Set in 1960s Calgary and Alberta‘s backcountry, this reissue of In the Bear’s House tells the story of a creative young mother, Clare Dunlop, raising her deaf son against the insurmountable odds of poverty, mental illness and hardship. 

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The novel opens as seventeen-year-old Clare gives birth to her son, while her husband serves a penitentiary sentence for a serious crime. After contracting pneumonia, her infant son loses his hearing.

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Later, the young boy, nicknamed Trout, struggles to find his way until his 99-year-old auntie gives him a conch shell. For Trout, the conch becomes a literal and metaphorical hearing aid. He cannot hear the sea in the shell. Instead, he hears the mad swirl of the adult world around him full of contradictions and deceptions. Out of chaos, he finds clarity. 

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At the death of his beloved auntie, Trout spirals out of control, getting into serious trouble at school and at home. His mother, challenged with chronic depression and the impending birth of her fifth child, sends 12 year old Trout to live with her deaf uncle, Jack, in the wilderness of historic Kootenay Plains. There, Trout thrives, finding adventure, connection, and belonging, with his forest ranger great-uncle and his musician wife. Trout learns the wisdom of survival, listening and observing, from the elders of his own Scottish clan and those of the nearby Îyârhe Nakoda. He bears witness to land theft from First Nations to build the controversial and environmentally ruinous Bighorn Dam.

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Despite its devastating sociological and ecological impact, the dam becomes Alberta’s largest reservoir and hydroelectric plant. Trout sees what others may not. Both the rugged beauty of the land, and especially its people, the destruction of their sacred places, homes and livelihoods. Disability becomes an unexpected gift of insight. In the Bear’s House is ultimately about listening to the wild and the wilderness, and what we lose when it’s gone.