Prompt entry #4

Bears have been on my mind lately. A few months back Lily, one of the residents of the North American Bear Center in Ely, Minnesota, gave birth to cubs. Oddly, you could watch the action in real time via a den web cam. I didn’t tune in, as it struck me as voyeuristic, even for a captive bear. Our local public radio channel gave the birth plenty of coverage.

I have a complicated relationship with bears. In my neck of the woods black bears are some of the biggest animals around, putting them in the mega-fauna category. Unlike wolves, though, which are rarely glimpsed, black bears often get habituated to human food, and can become like oversized mice.

These stories are clichéd, but they are true, too.

We were windbound in a patch of thick alders on a river in northern Saskatchewan. Our canoe was half in and half out of the water, rocked back and forth by the whitecaps. I’m convinced the bear hadn’t smelled us when she nosed through the alders to our little clearing. She wheeled when she saw us and crashed back through the alders in the direction she had come from. My friend actually uttered, ‘she’s more afraid of us than we are of her.’ Which I believe generally might be true. But not this time. Not this bear. A minute later she approached from a different direction; we shouted and she again wheeled and ran off. This happened four or five times, the bear inching closer at every encounter. Finally, I grabbed the shotgun from the canoe. My friend stood his ground as the bear approached. He pointed the gun in the air and squeezed off a warning shot. I fully expected the bear to run off, but there was an eerie silence after the shot rang out. She hadn’t budged. Another deafening shot—BLAM—and the bear again stood her ground. She inched closer. My friend took aim, paused, and fired. The bear rolled backwards, stood up. He fired again and this time she was down for good…

The bear cubs have found the hammock in our yard; they paw at it, push it back and forth, test their weight against it. One climbs in, the hammock upends and the little cub tumbles to the grass. We sip our coffee, stare out the window, and laugh.

My wife and a group of teenagers are in a little cabin on the shores of Hudson Bay. They have paddled a river to the delta, and will be picked up by boat the next morning. In the middle of the night they were awakened by scratching. Polar bear? She grabbed the gun, cocked it, tensed and ready. The scratching continued, no more urgent than before. The group was edgy and tired. Hours went by. Nothing happened. The kids gave in to sleep. My wife kept vigil on an overturned five gallon bucket, gun across her lap. At the first light of dawn, she cracked the door and peeked out. The noise was a piece of tarpaper rubbing against the cabin in the wind.

Teddy Bear. Winnie the Pooh. Cold-blooded killer. We project so much onto bears. We are dismayed when they act like wild animals, and we are bothered when they don’t. We want them to be wild but not too wild. We might want to glimpse them, but we demand they be more scared of us than we are of them. When they are not, we kill. When they raid our garbage they are pests. We put them in zoos and give them beach balls to play with. They are both commonplace and awe inspiring. Much like us.