The Bear's House

The town of Blackwell changed its name in 1786. It had been called Bearsville when first founded, but that name did not encourage new settlers. There were nearly as many black bears in the woods as there were pine trees, but there were also more eel in the river than anyone would have thought possible. A person could stick his hand into the shallows of the cold clear water and pluck out half a dozen without using bait. All the same, no one considered naming the village Eelsville, even though people ate eel pie on a regular basis and many of the men in town wore eelskin belts and boots. They said wearing eel made them lucky at cards, although when it came to the rest of life, love for instance, or business acumen, they had no luck at all.

Why the name had been changed was always debated in August, that dry yellow month when the grass was tall and the bears ate their fill of blueberries on the other side of Hightop Mountain, a craggy Berkshire County landmark that separated Blackwell from the rest of the world. August was the time when the town always held a festival to commemorate Hallie Brady, but those who thought she'd been born in that month were mistaken. In fact, she had actually had been born in Birmingham, England, on the sixteenth of March into unhappy circumstances. She'd gone to work at a hat maker's at the age of eleven, and it had been an unsavory situation that included more than merely fashioning hatbands out of black ribbon. Hallie was the sort of person ready to face the wilderness, one who was quite certain she had nothing more to lose.

Even in the heat of summer, when mosquitoes were skimming over the surface of the river and bees were bumping against window panes, people looked out at Hightop and shivered. They knew how killing winter in these parts could be. Many wondered how the early settlers managed to survive that first winter, when bears were in every tree and the snowdrifts were said to be as tall as a man. Before the settlers arrived, the far side of Hightop was unpopulated. The native people who camped nearby said that no man would ever find happiness west of the mountain. Their hunters never crossed into that area, even though the woods were filled with wolves and fox. There were red-tailed hawks, deer, squirrels, and more bears than anyone could count.

William Brady needed a wife before he set out to the wild western parts of Massachusetts, a ready partner to help carry the weight of the journey. He met and married Hallie in Boston two months before they started out, having known her for half that time before saying I do. William was the first man to ask her for her hand, so Hallie agreed. He was forty, she was seventeen. He had already failed at everything he'd tried; she hadn't yet begun to live. Hallie had the impression that the marriage was a mistake on their wedding night, spent at a raucous inn near Boston Harbor. William had done his husbandly business, then had dropped into a deep, twitchy sleep. He hadn't uttered a single word during their lovemaking. Soon enough Hallie realized she should have been grateful for that, but on that night she seemed absurdly alone, considering she was a newly married woman.

Somehow William managed to convince three other families to travel with them out west: the Motts, the Starrs, and the Partridges, who had a young son named Harry. Hallie quickly began to suspect she had married a confidence man. In fact, William Brady was running from debtors' prison and a long list of failed projects that included bilking people of their earnings. The three other families they set out with paid for everything: the horses, the mules, the dried meat, the flour, the cornmeal. In exchange William would lead the way. He insisted that he had experience, but he had never been farther west than Concord. He led them in...