77 pages • 2 hours read
Will HobbsBearstone
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1989A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
The Hurt You Get Over: Overcoming Adversity
Cloyd is a 14-year-old illiterate runaway who finds his father lying brain-dead, ignores his Ute heritage yet resents those who tread on his culture, and deliberately hurts the only man who ever cared for him. He watches helplessly as a hunter he despises brutally kills one of the wild creatures, a grizzly bear, that he truly respects. His mentor nearly dies in his arms but survives, only to face withering away in an old folks’ home. At each disaster, Cloyd picks himself up, learns from his mistakes, and resolutely follows his grandmother’s advice about being a good person. He also remembers Walter’s words, that “the hurt you get over makes you stronger” (70) and rises up from heartache to dedication.
Cloyd’s great hope is that if he can find his birth father, he’ll have a family. That dream dies at Leeno Attcity’s hospital bed. With nothing to aim for, he simmers with resentment until he discovers the carved bearstone in a cave and resolves to embody the inspiring spirit of his Ute ancestors. His new goal is to climb high into the mountains, where the sacred bears dwell, and stand atop the peaks and see the world as the Ancients once did.
This dream, too, crashes to earth when, overwhelmed by stress and frustration, Cloyd vandalizes Walter’s ranch and figuratively burns the bridges he’s built across the gap between them. He realizes the terrible mistake he’s made and, heeding his grandmother’s wisdom, decides to “live in a good way” (65). He starts by accepting Walter’s anger and rejection and then makes amends to the old rancher. Walter forgives him, and Cloyd resumes his quest to reach the spiritual heights of the back-country wilderness.
He makes it to the top of one of the highest points in the San Juan Mountains, then undertakes a pilgrimage to Ute Lake and Rincon la Osa. He encounters a grizzly bear who acknowledges his presence and departs peacefully. All of this seems to confirm Cloyd’s destiny.
This, too, is ruined when Rusty the hunter kills the bear. Recognizing his part, albeit accidental, in the bear’s destruction, Cloyd apologizes to the bear and holds a vigil over its body. Guilt sears him, but he accepts the pain and soldiers on. A second disaster greets him at the gold mine, where Walter is nearly killed in an accidental dynamite blast. Cloyd rides desperately for help, and he’s aided at the last minute by Rusty, the very man who killed his beloved bear. Rusty tells him, “you done awful good” (140). This gives Cloyd at least a partial sense of closure about the bear: Rusty isn’t all evil—he, too, has a heart—and Cloyd proves himself strong enough to save his mentor and closest friend.
The final test takes the form of a bureaucratic obstacle threatening to kill Walter. The ailing man is told he must go to a nursing home. Gently, politely, and firmly, Cloyd tells the adults involved that he can and will take care of Walter at the ranch. They recognize the force of his resolve, and they relent. Under Cloyd’s care, Walter recovers and thrives.
From an unruly, rebellious teenager, Cloyd evolves into a worthy young man who’ll risk himself to protect those he loves. Instead of doing what pleases him, he does what needs doing to protect and nurture the people who matter most to him. The things that have hurt him also help him grow, and the choices he makes—each one a step toward living in a good way—form a pathway toward his best self. Cloyd learns to use difficult and painful experiences as stepping stones to greatness of spirit in service to others.
The Need for Family
Cloyd’s great need, and his big quest, is to find a family where he feels truly at home. His search goes through three phases: He looks for a father, searches the mountains for a spiritual connection, and builds a relationship with Walter. Walter also must learn to open up his heart and allow others into the emotional space once occupied by his late wife. In the process, both discover that only when their hearts are ready to accept others into their lives does their new family become visible.
As a boy who never knew his father, Cloyd yearns to find that man and unite with him. He searches far and wide: “For years Cloyd had been asking every Navajo he happened to meet if they knew a man named Leeno Atcitty” (2). Finally, at the Navajo city of Window Rock, he finds Leeno lying in a hospital bed, his brain severely damaged and permanently unconscious. For Cloyd, this empty shell is no longer his father.
The boy is sent to spend the summer at Walter Landis’s ranch. Strangely drawn to a cave in a nearby cliff face, Cloyd discovers a burial crypt with a small stone carved into the shape of a bear. Recognizing in it the ancient Ute tradition of respect for bears, Cloyd claims the bearstone as a sign and protection, and he decides to search for the spiritual wholeness his people once knew in the nearby mountains.
With that in mind, Cloyd agrees to live with Walter, where he works hard to prove himself worthy of the rancher’s help in traveling into the back country. He and the old man begin to connect the first few strands of a friendship, but neither of them is very good at communicating their feelings, and misunderstandings mount. Under stress, the boy lashes out and damages Walter’s ranch. Cloyd doesn’t yet see that a spiritual quest arrives, not at a place of isolation, but in a loving connection to people and the world; his heart is still too hardened to let Walter, or anyone, in.
Walter takes him to his grandmother’s house. There, inspired by her wisdom about living life in a good way, Cloyd realizes he’s taken a wrong turn on his quest. He also sees that, like his grandmother, Walter is a good and caring person who wants him to be happy. Walter also is someone Cloyd can care about. It’s the dawning of his understanding that relationships are as much about giving as receiving.
Walter, too, sees that he must offer more of himself as a person to Cloyd and care more about the boy’s feelings. Together, they reopen the gold mine, but it proves to be an emotional trap that quickly ensnares Walter in the feverish obsession with gold that he felt decades earlier. The hard lessons he and Cloyd have learned remind Walter to prioritize the boy’s needs: “He realized he’d made the boy a prisoner of sorts again and must set him free at once” (101). Walter releases Cloyd to continue his journey to the top of the mountains.
Cloyd’s climb up the Rio Grande Pyramid brings a sense of completion to his spiritual quest. He gazes out across the mountains and plains and senses his connection to everything around him. A peaceful encounter with a grizzly bear reinforces this sense of oneness and harmony, both with nature and with the spirit of his people. Cloyd now understands that a true sense of family begins in his heart and extends outward to others.
Dedicated no longer to his whims but to the betterment of those he loves, Cloyd helps rescue Walter from a mine accident and visits him every day in the hospital. Cloyd saves Walter’s life a second time by insisting that he can take care of him at the ranch instead of letting others put him in a nursing home where he might wither away. The Ute community sees in Cloyd a newfound and sincere desire to contribute to others, along with a commitment to furthering his education. They help Cloyd coordinate his studies with his shopping and working for Walter. Cloyd discovers friendships among the Ute students; his ability to care about Walter already extends outward toward others in his life.
From an alienated isolate on a futile search for a departed father, Cloyd evolves into a strong, solidly grounded young man whose dedication to the spiritual values of his people expresses itself in everyday connection to those around him. Walter, too, overcomes his isolation as he persists in reaching out to Cloyd. Together, they form the core of a new household as both extend their compassion to the people they care about the most.
The Native American Identity and Forgiving Oppressors
Cloyd wrestles with his identity as a Native American. He learns that hatred and resentment toward his people’s oppressors can sour his soul and make him bitter and vengeful. Instead, he finds inspiration in a spiritual quest that brings him to the high country where his people once dwelt and lived in communion with the wilderness. In the process, Cloyd’s heart softens, and he finds room in it for understanding toward people he might otherwise have despised.
His grandmother raises Cloyd in a Ute town, White Mesa, where poverty is great, and opportunities are few. The boy rebels against the state requirement to attend school, often running away to live alone in the canyons near the town. He’s sent to a group home for Ute youngsters in Durango, Colorado, but he runs from there, too, searching for his long-lost father, only to find him lying brain-dead in a Navajo hospital. Cloyd’s dream of a united family also lies there, barely alive.
Cloyd’s Durango housemother, Susan James, takes him to Walter Landis’s ranch, where Cloyd tries to be a good worker in the hopes Walter will reward him with a trip into the mountains. Cloyd hopes he can find spiritual fulfillment despite his feelings of lonely personal isolation. A lucky stone bear talisman serves as his only sense of connection to family and community.
A hunting guide, Rusty, meets Cloyd and shakes hands with the boy, his grip nearly crushing Cloyd’s, and he makes a casual remark about Cloyd’s unusual name that leads the boy to think Rusty is making fun of him. Cloyd mentions his love for the horse Blueboy, but Rusty ridicules the belief that horses care about their riders. When Rusty and his hunters return with a dead bear strapped to a horse, Cloyd loses his temper. He decides that Walter’s friendship with the hunters proves he’s no friend to Cloyd.
He focuses on Walter’s peach trees, whose luscious fruit puts to shame his grandmother’s scrawny peach orchard in the desert. To Cloyd, the trees symbolize the unfair advantages the white people take for themselves, leaving only the desert dregs for Natives to survive on. In a rage, Cloyd uses a chainsaw to kill all of Walter’s peach trees.
This act of destruction doesn’t make Cloyd feel any better. He realizes that, in his anger, he has aimed his vengeance at the one person who never forced anything on him, who has always been considerate and caring. Indeed, though angry about the vandalism, Walter goes to the trouble of returning Cloyd, not to his group home, but to his grandmother’s, where the boy might have a chance to cool his temper before returning to school. Receiving this kindness from someone who owes him nothing, Cloyd realizes he has thrown away a wonderful friendship. Quickly he finds his way back to Walter’s ranch, where he begins the hard work of making amends with the old man.
They ride up into the high country, where Cloyd finishes his quest to climb a nearby peak. In the process, he sees the vastness of the world from high above, grows closer to his horse, and encounters a bear who notices him and leaves him in peace. He feels a deep connection to his people and their place near the top of the world.
Cloyd accidentally gives Rusty the information the hunter needs to follow the bear and kill him as a trophy. The boy tries and fails to stop Rusty, who slays the huge beast, then realizes it’s a rare grizzly protected by law. Cloyd goes to the dead animal and apologizes to it for his part in its death. He stands a vigil over the creature until sundown, his guilt cementing his link to the creature and all wild things.
Finding Walter unconscious amid the rubble of an accidental dynamite blast, Cloyd rushes back to the bear site, where he convinces the game warden’s helicopter crew to abandon the bear and rescue Walter. Rusty compliments Cloyd on his bravery and effort. Cloyd realizes that, though they’re opponents about bear hunting, Rusty isn’t an evil person but one who tries to repair the damage when he recognizes that he’s done something wrong. Cloyd, therefore, refuses to give the warden his evidence against Rusty.
During his quest for spirit, Cloyd has discovered his heart, which has grown big enough to permit him to set aside his simmering resentment toward those who have caused harm to his people. In this way, Cloyd’s spirit climbs the highest peak.
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