Bear extraordinaire

WINNIE: THE TRUE STORY OF THE BEAR WHO INSPIRED WINNIE-THE-POOH
Author: Sally M Walker; Illustrated by Jonathon D Voss
Publisher: Henry Holt & Company
Pages: 40
Price: $17.99

In the annals of human-animal comradeship, there is nothing quite like the tale of a brown bear cub named Winnipeg, Winnie for short, the inspiration behind A A Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh. She was bought for $20 by a Canadian soldier at the outset of World War I, sailed with him to England, then ended up living out her years at the London Zoo. There, a little boy named Christopher Robin took a shine to her, renaming his own stuffed bear Winnie and prompting his father to write the classic children's books. As a new picture book by Sally M Walker plays it, this is a "gee-whiz" kind of story, with one improbable, satisfying moment after another and little to no conflict. Jonathan D Voss's sweetly realistic, nostalgic watercolour illustrations go down easy as well, casting a benign glow even over scenes of army life during wartime. The little brown bear is adorable and affectionate, winning the heart of every human she comes into contact with, and her owner, Harry Colebourn, is a paragon of kind, virtuous, never-say-never manhood. Though Winnie earned her place in history accidentally, Walker's storybook narration makes her legendary status seem well deserved, even preordained.

Can a real live bear, if treated well and trained correctly, possibly become as tame and loving toward people as - well, a teddy bear? Can wild beasts and civilised humans really mix with nothing lost, and without some looming tragedy? Winnie answers both questions with a resounding yes. There is something reassuring and delightful in that idea, though it's worth noting that it feels old-fashioned, even, to me, a bit uncomfortably so. The book glosses over all the moral complexity that, these days, books for children about animals in captivity usually embrace. Consider Katherine Applegate's Newbery Medal-winning novel The One and Only Ivan, and the picture book in which she told the actual events behind the novel, Ivan: The Remarkable True Story of the Shopping Mall Gorilla. In both, Ivan's years of suffering, the misery of his confinement in a shopping-mall display and lack of access to life in the wild with members of his own species, elicit in child and adult readers alike a compassionate ache. The zoo where Ivan ends up is only paradise, we understand, in contrast to a cage at the mall.

One reason Walker gets away with such an unnuanced telling of the story is that she avoids ascribing feelings to Winnie, who for all we know spent her life longing desperately for the Canadian forest of her birth. Walker simply relates what happened. "I didn't see her until after I'd shot her mother," the man who is selling the cub tells Harry, but that little unpleasantness is swept quickly away. "Harry could care for a bear; he was a veterinarian," we are told on the next page.

From there, the narration focuses on Harry's increasingly bold devotion to keeping her with him, and the sheer amazingness of Winnie's life among humans. It's up to readers to name the reasons for her behaviour; what some will call love, for example, others might see as savvy self-preservation. After Harry gets seasick on the voyage across the ocean, "Winnie played with the other sailors, but she ran straight to Harry as soon as he was better." When the fighting heats up, Harry decides to leave Winnie at the London Zoo before he is sent to France, telling her he'll visit whenever he can, then take her home to Winnipeg after the war. Did she understand what he was saying? Voss's illustration of the moment shows Winnie mirroring Harry's dejected posture, and readers can interpret that however they will.

©2015 The New York Times