"a vow to bear"

Let me get this out of the way because it's really (maybe) a distraction. Here's the sentence this chapter title is taken from:

Inman set the pistol down on his bedding for he had taken upon himself a vow to bear, never again to shoot  one, though he had killed many in his youth and knew that he had still in him a strong liking for the flavor of bear grease. [italics mine]

The editor in me wants to change that; it seems like a typo.  Didn't he mean "he had taken upon himself a vow never to again shoot a bear"?  Why the awkward construction? Why not "vow to a bear" or "vow to all bears"?

Methinks I detect a pun, something Elizabethans delighted in but not something I expected to stumble across in a contemporary story of Appalachia during the Civil War.  If you lift out just the phrase, it can be completed by adding "a vow to bear all the trouble he had seen and expected to see." Or there's a possible additional layer if you see "bear" as a variation on "bearings" and an indirect comment on Inman's having lost his true sense of direction, lost his bearings in other words.

See how it could be a distraction?  Enough side.

This chapter really emphasizes Inman's contradictions.  On the one hand, he's had dreams of being a bear and "there was something in [the?] bear that spoke to him of hope." (There's that construction again; maybe it's an Appalachian dialect thing.)  Yet, in his attempt not to harm the bear, it rushed past him and "plunged over the high ledge that she never saw in the gloom."  Now, Inman muses, "Even my best intentions come to naught, and hope itself is but an obstacle."

Then Inman kills the bear's cub and eats it, so "as not to waste the meat."  (We're reminded of how quickly Ruby dispatches a rooster and how the goatwoman dispenses with a goat.)

Pretty bleak.  Yet as Inman looks at the "scene . . . there was growing joy" in his heart.  He finally sees his home, even if it is at a distance:

It stood apart from the sky only as the stroke of a poorly inked pen, a line thin and quick and gestural. But the shape slowly grew plain and unmistakable. It was to Cold Mountain he looked. He had achieved a vista of what for him was homeland. 

But what kind of home is it going to be?  Inman sees it as a filled with people "he would not be called upon to hate or fear" and a place where "he would be hid and safe from the wolfish gaze of the world at large."

How will this vision of Cold Mountain sync up with Ada's growing vision of it?  Their emotions seem to be going in opposite directions: Ada is getting a positive sense of her strength, while Inman becomes increasingly negative.  When he eats the meat of the bear cub, "it tasted . . . like sin."

Again the theme of language comes back in the last sentence in the chapter: "He [Inman] tried to name which of the deadly seven might apply, and when he failed he decided to append an eighth, regret."