questions on page 100-101

1. I can definitely imagine myself in a similar position. I have a dog and i feel that she is just as stupid as the dog described in the story. She has no idea what she is barking at. If anything within 100 miles (a little exaggeration) makes a noise, she is running frantically around the house barking. I disagree with that statement. She may have looked after him in terms of food and water but in terms of fending off an attacker or animal, her dog would have most likely done anything he could to protect her.
2. Those four paragraphs set a much more negative tone on the story. It talked about a bear next to a "dead tree". This along with the title of the story hint that she is going to kill the bear. The third section creates a much more depressing tone when talking about how her stuffed bear was taken away from her. This seems to be related to the bear that comes back to her throughout the story.
3. I think that she does this because it makes her think about her old stuffed bear and how sad she got when it was taken away from her. So this was a symbol for the pain she felt at that time.
4. These paragraphs show how now she feels sad whenever she is around bears. The traumatizing memory of her mother destroying her bear makes her very sensitive to any type of bear that she sees. Perhaps she feels almost guilty for being around bears afterwards because she knows she shouldn't have one. So the reason she killed the bear was because she didn't think it was okay for a grownup to have.
5. She built the porch to feel protected when she's outside. The couch is just to sit on on the porch. She feels that this way, the bear can't get to her anymore and she won't have to think about it. She smells the bear but it becomes a bad smell because she knows that it is the bear and the fact that she has a negative opinion towards the bear make the bear smell bad to her. The fact that the bear is a him shows her insecurity towards males. Her father could have left her and her mother which is why only her mother is mentioned in the story. So she hates the bear because of her father.
6. In the sixth section, stories are told in which the bear is held as equal to human or as a good and positive thing. However in the seventh section, the bear is a vicious animal who destroys anyone or anything that gets in its way. This shows a shift in the girls opinion of the bear from honorable to destructive.
7. The summer was when she sat outside with her dog everyday on her hammock. When her dog passed, she must have gotten a negative of summer as well. So she marked summer days with X's to represent how she feels sad about summer time and not being with her dog.
8. In these paragraphs she turns into an emotionless monster. She kills the bear while he moans and slowly dies of pain. She stated how she didn't want him to die slowly yet she left him to die on his own until morning when he finally passed of blood loss. She then proceeded to bury him with the gun representing that she is trying to forget about it by ridding of everything that was touched or marked by the bear.
9. By the end of the story I wasn't very surprised to hear that. She had simply gone mad when she killed the bear so she is now going back to dig up its dead body to get it's claws... she is crazy!