Bearstone

Bearstone, published in 1989 by author Will Hobbs, is a coming-of-age adventure story for middle-grade readers. It describes half Ute, half Navajo teenager Cloyd Attcity’s quest to escape his dull, constrained life and find purpose and meaning in the wilderness. With the help of his mentor, rancher Walter Landis, Cloyd’s search leads to a spiritual adventure in the high country and a dramatic struggle to protect a grizzly bear from a professional big-game hunter.

Bearstone is the first of two books about Cloyd, Walter, and the grizzlies. It was Hobbs’s first big success as a writer and remains one of the most celebrated of his nearly two-dozen novels. Hobbs’s books have garnered more than 20 awards, including places on the American Library Association’s list of the 100 best books for young adult readers. Many of the author’s works have been translated into other languages.

The ebook version of the 2004 Aladdin Paperback edition forms the basis for this study guide.

Plot Summary

Cloyd Attcity, age 14, runs away yet again from a group home for Native Americans in Durango, Colorado, and hitchhikes to Window Rock, Arizona, where he locates his long-lost father, Navajo Leeno Attcity. Leeno lies comatose in a hospital, having sustained brain damage in a car accident. Heartbroken, Cloyd returns to his group home.

Housemother Susan James notes that Cloyd has flunked all his classes and missed four years of school as a truant when he roamed the canyons near his grandmother’s house in southern Utah. She drives him to the mountain ranch of Walter Landis on the Piedra River: Here, the boy is to work during the summer.

Right away, Cloyd runs off. He climbs a nearby ridge, traverses a sheer rock wall, and drops into a cave, where he finds the ancient burial site of an infant. Among the items is a carved turquoise bear. Recalling that his Ute ancestors had a special connection to bears, Cloyd apologizes to the dead infant and takes the bearstone, hoping it will bestow upon him luck and inspiration. To honor the stone, he gives himself a secret name, Lone Bear.

Cloyd decides he’ll be okay at the ranch and returns to Walter’s house. He and Walter talk about the canyons and the ancient cliff dwellers who lived there.

The next morning, Walter and Cloyd saddle horses and ride up the river canyon. On the way back, they spot a bear and its cub. Cloyd takes this as a good sign. Cloyd decides to build a fence to convince Walter he’s fit to travel into the wilderness. By the end of June, he realizes he’ll never finish the fence in time. Frustrated, he begins to resent Walter. When a hunting party approved by Walter passes through on its way to hunt bears, the leader, Rusty, belittles Cloyd. Cloyd refuses to work, and Walter must bring in the hay bales by himself.

The next morning, Cloyd sees the hunters return with a dead bear strapped to a horse. Angry and ashamed about his life at the ranch, sure that Walter has never been his friend, resentful of the ranch’s beautiful pear trees that put his grandmother’s to shame, and hot and dehydrated in the morning heat, Cloyd boils over. He fires up the chainsaw and cuts deep, fatal gashes into every pear tree in the orchard. He then cuts down as many fence posts as possible before the saw seizes up.

He climbs into the hills. Realizing he has mistreated Walter, Cloyd returns to the ranch house. Walter, irate, orders the boy to turn over his turquoise stone and nearly smashes it before changing his mind and handing it back to Cloyd. He tells Cloyd to pack for his return to the group home. Walter drives Cloyd to the boy’s grandmother’s house in White Mesa. Cloyd feels tremendous regret and tells his grandmother that he must return to Walter’s ranch. He hitchhikes back, and Walter, relieved, welcomes him.

Walter wants Cloyd to help him re-start his gold mine up in the high country. The boy is delighted at the chance to ride up into the mountains. In late July, the two load a train of packhorses for the journey.

The pair camps, and Cloyd goes fishing. After he’s caught in a hailstorm, Cloyd falls and hurts his leg as hail pounds him. Freezing, he stumbles into the woods and begs help from a camper, who gets him into dry clothes, lights a campfire, and warms Cloyd up, saving his life. Walter finds them and is greatly relieved.

Walter and Cloyd continue up to a high ridge and spend a week drilling holes by hand into the wall at the other end. Walter sets dynamite charges, and the explosion carves three feet out of the wall. The rubble shows no sign of gold. As they work, Cloyd worries he’ll never get the chance to climb a nearby peak. Realizing he has trapped the boy in a crazed mining project, Walter tells Cloyd to ride Blueboy, his horse, to summit the peak.

On Blueboy, Cloyd climbs toward the peak. The horse slips and falls; somehow, he manages to roll away from Cloyd, protecting the boy. Cloyd realizes that horses sometimes care about their riders. Cloyd and Blueboy ride through the Window, a tall, vertical break in the mountain ridge that reveals the mountains and valleys below. Cloyd continues on foot to the top of the Rio Grande Pyramid, nearly 14,000 feet in the sky. From here, he can see all the way to the hills of faraway White Mesa.

He camps that night with Blueboy at Ute Lake; the next day, he visits Rincon la Osa, a corner of a high valley where he sees a grizzly bear. The creature rises on its hind legs and stares at Cloyd, then ambles away into the forest. That night, Cloyd returns to the mine camp, where Rusty visits Walter. Cloyd admits to the hunter that he saw a bear. Rusty leaves quickly, and Cloyd realizes he may have put the bear in danger.

Late that night, he follows Rusty, hoping to scuttle the man’s plan to kill the bear. Cloyd watches as Rusty shoots an arrow into the large bear. It charges the hunter, who unleashes another arrow into its chest, killing it. Rusty’s brothers arrive and congratulate him, but Rusty says the bear is a grizzly and killing one is a serious felony. He decides to report the kill and tell the warden that he had to shoot the bear when it charged him. A helicopter will fly the carcass out the next day.

After they leave, Cloyd goes to the bear’s body and apologizes to it. At dark, he hurries back to the mine, where he finds Walter unconscious and injured from in the rubble of a blast that went off too soon. Cloyd rides Blueboy back up the hill and reaches the helicopter just in time. It flies to the mine to rescue Walter.

The old man recuperates in the hospital for weeks. Cloyd visits him every day, and he gives Walter the bearstone. Walter’s siblings decide he should move into a nursing home. Cloyd fears Walter will quickly die there, so he convinces the adults to let him live with Walter and nurse him back to health. The plan works, and Walter recovers well. As the story comes to a close, Colyd buys 22 peach tree seedlings as a surprise for Walter.