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An Ojibwe legend
Not sure if this story has any historical relevance
How the Bear Lost His Tail is an Ojibwe story. Jerry Smith told it to Marian, Doreen and Leonard Belille, and the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh printed it for its ethnomathematics project, with word problems for children. That page is now offline, but a copy survives in the Internet Archive.
The story is set long ago, when there were only animals on the earth and no people. All the animals spoke the same language. They played tricks on one another, and they also helped each other.
One winter day, after the lakes had frozen but before the winter sleep, Bear was walking along the shore. He came upon Otter sitting by a hole in the ice with a big pile of fish. In those days Bear had a long, bushy tail, and he was very proud of it. Instead of telling how he dove into the water for the fish, Otter decided to trick Bear.
Otter tells Bear a false way to catch fish.
"The way I catch my fish is by putting my tail in this ice hole," Otter explained. "I wiggle it around once in a while so the fish see it…"
How the Bear Lost His Tail, as told by Jerry Smith, short excerpt for review and study
Bear asked to use the fishing hole, and Otter, laughing behind his back, told him to use it as long as he liked.
Bear put his tail in the hole and waited until the sun began to set, wiggling it now and then. Not one fish bit. When he tried to stand up to go home, his tail had frozen into the ice. He pulled with all his strength and ripped off half of it. That, the story says, is why the bear has a short tail, and why you should not always believe what people tell you.
Trying to connect the dots
Two ideas could link this story to a deeper past. One is the star pattern of the Great Bear, Ursa Major. The other is the long history of bears themselves, going back to the Etruscan bear.
Ursa Major, the bear with the long tail
Dolores Cannon’s book The Legend of Starcrash records a Native American speaker, marked “B”, talking about the stars. B links the Big and Little Bear in the sky to the same story. In B’s version, it is the fox, not the otter, who tricks the vain bear into fishing with his tail.
B says the legends remember bears with long tails.
B: Well, bears used to have long tails. That is what the legends say. Some will have partial tails now, but the legends say they used to have beautiful tails…
Dolores Cannon, The Legend of Starcrash, short excerpt for review and study
More on these stars: The Great Bear, Big Dipper.
The Etruscan bear
The second idea looks at how bears evolved. Both the cave bear and the brown bear are thought to come from the Etruscan bear (Ursus etruscus), which lived in Eurasia in the Early Pleistocene, from about 2.2 million to about 1.4 to 1.2 million years ago. The ancestors of cave bears and brown bears split around 1.2 to 1.5 million years ago. The earliest bears of the cave bear line are put in the species Ursus deningeri, Deninger’s bear, which first appears around 1.2 to 0.8 million years ago.
Over time, cave bears lost their three front premolars, possibly because they ate mostly plants. In about a quarter of the skulls from the Conturines cave, the third premolar is still there, while later skulls lack it. The last premolar merged with the molars, which is called molarization, and this helped the bears chew tough plants.
In 2005, scientists sequenced nuclear DNA from a cave bear that lived 42,000 to 44,000 years ago, using DNA from a tooth. They recovered 21 genes. This built on an earlier study of mitochondrial DNA from cave bear remains 20,000 to 130,000 years old. Both showed that the cave bear was closer to the brown bear and the polar bear than to the American black bear. It split from the brown bear line before the eastern and western brown bears, and the brown and polar bears, went their separate ways. A later study found some interbreeding between cave bears and brown bears.
