It is a well-known fact that the Dalish do not wear shoes.

This fact is not strictly true; the Dalish do wear shoes. Calluses won't save you from frostbite, after all, and the Dalish are, above all, beholden to certain practical concerns. Sorrel was, of course, not wearing shoes at the moment. First of all, he was a mage, and secondly, his footwraps had worn out somewhere around the fifth mile of this damn bear chasing him.

You see, you have to sit down if you want to re-wrap your feet. And sitting meant that the bear, the patient, menacing, possibly intelligent bear would catch up to him. He reminded himself of this as he stepped on yet another sharp stone in the endless field of small, inconveniently placed, sharp rocks that was the Hinterlands.

"Go the fuck away!" Sorrel muttered at its ever-present lumbering shadow, walking along behind him with all the patience of death itself. He was beginning to think that getting off the ship at Denerim had been a poor decision, seasickness or no, "I am going to die, and be eaten by a bear, before I find any of these damn Inquisition camps. And no one will ever know I was here, or bury me, because I will have become bearshit."

He kept walking. The bear kept following. Such is life.