Bears and Bear Tales

My sister wrote an excellent story on her blog about being hunted by wolves (http://www.shadowsnatcher.blogspot.com/), which inspired me to write about my first bear encounter.

When I was about eleven or twelve I was somehow exposed to the book Alaskan Bear Tales by Larry Kaniut (an excellent but at times rather morbid book). I was fascinated by this book and could not put it down. Unfortunately, by the time that I was finished, my head was full of "and the bear's teeth grated against my skull like chalk against slate," which kind of starts to run away in the mind of an eleven year old boy.

So, it shouldn't have been any surprise that soon after I finished the book I had a very eerie dream. I was walking in the woods near where my family burned our garbage (you can do that in Alaska, there's no trash services around). The ground was mossy, and beams of sunlight filtered through the countless skeletal branches of spruce to light a small clearing in the trees. There in the center of the clearing was a cinnamon colored black bear. It was lying in the moss, watching me. And that is all I remember.

Two or three days later, I saw that bear in real life.

It was my job in the family--being the eldest and strongest son at home--to empty and burn the garbage. The problem began when I took the garbage out the previous evening, and for some reason (wind, wet, lazy), I didn't actually burn it. My family was--and still is--building a large house which at the time was just four concrete walls that we had poured for the basement. Surrounding our "construction site" were piles of various lumber, plywood, and insulation. The day after I had neglected my duty as a "garbage man," my father and I were engaged in some sort of productive activity around the house when my dad asked me to go get an item. As I made my way towards the pile of stuff--I think it was insulation--I heard a thrashing of branches from behind a deadfall near the garbage area. I stopped short. My dad noticed and called over to me and asked what I saw. I wasn't sure, I had just seen a flash of brown before the thing disappeared. I told him it was a "moose, or deer, or something," (deer don't live in Alaska by the way). About the time that I finished my sentence, it appeared hesitantly from behind the deadfall. It was a bear. At the time, I didn't notice that the bear was remarkably similar to the bear that had seen in my dream--my train of thought was more along the line of a female park ranger who had her arms gnawed off--but it was. A small cinnamon colored black bear was trying to get into the garbage that I had neglected the previous evening, and I had startled it. My exit strategy was to back away slowly before I sought the "safety" of four concrete walls with holes for windows and doors. My dad tends to tell people that I ran like a "scalded cat." Whatever.

By the time I felt safe (on top of a pile of plywood with my head poking over the wall), the bear had meandered nearer to the garbage and was eyeing it speculatively. My dad had ambled a little closer to get a good look. There was a moment of uncertainty on both sides before the bear changed its mind and wandered back into the forest. I exited the house and joined my dad as we paralleled the bear's path through the woods. The shocking thing was that even though we could see the bear in and out of the trees, the bear made no sound. It was like a ghost drifting through the forest, a dry and brittle forest which makes squirrels and rabbits sound like demons. But the large, heavy bear was deadly quiet. Soon after, it disappeared.

This was the first of my bear encounters, and it instilled in me a respect for a (sometimes) deadly animal that is large and powerful, but silent in its element. However, over time, my unfounded and childish fear of bears faded and was replaced by a certain. . . affinity for them. I view bears (and a certain falcon) as my "nature guardian" if that makes any sense.