The smoke rises slowly from the stacks of a small Italian village nestled low in an obscure provincial valley. It is in one of those quaint stone houses that Domenico sands the rustic wood of a bear shaped coffin. The sharp jolts of his crafting a times creating a draft that rattles the ironically cheap wooden picture frame on the wall that contains his undertaker’s certificate.

“The whole village of Speranza is in a bitter mood”, he moaned as bits of sawdust began to dam the tears welling in his eyes.

He went on to describe the morning it happened.

“There was a distant flash. For a second it was as if there were two suns. Everyone looked at the sky. The priest, the tailor, the butcher, the baker, the chiropodist. Then, the sound of the explosion came, and at that point our hearts knew who it was we had lost. A little while later, some boys came running from the direction of the woods. After waiting a moment to catch their breath, they cried out that ‘he was dead’ and that ‘he had fallen from one of the trees and then exploded’. The village was stunned into silence. Even the birds stopped their song to mourn with us”.

Applying context to the above enigmatic prose, the event Domenico described was the death, last month, of the village bear by falling from a tree onto a long forgotten bomb from the Second World War. 

Affectionately known as Umberto, the bear had escaped three years ago from a travelling circus. The circus in question saw the loss of their main animal attraction as an opportunity to amend their business plan and are now one of Europe’s foremost recruitment agencies. Their CEO, Giggles the Clown, has recently given a TED talk on the the growing application of technology in the recruitment process. Umberto the bear would take no part in all this however and he went on to lead a very different life.

Shortly after the bear’s escape, his bear like instincts saw him quickly stumble upon the quiet village of Speranza.

“I woke up one night to find a bear in my house”, recalled the local school teacher Giuliana. “We tried to shoo him out by flapping newspapers at his face but he wouldn’t leave. He just sat there in our kitchen, silent and staring at us in the dark. Then, after my arms were tired from flapping he looked at me straight in the eyes and he told me my future.”

Giuliana pauses for a moment. You could sense the profound emotion that can only be emitted by someone who has witnessed, first hand, the clairvoyance of a bear.

“Umberto told me that I would become a mother again”, Giuliana continued. “And, sure enough, two weeks later I gave birth to my second child.”

After proving his worth with the above premonition, the villagers allowed Umberto to reside in the nearby woods with a charitable disregard to its fragile ecosystem . Soon, other locals travelled to meet the bear in the hopes of having their futures foretold.

“He doesn’t say the words to you with his mouth”, said Giovanni, who visited from a neighbouring village. “That would be ridiculous. He sort of stares at you for a while until his prophecy manifests itself as a thought slowly inside your head. I suppose it’s kind of like he’s sending your mind an email with a large PDF attached.”

Soon, so many were visiting that the village of Speranza began to bustle with tourists who wanted their futures to be foretold by the bear. Some locals even started stalls that sold hastily made Umberto the bear trinkets to this welcome incursion of new travellers. The most popular souvenir was a brown painted clump of cotton wool with basic bear features crudely drawn on.

Some were critical of these merchandise sellers, seeing them as an affront to the sacred powers held by the bear of the wood. Comparisons to the Money Changers at the temple however were brushed off, with the pedlars pointing out that they had only offered currency exchange services on a trial basis.      

As the bear’s fame grew, despite countless cases claiming that the bear’s soothsaying had come to fruition (3 cases in total), there were those began to doubt the bear’s abilities as a seer.

“The official line espoused by Science is that bears cannot see into the future”, says renowned bear expert Raymond ‘the Bear’ Smith.

Untouchably at the forefront of mainstream bear study, Jones has written about the exploits of Umberto in his latest TV tie-in hardback, ‘The Wonders of the Beariverse’. In this glossy volume of soft fact, he goes on to questions legitimacy of the numerous claims that Umberto correctly predicted the future.

But, in this post-contemporary world, many people are unwilling to listen to the thoughts of such experts. At the very least, the notion of a bear foretelling the future represents a break from the factual drudgery espoused by the establishment and urban elites. Umberto was beloved by the village of Speranza, but he was so much more than a localised phenomenon. He was the very accent of Western populism. A creature so ridiculous in form a function that it was the purist antithesis to a grey nondescript German Chancellor.

That is why many suspect foul play in his death. Although the forests in which the villagers let the bear roam freely were still littered with dormant wartime ordnance, there are those who maintain that the bear was murdered by a state sanctioned assassin and refuse to believe that his death was the result of the simple reckless abandon of a bear leaping from a tree.  

‘They Killed our Bear’, reads the litany of graffiti sprayed onto the village’s government buildings. Seemingly the only available act of defiance for the youth of this place who feel like their figurehead has been eradicated by the Elites. Until, that is, things begin to get out of control. And, like Umberto, the village of Speranza explodes in a eruption of violence that not even the bear himself could have predicted.