History

Mik is inspired by a character of the same name from Henry Clay Lewis’s 1850 short story “The Indefatigable Bear Hunter”. In this fictional tale, Mik is the bear hunter named in the story’s title. He loses a leg in a hunting accident but refuses to give up this pursuit following his recovery. In a later hunt, he ends up in a fist fight with a bear and eventually uses his wooden leg as a club to defeat his furry foe. The potential for prosthetic limbs to serve as weapons was regularly imagined in nineteenth-century literature. See chapter 3 of Ryan Sweet’s free 2022 book Prosthetic Body Parts in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture.

Backstory

A bear hunter from Louisiana, whose leg was mauled by a particularly vicious bear.
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