Grin and bear it

It's Sunday afternoon in February in Saint Laurent de Cerdans, a village high in the eastern Pyrenees

It's Sunday afternoon in February in Saint Laurent de Cerdans, a village high in the eastern Pyrenees. Another year's carnival is almost over, but the place is crowded with people threading their way merrily down the steep, needle's eye streets. Despite the odd patch of snow, spring feels close.

Some of the throng appear to have escaped from a commedia dell'arte troupe. A pantomime dame plants her flamboyantly rouged lips on unwary onlookers' cheeks. A grotesque, elderly couple attempts to thrust an antique, smouldering bedwarmer under women's skirts, and the la monaca (pronounced moonack), a Siamese grotesque, lopes along and turns unexpectedly to give anyone too sluggish to dodge a thwack with its twin's dangling legs.

Somewhere out of sight a band keeps repeating the same catchy oompah-pah of a tune. Everyone is having a wonderful time until . . .

Screams drown out the band. Heads turn as a woman in her 20s dashes from an alleyway. Her shrieks sound more like make-believe than genuine terror, yet she is running away from something.

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The crowd divides to let her escape and the gap widens as her pursuer plunges after her. He is a fearsome brute, eight foot tall and with menacing fangs This is Ursus Arctos, a huge, brown bear, on the rampage; the grotesques in the parade are his entourage.

Welcome to La Fete de l'Ours or La Diada dels Ossos (Day of the Bear) in Catalan. The animal features in various forms in similar events wherever bears once roamed. However, it is only in Arles-sur-Tech, Prats de Mollo and Saint Laurent in the Vallespir that he has a day set aside specially for him. The location is perfect. It is not hard to imagine the bears haunting the settlements that cling stubbornly to these craggy slopes with their dense covering of evergreen oak and chestnut trees.

La Fete, dating back to the Middle Ages, corresponds with the end of the bears' hibernation. The festival bear is associated with the death of winter, with virility and with the triumph of good over evil. Apparently young Catalan men, in order to prove their manhood, were expected to go and kill a bear. Minimising their risk, they usually went bearhunting in February, when the bears were still sleepy after their long sleep. Elie Mestre, a robust, good-humoured man in his early 50s, introduces the main players. It becomes clear that this is a family affair. Elie's son and grandson have taken over his role as l'escalfador (bedwarmer), a key member of the bear's entourage whose task is to find mates for him. Jean-Pierre Roitg (pronounced rotch) recently handed over his cumbersome monaca costume to his son, Jean-Jacques.

Jean-Jacques's height makes the macabre character - which, like the bear, looks back to winter and forward to spring - even more bizarre. The word monaca means scarecrow, but this one is a far cry from Dorothy's amiable companion in Oz.

Jean Saque, enjoying the licence that goes with drag, added his own character, la randoneuse (an English rambler) to the bear's party several years back. Far from rejecting the bear's advances, la randoneuse positively relishes them. It is partly this willingness to invent and modify characters that gives Saint Laurent's Bear Day its peculiar energy and conviviality and it's that conviviality all the organisers stress.

"We do this for fun," they insist. "And we like visitors to dress up and have fun too. This is not a show, it's a party."

The bear certainly seems to be having a wonderful time. Here he comes, the insatiable brute. He's chasing his latest victim into a house. Cornering her upstairs on the balcony, he leaves his pawmark - a mixture of oil and soot, on her cheek, then charges back into the street.

Now the charcoal-bearded hunters and the handler, all sporting traditional Catalan berets, grab him.

The handler (le Meneur) holds the beast's chain and proceeds to recite a long verse, La Perdica, parodying the tradition of 18th and 19th-century bear-handlers. To sceptical jeers and catcalls, he boasts that he alone captured this devourer of livestock and families, this violator of virgins.

The band strikes up its oompahpah, the hunters and anyone cares to join them dance around le Meneur and the Bear in an ever-tightening spiral. The Bear struggles and breaks free and so it continues.

But what's happened? The creature disappeared into that bar 15 minutes ago and has not been seen since. Is his day over?

No, he's back, leaping into the street after yet another young woman. Where does he get his energy? How has he managed to charge up and down this vertiginous village for 90 minutes without dropping dead?

The answer is simple. The bear now running riot is Bear No 2. The past quarter of an hour has been spent having a break, changing costumes, swapping anecdotes and - naturally - downing a couple of beers.

Fred Herbert is a teacher and freelance journalist based in the Pyrenees. La Fete de l'Ours takes place in Arles-sur-Tech tomorrow and in Saint Laurent and Prats de Mollo on February 21st this year