Adams Richard. Shardik

Shardik is a fantasy novel written by Richard Adams in 1974. Adams's second novel Shardik concerns a lonely hunter, Kelderek, who pursues Shardik, a giant bear he believes to embody the Power of God. Both of them become unwillingly drawn into the politics of an imaginary region called the Beklan Empire. This setting stands in sharp contrast to the rural England of Adams's first book, Watership Down.
Adams, famous for writing stories from animals' point of view (Watership Down, The Plague Dogs, and Traveller), here creates a story in which the animal, Shardik the Great Bear, is an antagonistic force that generates the entire plot and yet whose status remains ambiguous. The bear's point of view is narrated to the reader in the first chapter only, as a confused action sequence in which he flees a forest fire. This flight brings him to the channel island of Ortelga, whose natives are members of a cult that has waited for an unspecified, uncountable number of years for the return of a gigantic bear that embodies God's divine might.