By September, it had begun to feel very much like the end of our year. All sorts of things in nature were drawing to a close. The last sockeye salmon run, the biggest and most important for the bears, was on the wane. Some of the bears had already left it to concentrate on pine nuts, which were full of fat and other things the bears needed in their preparation for winter.
When good flying weather resumed, around the first of the month, I went over to Kurilskoy to help myself to Katya and Alexei’s ample and currently wasting garden. Katya had gone to PK to help her children get started in school, and Alexei was flying surveys up north. Bill Leacock and family had already gone back to the U.S.
I wasn’t expecting to find Igor—because of all the bureaucratic problems he’d been having due to Michio’s death—but he was there, overhauling his outboard motor and working on improvements to the Leacocks’ dwelling for next year. He wasn’t ready to come back with me to Kambalnoye, but he would be in a couple of days.
What Igor had by way of news was troubling. Sergei Alexeev, who had given me my permission to fly, was now in hot water over it. The FSB, the post-Soviet version of the KGB, had found out about me and were not pleased that a foreigner was gadding about their skies without supervision. When they first showed up at Sergei’s door, they claimed that Maureen and I were already in prison. They kept that up for a while, then said they were joking. The real problem they wanted to talk about was my flying. They wanted me to stop.
All this worried me considerably and Igor not at all. He doubted they had the budget to hire a helicopter to fly to our camp and observe what we were doing, and otherwise how could they know if I was flying or not? His feeling was that they had known for a while and had been assuming, perhaps even hoping, that nature would take care of the problem. If I were to crash, that was by far the cheapest and easiest solution. When I stubbornly refused to kill myself, they decided they must take action. They were ordering Igor and me to show up at the Kurilskoy research station for a meeting with the chief flight inspector and a representative from the FSB on September 6.
Better news from Petropavlovsk was that Evgeny, the engineer who was building Sergei’s Kolb, was half done. I was amazed. He was ahead of the schedule of any builder I had ever known, including me. I had worked continuous twelve-hour days to meet a work deadline, and Evgeny was bettering my pace even though he could not read English, the language the instructions were written in. Igor had watched him at it, and said that he took the manual home at night to translate the instructions he needed for the following day, using his English-Russian dictionary.
By the time I went to pick up Igor at Kurilskoy Lake on September 3, the weather had changed completely. Gorgeous warm days had come that felt very much like Indian summer back home. Igor was not ready when I arrived, so I made the first packing voyage alone. I was excited to see, in among the food and Igor’s camera gear, two thick, heavy books printed in an ancient Cyrillic script. The Itelman information, I hoped.
Igor and I made the final trip together on the margins of darkness. Maureen had a wonderful supper waiting, and only when we were well into it did I urge Igor to explain to Maureen the FSB flying quagmire. I hadn’t said a word, preferring Igor’s way of explaining, which made it sound as consequential as a speeding ticket.
That night, we also talked about the orphan bear project. When we proposed it, Igor thought quietly for a minute, asked a couple of clarifying questions, then said he thought it might be possible. Sergei Alexeev was responsibile for orphaned cubs, and he might be receptive to our plan, especially if it brought some positive attention to the preserve. Igor guessed that some of the scientists would have concerns, such as mixing bear genes from north Kamchatka with the southern population, and about reintroducing bears into an area that already had lots of bears. Igor himself worried that the cubs might be killed by predator males. I suspected there would be many such problems ahead, but, if we got permission, I would be happy to apply all my bear experience to solving them.
The first big snow hit the volcano, turning the top half white. Most of the bears had moved to the coast, and we decided that in order to keep observing them we should do the same. We would fly down there and move into the cabin on the river for a while. Maureen and I had dropped in once since the time I had robbed the place of a handful of nails to finish the darkroom. With a little work we could make it livable.
But first we had to face the dreaded FSB. On the appointed day, Igor and I flew over to Kurilskoy. The research station, which had been all but empty on my previous trip, was now a hive of activity. The FSB could only afford the cost of the helicopter by sharing it with twenty vulcanologists doing fieldwork. Word had spread about what was happening, and everyone was curious to see the outcome of the meeting involving me and my plane.
As it turned out, the meeting consisted of Igor taking the chief flying inspector aside for a private chat. After that, I was served with a document for my signature. Igor told me to sign it and I did. For all I knew, it could have been my death warrant.
Not until we were back at Kambalnoye, having tea with Maureen, did Igor divulge the document’s contents. I was grounded and was to remain so until they had written a new regulation that covered my kind of plane. If I needed to fly in the meantime, I must hire a Russian pilot and file a daily flight plan. As for my activity next summer, we would need to do the same thing.
To my ears, this was a nightmare, but Igor found it funny. In fact, he was laughing uproariously. I had signed a document that grounded me and then had flown off in my grounded plane, which symbolized the whole situation as far as he was concerned. After listening to the inspector’s harangue, Igor had said that, of course, we would need to continue to fly for the rest of the season, and the inspector had agreed. If we came back next summer, Igor assumed it would be the same: a lecture followed by nothing.
So with that out of the way, we flew down to the coast and set up housekeeping in the other cabin.
The weather that week stayed wonderful. The vision of a prairie like the prairie back home—but covered in grizzlies—was even more intense for me now that the bear numbers were up and the weather was clear. While I studied how they used the coast, Igor harvested a bounty of white boletus mushrooms that were in full body on the tundra. He cut them into strips and set them to dry on old window screens. Through the grassy dunes and the driftwood stumps and the skeletons of whales and sea otters, Maureen and I stalked and photographed the bears.
MAUREEN: At the coast, the bears still ran away from us, but in the beautiful weather, it seemed to matter less. There was endless space. We were not crowding them. I was so sick of bad weather and the tense month that we had just experienced that living in the cabin at the coast in good weather felt like we had gone on holiday. We learned a lot too, such as the distance at which the bears could see us. The camera shots we were getting were better than we had managed to date, and that relieved some of my tension in regards to our eventual report to sponsors.
Among other signs of fall, at the coast and at Kambalnoye, were big flocks of geese that competed with the bears for the remaining tundra berries. They were getting ready to strike off for Japan or even more southerly points. The ptarmigan were also flocking, already wearing some of their camouflage whites. Hawks and falcons took natural advantage of the clustered bird life.
One day, as Igor and I were flying over the divide between the cabins, we spotted a herd of seven snow sheep just under the valley rim. I could see how the plane terrified them, and I gave them a wide berth lest they fall off the cliff in fear. Near the end of our stay at the coast, the mountain slopes turned bright red, the bear berry’s vivid final flourish before the snow.
On those lovely evenings at the coast, Maureen, Igor, and I worked on the orphan cub proposal that we would present to Sergei Alexeev at the end of the season. Igor suggested we not mention the human coexistence part of the scheme. For the first time, he told us that he had been omitting this aspect of our project any time he made a presentation of our plans to the Russian authorities. He didn’t believe his colleagues were ready for the idea of people and bears living together. As for what we were supposed to be here for, he had stated that our main purpose was to record bear behaviour on film and video. The $10,000 a year that we were being charged (two years of which was paid for with the Kolb) was to pay for this supposed filming. We had learned from Bill Leacock that he did not have to pay at all because of the scientific nature of his work, so our costs were really the high price of not being scientists. I was reluctant to continue the charade, but, as it goes with any deception, once you’ve started it’s hard to stop.
Despite everything, Igor was optimistic. Sergei Alexeev was the one we had to persuade, and he knew more about our actual work and our ability than anyone, save Igor. Furthermore, during the winter, Igor planned to translate for us papers written by Dr. Valentin Pazhetnov, the only person in the world who was reintroducing brown bear cubs to the wild. He and his son had already been successful with twenty cubs in western Russia.
After about a week on the coast, we gathered up our effects and moved out. We did so with some regret, because it had been a marvellous time— bountiful bears, tasty mushrooms, and a stretch of fine weather better and longer than any we had experienced so far.
Any sadness we had about leaving was soon vanquished by changes back at Kambalnoye Lake. In our absence several bears had taken up residence in the bush near the cabin for the purpose of eating pine nuts, and they showed no concern when the three of us moved back in. It wasn’t as if they were holding their ground against an enemy either; they really didn’t seem to mind our presence. I had never seen bears eat nuts before, and now we could watch how it was done through our windows and from our porch. The close-up views of bears that we had been unable to get all season, we were now able to get without leaving the cabin. On still nights, we were serenaded by the crackling of dry cones between strong jaws.
MAUREEN: When we returned to the lake and our own cabin there, something had changed. It was as if the bears had sat down and had a meeting at which they decided to accept us. They came around our cabin to eat pine nuts and we were able to shoot big glorious close-ups right from our windows. One day when I went to the lake for water, a bear crossed the trail between me and the cabin. I talked to it. It stopped and looked, and then slowly walked by me. The bear seemed completely relaxed and later allowed me to take some great photos. This was a pivotal experience for me. I was overwhelmed by the changes that September had brought, and these changes were responsible for my decision to return.
The good weather stayed with us at Kambalnoye Lake. Battered by storms, the poor old wall tent looked like the veteran of a decade of bad weather rather than a single season. It had to go. The three of us set about building another cabin on top of the supply tent floor. We could never have imagined that a tent wouldn’t be strong enough for storage. We gave the new structure the expansive title of “east wing,” and joined it to the existing cabin with a covered walk. The result was an L-shaped edifice that buttressed the original cabin. The combined structure made the cabin stronger, and I was now confident it would survive the winter winds.
After a day of building, Igor and I would have a night of reading. The venerable-looking books he had brought from Petropavlovsk were indeed what he had been able to find on the topic of the Itelman people and another native group called the Koryaks who lived in north Kamchatka. The books were a two-volume set written in the eighteenth century by Stepan Krasheninnikov, titled Exploration of Kamchatka, 1735—1741. With the fire snapping in the stove, and pine cones scrunching in the bush, we sat beneath the light of our single bulb, and Igor provided a translation almost as fast as he could have read the book himself. We continued into the morning hours and only stopped when the solar-powered batteries weakened and the bulb began to fade.
I found Krasheninnikov’s story fascinating. As a young science reporter, he had signed up with Vitus Bering’s second expedition to Kamchatka in 1733. He left St. Petersburg that year and made it to Kamchatka’s west coast four years later. He and his men were almost killed while crossing the Sea of Okhotsk in a decrepit, leaking boat. They were hit by a tidal wave caused by a violent earthquake just as they were landing at the mouth of the Bolshaia River (about one hundred miles northwest of our cabin). They lost everything, including two years’ supply of food, but forged on.
When I got back to Canada, I went in search of an English translation of Krasheninnikov’s work and found one, published by the Oregon Historical Society in 1972. The translation and introduction were by E. A. P. Crownhart-Vaughan, and the following paragraphs from that introduction are a good summary of what Krasheninnikov proceeded to do:
For three years, he traveled Kamchatka virtually alone. In that distant primitive land of mountains, avalanches, quagmires and volcanoes, besieged by hostile natives, mosquitoes and lack of food, Krasheninnikov observed, collected, noted. Seemingly nothing escaped his notice. He observed the appearance of the natives and noted in great detail even such seemingly trivial matters as how their hair was cut and how they sewed their garments together. He described their religion, myths, beliefs, customs, and even their language. He analyzed their manner of speaking and contrasted the tribes to one another. Not content with simply observing their food, he ate it. He candidly remarked it turned his stomach just to watch some of the dishes in preparation. For days on end he lived in the choking smoke of the underground “iurts” while he recorded every minute detail of Kamchadal festivities.
During these years he collected specimens of animal and plant life, amassed detailed data on the precise distances between stopping places along the various trails in Kamchatka, and often risked his life to journey to some inaccessible place to examine a hot spring or geyser or volcano. He experimented with raising rye and barley to see if Kamchatka might be used as an agricultural station for Siberia. Even though Maureen was already asleep when we came to the bit about the “choking smoke,” I woke her up and had Igor read her that part. Now I felt we had even more in common with those ancient people. Naturally, I was most interested in Krasheninnikov’s observations of bears, and was disappointed when all Igor could find were two and a half pages, most of which was an account of how bears were hunted by the Koryaks from northern Kamchatka, and by other natives of Siberia. Of those pages, only one half page was devoted to how the native people of the south lived with the many, many bears that dominated the Kamchatka peninsula. Here, in translation, is that passage written by Stepan Krasheninnikov in the mid-eighteenth century:
In Kamchatka, there are a great many bears and wolves. In the summer the bears graze in packs over the vast tundra in this country. The Kamchatka bear is neither large nor ferocious; it will never attack a man unless someone comes upon it while it is asleep. Even then a bear will rarely kill a man, being content with ripping the skin from the nape of the man’s neck, slashing him across the eyes, and leaving him on the ground. When the bear is aroused to a fury, it will rip one’s flesh to shreds, but will not eat it. In Kamchatka, one comes across a few men who have been treated in this manner. They are commonly referred to as “dranki” or “the frayed ones.” One thing that should be made clear is that the Kamchatka bear will never harm a woman. In summer, when the women are out gathering berries, the bears follow them around like domestic animals. Occasionally the bears will eat the berries the women have picked, but that is the only harm they do.
When schools of fish come into the river mouth, the bears come down from the mountains in regular herds to the sea and find a good place to take the fish. Since there is such a quantity of fish, the bears become particular in their choice, and only suck the brains from the head, leaving the rest of the fish on the bank of the river. But when the fish are scarce in rivers and there is no forage available in the tundra, the bears do not hesitate to eat anything they can find on the shore. Quite often they will even break into the Cossacks’ huts along the shore to steal their food. They should be indulged, however, since they are content to eat the fish they find in the huts, and do not harm the people. It is customary to leave an old woman in each cabin.
Once I got over my disappointment about how little material there was, I started to pay attention to what the paragraphs actually said. I had wanted to know how the Itelman people lived with the bears, and the Krasheninnikov book told me. I had heard this idea of women being excused from harm before. As I thought about it, I considered the pronounced difference in the roles played by women in these cultures as compared to men. The men, as hunters, were the ones who travelled farthest from the village, and were thus more likely to collide unexpectedly with bears at blind corners, or to surprise sleeping bears in the bush. The men, in other words, were more likely to trigger an attack.
Then there was the probability of a differing attitude between males and females. The men of Kamchatka were portrayed by Krasheninnikov as a pretty macho bunch and were likely gruff and aggressive compared to the women. If bears followed the women around the berry fields “like domestic animals,” it implies that the bears did not fear them, and that the women perhaps did not fear the bears. Bears are intelligent, so it made sense for them to let the women do the picking and then rob them of the occasional basket. The women, by simply allowing it without threatening the bears, ensured their own safety.
That condition of relaxation was what I hoped to achieve and what I hoped would defuse the aggression that existed between modern people and modern bears. The fact that it had worked for the Itelman women two and a half centuries before was the best assurance I had found yet that I was on the right track. What I had to hope was that, as a man, I could be accepted into that circle of trust.
I pondered the words of this Russian scientist-adventurer over and over, and was often rewarded with new questions and insights. The fact that the bears were described as “not large” fascinated me. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, the Kamchatkan bears of today are twice the size of the Rocky Mountain grizzly, and similar in size to the giants of Kodiak Island off the Alaskan mainland. I had been told before that there were bears elsewhere in Russia that were even bigger than the Kamchatkan brown bears, but I had passed it off as myth. Now, I started to believe it.
I thought about the reference to the Cossacks’ cabins being ransacked by bears. These people were colonizing Kamchatka at that time, and were drawn to the south shores in pursuit of sea otters. It sounded like they also capitalized on women having a different relationship with the bears than men. I wondered, were the cabins that were broken into the ones that had no old women available to protect them?
The Itelman built balagans, which were thatched roof huts on high stilts in which they could dry and store salmon during the summer, safe from dogs and bears. This system suggested a fairly sophisticated evolution towards making life easier and safer for themselves. In a way they were forced into being civilized by their lack of technology, but the introduction of firearms erased what they had known. It seemed fitting that now, in the same area, Maureen and I were trying to relearn their lost knowledge.
Perhaps the most important conclusion I drew, with the help of this piece of historical writing, was that maybe I shouldn’t bother so much with the question of whether bears were naturally afraid of people. Maybe it didn’t matter. What was more obviously true and important was that, in the absence of fear on both sides, life in close association between bears and humans was better for both.
One of the things that would continue to mystify me for some time was why Krasheninnikov had been so stingy in the space he devoted to bears in his huge, complex set of books about this country. Later, while doing literary research in Petropavlovsk, I asked that question of Irina Viter, head of the historical department of the Petropavlovsk museum. Irina had published several books on the local aboriginal people, and I had made an appointment with her to talk about both the Itelman and the Koryaks.
“Imagine travelling Russia as these people did,” she suggested to me, “and consider that bears were numerous from St. Petersburg to the Bering Strait, a distance of 9,000 kilometres [5600 miles]. There were tens of thousands of bears and they would have been easy to take for granted.” Krasheninnikov, being a writer trying to interest his readers, would have known that bears were too commonplace to excite them. She asked me to compare the mentions of bears in the books to the mentions of sable, the equivalent of the North American marten. Sable was Russia’s most important fur-bearing animal at that time. Since the beginning of the seventeenth century, sable had been a form of currency in Russia. The “sable treasury” within the walls of the Kremlin held the royal reserve. Sable, as a result, got seventeen pages’ worth of coverage in Krasheninnikov’s work.
Another thing Irina Viter focused my attention on was the way bears were described in the Koryak sections, as opposed to the Itelman sections. Most of the mentions of bears had to do with the Koryak people, and virtually all these mentions had to do with hunting the bears, one of their staple foods. Just like hunters and outfitters today, the Koryak liked to tell tales about meeting the mighty bear head-on and emerging the victor. The Itelman, on the other hand, were fishermen and “pastoralists,” which gave them a very different attitude towards the land and toward bears. They lived off salmon and wild berries. Even their boots were made of fish skin. Bears were not very important to their material culture and, hence, didn’t even show up in their art. The Koryaks, who lived by hunting bears, included the animals in all their cultural trappings.
Inevitably our season of fine weather, wild blueberry pies, and wild mushrooms came to an end. On September 23, with the weather starting to go sour, I flew with Igor to Kurilskoy to check on the helicopter that was supposed to pick up Maureen and me at Kambalnoye in ten days. We discovered that there was some problem, but we couldn’t find out what. Later that afternoon, I flew Igor to a creek near Ozernovskiy and dropped him off. Ozernovskiy was one of the places Igor had been told I was no longer to fly, so I didn’t want to get too close. Igor assured me that he would look after the helicopter problem when he got back to PK, and all I could do was hope that he would succeed. He walked off in the direction of the village, and I got back in the air as quickly as I could. A storm was starting to roll in, and I just barely got home to Kambalnoye before it hit.
This, the final storm of our 1996 adventure, lasted a full nine days. Maureen grew steadily more upset because she was certain that Igor wasn’t going to make it to Petropavlovsk, and we would be stuck here for the winter. We used the time to get everything packed. Towards the end of that storm, we were completely out of firewood and had to resort to burning green alder for warmth.
On October 2 the weather cleared, and we stared at the sky hoping for a helicopter to appear. It did not. I raced for the coast to get wood and on the way back was forced by fog to land. The little lake where I landed was not that far from home, but I was no less stuck for that. I could have hiked to the cabin, but that would have meant leaving the Kolb. So I got out my tent, pitched it by the lake, and prepared to stay the night. Just before dark, the fog rose a little, and I could see my way to fly. I struck camp, threw my gear in the plane, and headed home.
The next day was clear again, but still no helicopter. I flew to Kurilskoy to see if any message about it had arrived there. Nothing. By now, our situation was worrying me, as well. The snow was well down the volcano and would soon get to us. On several mornings there had been frost on the wings of my airplane. If we couldn’t fly and weren’t picked up, the result would be a long snowy winter of snaring snowshoe hares and ptarmigan, and burning green alder.
Finally, in the early afternoon of October 4, a small helicopter crossed the ridge into the basin and lowered to the ground. It was Igor and his friend Viktor, who taught helicopter flight at the flying school. They were ready to move us out. The first trip was to the research station with a load of things we were storing there for the winter. By the time that was done and our cabin was secured, it was getting pretty late. Igor and I left Kambalnoye Lake by plane and Viktor took Maureen in the helicopter. It felt strange to lift away, knowing I wouldn’t be back for at least seven months.
When I landed in the flying school cow pasture, there was much amazement. Pretty well everyone had been sure I would never make it through the season in one piece.
The most important thing we did in Petropavlovsk in the days before returning home, was to meet with Sergei Alexeev about our orphan cub plan. Somewhat to our and Igor’s amazement, Sergei liked the idea. We got as far as meeting with the owner of the local zoo, who agreed to co-operate when the time came.
There was progress as well on our other second year project: the electric fence for the salmon research station. For that, we met with Katya and Alexei at their institute in PK. The only real obstacle was their reluctance to accept what they deemed charity. I argued that the fence was more of a benefit for our study than an act of charity, and they relented. After these two meetings, our plan for year two was in place, albeit without a crumb of guaranteed funding.
The last days in Russia were quite pleasant for me, visiting and shopping, meeting with Sergei, Alexei, and Katya, but I still managed to inject an element of danger. I spent a lot of time at the flying school south of the city, training the instructors how to fly a Kolb. These were the fellows who ran the automobile windshield business in Nikolayevka, and they also had a shop where they built small personal aircraft, often from their own designs. They fabricated their flying machines out of parts scrounged from wrecked military aircraft.
The pressure on me to train what seemed like half the population of Nikolayevka in the use of my plane came from the fact that Eugeny was almost done the second Kolb. They would all be flying it soon. And the truth is, I am a lousy flying instructor, totally inexperienced—and nearly crashed my precious Kolb as a grand finale to the season.
My first year as a Russian flyer ended on my last day in Kamchatka. The Kolb was back on wheels, and we taxied it through the streets of Nikolayevka to a big shed associated with the windshield business, where it would spend the winter. When we closed the doors, I felt a wave of elation. Against all odds, against the predictions of a great many people, both my plane and I had survived.
From there I headed into the open market near our hotel in search of a dry champagne. Whatever I had managed to learn of Russian and Kamchatkan ways, the language was not part of it, and I emerged from the kiosks carrying a bottle of what I hoped was champagne, and not too sweet. I marched into Maureen’s and my room bent on a major celebration and found my partner mired in a terrible depression.
While I had been risking my life and that of my trainees in the Kolb, Maureen had been packing her season’s creative output and feeling mightily unimpressed with it all. Everything she had done struck her now as a big waste of time. She couldn’t imagine facing the people who had given her a grant for this work, and even more so her colleagues at the Alberta College of Art. She felt her career as an artist was over.
I had seen this insecurity in Maureen before and, so far, every time, the result had been the opposite of what she supposed. The more depressed she was about her art, the more successful it tended to be. Given that she was now more depressed than I’d ever seen her, I hoped it might mean that the work was the best she’d ever done.
I didn’t say so. I accepted that we wouldn’t be celebrating that night, though I expected we would sometime down the road. The following day, we returned, by way of Alaska, to our Canadian home.
For the record, our families, horses, and dogs were all fine when we got back to Alberta. Our sponsors were a lot more impressed with what we had done than we thought they would be, and the response to Maureen’s season of work was wildly enthusiastic. When she had her fall exhibition, the paintings sold rapidly, which was both a pleasure and relief to us in that we were relying on their sale for a winter grubstake. We had arrived home close to broke.
For Christmas, Maureen’s brother sent us air tickets to come to his place in Mexico for a big family celebration; not so much for our homecoming as for Maureen’s mother’s ninety-second birthday. When her family asked Maureen what her plans were for 1997, she said without hesitation that we were taking orphan bears to our cabin in Russia to raise. In the privacy of my mind, I had a chuckle. I was recalling her saying in the midst of the last storm at Kambalnoye Lake that I was to immediately commit her to an asylum if she ever suggested returning there.
Living under the volcano.
Kambalnoye Lake was a place to behold—in good weather. A rare photo with both of us in one frame.
At Kurilskoy Lake a big male looks down from eight feet. I was wiggling my fingers in the water, and he stood up to see if I had caught a fish.
Igor Revenko, our Russian fixer, who gave us the opportunity to live and research bears in his country.
Rediscovering the delights of being free.
Our first meeting with the cubs, at the zoo. One look from Chico, at left, was enough to melt our hearts and solidify our determination to free them.
Male grizzlies catching char two miles downriver from the cabin. I estimated, on occasions when I saw a hundred or more from the air along the ten miles of river, that I was seeing fewer than half the bears each count.
Young bears find fun in anything and everything. Their joy in life was infectious.
Maureen warned me that the cubs would take advantage of the few inches above the door of their cabin to get out. I didn’t believe her.
At this age bears have two speeds: full throttle ahead and complete stop.
Life was non-stop interesting. Biscuit and Chico were spellbound watching Maureen make oatmeal porridge for all of us.
Rosie was a slow eater.
Maureen decided to show them new territory across the bay.
Two small wires kept the bears from damaging the Kolb. Here I have completed the repair of my float.
I couldn’t take this photo until I understood that there was a chance the damage wasn’t permanent.
Once the cubs could hunt to fill their stomachs, next was to teach them the fine art of sport fishing.
I cut large driftwood logs into stove-length sections that fit upright in the passenger seat, so I could fly them in from the coast. They carried with them many interesting new smells of the sea.
The cubs liked having us with them along the lake’s shore, to deal with other bears. It was a great place to find scraps and spawned-out salmon.
Chico, displaying her skill in dismantling a pine cone.
With Maureen back in Canada and the cubs in hibernation, this fox kept me company.
Denning time, 1997. Could the cubs, raised with us, do it on their own?