boy is raised by a bear, and ends up a Wild Man of the Woods.
• The Waste Lands: The group has to fight a giant zombie cyborg bear god named "Shardik" in reference to the Richard Adams novel about a similar creature.
• Were Going On A Bear Hunt: When the father and children encounter a bear inside a "narrow, gloomy cave", they run for their lives and retrace their steps.
• The Wild Boy: The Lindauzi are an alien race that covertly killed millions of humans with a virus, then appeared with a cure for anyone who would live with them. And those who did were bred and kept like humans do dogs. Guess what they look like.
• Wilder Girls: On Hetty's first trip on the Boat Shift, the team encounters a bear but they manage to avoid engaging it. Later, a bear infected with the Tox invades the school grounds and does get into the building.
• The Winternight Trilogy: The Big Bad of the first book, The Bear And The Nightengale, is an ancient proto-slavic deity named Medved, who frequently takes the form of a monstrous, one-eyed bear. This is explained by Medved's brother as being an Invoked Trope: Medved is an Anthropomorphic Personification of fear; specifically, he's the fear of death. To the ancient Slavs who first settled the region that would become modern-day Russia, there was nothing scarier or deadlier than an angry bear. So, that's what Medved became.
• World of the Five Gods: In Paladin of Souls, a bear shows up, Foix dy Gura kills it, and the demon that was possessing the bear jumps into Foix.
• The Yearling: The pioneer family has trouble with a bear with a missing toe on one paw called Old Slewfoot. He kills pigs, nearly kills one of the hunting dogs because she's not a good bear dog, and later kills the family's calf before he's finally killed. The film omits the last part.
• The Zombies of Lake Woebegotten: The bear is bad enough when its alive. As a zombie, its somewhat of an inconvenience.
• The creepypasta 1999 is about a kid discovering a local access cable channel that prominently features a children's program about a host who kidnaps and tortures children. His name is... Mr. Bear.
• In More Tales of MU, bears are the only animal that the typically arrogant elves will not hunt:
  Iason: And did nobody ever think to teach you anything about bears?
  Jamie: Not to mess with them.
  Iason: That will do for a beginning.

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