Bears with Lawyers - Dark Mountain

‘Deep in our hearts we knew they were right’, writes Shaun Tan in his short story ‘Bears with Lawyers’. Republished as part of Dark Mountain’s issue dedicated entirely to works of fiction, FABULA, Tan’s ursine allegory tells of a kind of law larger than the marbled, mahogany courts of (human) justice.

In this tale of reckoning between species, ‘Bear Law’ is irrefutable. ‘Plain as day’, it is found ‘on the tailfins of freshwater trout’ and ‘in the cursive coastlines of entire continents’. Reams of evidence pile up in a damning case made against humankind: ‘Theft. Pillage. Unlawful Occupation. Deportation. Slavery. Murder. Torture. Genocide.’ The question is: what are humans going to do about it?

What I love about Tan’s story is the formidable presence of the wild in the artifice of the courtroom into which the bears’ lawyers are ‘dragging various bits of primeval forest’, as if breaking the spell of ‘civilisation’ and reminding us that the laws of nature cannot be ignored or kept out. Genteel posturing and phoney economics do not cut it with the bears. Their presence in our halls of justice is a stark reminder of our own animal nature – so close, yet hidden from view, obscured by ‘figments of the imagination’ and a stifling legacy of extractivism and plunder. What happens when (and if) we listen to the bears? (HC)

Bears with lawyers. It was as simple and terrible as that. For the first time in a very long while, longer than anyone could remember, or wanted to remember, the bears were able to speak through legal representatives: men and women in black gowns who studied Ursine and held aloft the hefty paperwork that allowed their clients to walk freely through the city without being shot. And walk they did, right past armed police and animal-control officers, past bewildered motorists and pedestrians, workers and shoppers, right into our great halls of justice.

Humankind was being sued, it turned out. A class action of epic proportions: Ursidae vs Homo sapiens.

That wasn’t the worst of it.

Human Law is not the only legal system on the planet, it turned out. There are as many systems as there are species, the lawyers for the bears explained to an incredulous room, under which all animals are recognised as legal entities within a cosmic hierarchy. Human Law isn’t even very high on this hierarchy (apparently we are just below Walrus Law) and Bear Law actually takes precedence in most cases. The fact that we didn’t know any of this only seemed to strengthen the bears’ case at the expense of our own.

Shaken? Yes, but hardly worried, and we are not ones to flinch. We had the best legal team that money could buy and immediately launched our broadside. We do not recognise so-called Bear Law! No such nonsense has ever existed! You have nothing to show us!

And so the bears showed us.

Sure enough, there it was as plain as day, in all places we never bothered to look: on the tailfins of freshwater trout, under the bark of trees, in the creased silt of riverbeds, on the wing-scale of moths and butterflies, in the cursive coastlines of entire continents.

Moss, sand, dew, the arrangement of seeds in a berry, pollen, bacteria, everything. Put a single slice of any rock under the right light and it is all there, literally written in stone.

It was humbling, beautiful and indisputable and horrifying. It was all those things.

Especially for a legal team that had spent their entire working life in a city, who knew nothing more than the contents of human filing cabinets and libraries. Which were only ever written by humans, it turned out. And meant very little to the rest of the world, it turned out.

That wasn’t the worst of it.

Lawyers for the bears now presented us with all the translated paperwork we had requested, stacks of it in huge boxes, boxes that filled shipping containers, shipping containers that sat on the back of trucks, trucks lined up in a convoy, as far as the eye could see. The city’s traffic ground to a halt as they backed one by one into the streets of our brightest legal firms, every fluorescent light and mahogany veneer trembling. If that sight was not demoralising enough, reading any fraction of the material, a case against humankind gathered over some ten thousand years, was an exercise in abject despair. Theft. Pillage. Unlawful Occupation. Deportation. Slavery. Murder. Torture. Genocide. Not to mention all the crimes we’d never even heard of like Spiritual Exclusion, Groaking and Ungungunurumunre.

‘For the hungriest of all animals,’ said the bears in their typically abstruse legal verse, ‘the only thing left to eat is the truth.’ As if to prove their point, none of our lawyers could view the supporting library video of evidence without losing their lunch.

We countersued, appealed, sought injunctions, mined every technicality and loophole, hiring and firing our own lawyers like there was no tomorrow. We were trumped each time, the bears always sitting so silent and resolute in the upper gallery. How we came to detest their calm, round shapes and sad black eyes. The extent to which we loathed their lawyers we could not even begin to express. Who were these people? They turned our every argument against us, each time presenting some precedent of Bear Law as old and unbreakable as time, dragging various bits of primeval forest into the courtroom. Again and again they exposed the shallowness of every Human Law as presumption, ignorance and hubris.

That wasn’t the worst of it.

Deep in our hearts we knew they were right. Even as we fought our defence with such intellectual ferocity, as if to convince ourselves more than our opponents of a truth mired in self-contradiction, we knew the end was coming. It was time to reach a settlement. We called in every favour and came up with a figure that made our eyes water and our mouths dry, a figure too staggering to ever make public.

‘Your money is meaningless to us,’ said the bears. ‘You grasp economics with the same clawless paws you use for fumbling justice.’

And, once again, the bears showed us.

There they were, God help us, the Ledgers of the Earth, written in clouds and glaciers and sediments, tallied in the colours of the sun and the moon as light passed through the millennial sap of every living thing, and we looked upon it all with dread. Ours was not the only fiscal system in the world, it turned out. And worse, our debt was severe beyond reckoning. And worse than worse, all the capital we had accrued throughout history was a collective figment of the human imagination: every asset, stock and dollar. We owned nothing. The bears asked us to relinquish our hold on all that never belonged to us in the first place.

Well, this we simply could not do.

So we shot the bears.

All perfectly legal, it turned out, thanks to a bill passed in the dead of night. We took care of their lawyers too, in a manner we are not at liberty to divulge. But we did ask them, before they went, ‘Why on earth did you do it? How could you, yourselves human beings, with homes and families and communities, represent those bears, speak for them, support litigation against your own species?’

‘We had no choice,’ they said. ‘We are sworn to uphold justice.’

Oh, please. Humans always have a choice: is that not what makes us unique? And is silence not a form of peace? We’ll never understand why it is so difficult for some people to accept the hard truth of the world. Why they fight, even when they know they cannot win.

And so, finally, finally, finally, things went back to normal.

Until now.

Until now, when the whole sorry and sordid experience with those damned bears comes flooding back. Blood is leeching from every face in the boardroom, and we can already hear the sound of document trucks reversing into streets. A fetid cloud descends over the city, the sickening stench of endless torment and persecution.

‘The cattle are here,’ a terrified receptionist quavers over the intercom, ‘with lawyers.’