When I was about eight, we found a perfect, complete bear track in the mud down by the river. In those days, signs of bears in Powhatan were extremely rare, although I understand that they are much more common now. We stared at the track and spoke in hushed tones of how it must have “come down from the mountains.” My dad fetched some plaster of Paris and made a cast of the track, which remained a conversation piece in our living room for many decades.
Fast forward to my life in Southeast Alaska. In 1991 we moved to Coffman Cove. A few nights after we had moved into our new trailer we heard a ruckus out front. We looked out the window and saw twin cubs up on the porch knocking stuff over. Their mother was down in the yard, fit to be tied. I don’t speak bear, but I imagine her vocalizations were something akin to “Timmy! Tommy! You get back here right this instant!” Timmy and Tommy paid her no mind until my husband set off a bottle rocket out of the window, at which time the whole family melted into the night.
How can bears be both hilarious and terrifying? I’ve burned a few gray cells on that particular paradox, but am no closer to understanding it. The local running club had as their logo a person in sneakers and shorts running from a cartoon bear. At the same time, we have (rare) reports of black bears tracking, killing, and “partially consuming” people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I can’t reconcile the two images, so I’ll just file them under “Whitman.” As in the words of the poet, who said, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.”*
So, I guess I will just allow this dichotomy to exist. The few face-to-face moments I’ve had with black bears were not funny at the time, but I can make them funny when I tell them. The one time I cut up and canned some bear meat, I struggled because its foreleg looked like the arm of a very large man, bloody and severed in my sink. A bear down by the fish creek looks nothing like me, and I’m glad it doesn’t. In a way, it looks much better.
*Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, 51. Retrieved from Song of Myself, 51 by Walt Whitman – Poems | Academy of American Poets
My experiences of bears and impressions of bears sure do vary with time and place. In the mid sixties, camping with my parents in Maine’s Baxter State Park my dad would hand us over to the Ranger to ride in his pick-up to the dump, where he would feed the black bears by hand as we watched – different times. In the late eighties as a grad student working in Alaska in the summer I had “Bear Awareness and Firearms Training” each year. We worked and lived in remote bush locations (often tent camps) in interior and coastal Alaska and often saw or sensed bears. We learned to live with bears, respect them, and try to keep ourselves and them safe. And years later, in the early two-thousands, I have a memory from Klawock on Prince of Wales Island of a group of young boys on bicycles chasing a black bear down Summit Street, interrupting a garbage can lunch. I have imagined bears as curiosities, as lethal threats, as pests, and as neighbors. I do remember one day, hiking with my wife in the muskegs on One-Duck Mountain. We came across a bloody carcass laid out on it’s back on a rocky hillock, the pelt and paws removed. The glistening, bloody body seemed eerily human. As we approached there was a moment when we weren’t sure. Archaeologically there are a few bones in bears and humans that are hard to distinguish. Bears are special beasts. I wonder what they think of us?
Bears do inspire mixed feelings in us, don’t they? I have always been fascinated by the different ways we look at them: we find them hilarious, and yet they can and do kill us. I had one experience canning bear meat, and having a foreleg in my sink was an unsettling experience: it looked like the arm of a large human. I would love to have had a window to that bear’s thoughts as he peered into my living room and at me. Who knows what my little domicile looked like to him.
And as for killing for the paws and pelt, it is despicable, but I guess it is the same the world over; there are unabashed trophy hunters on every continent. Thanks for your thoughts.