When I came in to land at Kambalnoye, after seeing the Mi-8 fly away, I swooped low enough over Maureen and our gear to see inside the cub box. My elation at seeing live cubs inside is my excuse for almost crashing the Kolb a moment later. The high overcast was creating a flat light and there were no shadows by which to decipher the contour of the ground. I chose to land on the lake, where I assumed the ice would be smooth. Touching down, I was suddenly catapulted back into the air by a five-foot drift. No thanks to me, the plane was not damaged.
There was so much snow in the Kambalnoye basin that, had our cabin been in a swale rather than on a hill, we never would have found it. The spot where I had parked my plane last year was under at least thirty feet of drift. In the distance I saw many bears, all on the move.
The three orphan cubs were playing wildly in their box, thumping its sides. I said hello through the grate, and they paused briefly to acknowledge me. Maureen had the shutters off the main door and one window, and water was boiling for tea. The cabin looked good inside. The snow had entombed it and protected it from harm. The one exception was a hole that voles had chewed through the inch-thick door. They had left a mountain of mouse dirt behind.
There was much to do before nightfall. Item one was to feed the bears. We had already christened them, without putting much thought into it, except that we wanted distinctive names for calling purposes. We called the dark one with the lively eyes Chico, and only remembered later (when she was already responding nicely to her name) that it should have been Chica. The largest blond became Biscuit. The smaller blond, and the smallest bear overall, we called Rosie.
Inside the travelling box, there wasn’t room to give each bear her own bowl. We dropped in a big rubber bowl and sloshed it full from a bucket of porridge and milk. Pandemonium ensued. In a flash, Biscuit had Rosie pinned upside down in the milk and porridge, while Chico stood to the side slurping her fill. The noise was like a steam whistle with its throat tied open. These weren’t barn cats, willing to sit politely at a common bowl.
After that performance, we worked non-stop to get our food and gear, and the sunflower seeds, under cover. It wouldn’t do to let a curious bear get into it all on the first night of our new season.
We ended the day in high spirits, excited to be back, excited to have the cubs, and conscious of what a streak of good luck and good people it had taken to get the five of us here together.
The next morning dawned calm and clear, and there was no shortage of work. We had managed to cover the food and gear for the night, but now we had to get it into the storeroom and arrange it there. I patched the hole in the cabin door to stop the vole parade.
As soon as she had eaten, Maureen grabbed a shovel and started to dig a hole in the snow the dimensions of the cub cabin. She was digging into eight feet of wet, heavy snow, so it was no small undertaking. Maureen had shifted what seemed to be several tons before I could talk her into giving herself a break and tackling some lighter job.
Getting the cub house built was the obvious priority, as conditions in the travelling box were deteriorating fast. My chainsaw roared to life after its winter’s rest, and I was soon happily building in the hot sunlight. (In that white world, the sun comes at you off every reflecting plane.) My goal was to have the cubs out of the box and into their new home that night. Whenever I glanced over, there were paws and noses sticking out of the iron grid as the bears peered out at their new mountain surroundings. I was waxing fanciful, imagining they could sense the freedom that awaited them there and were excited about it.
It was almost coal dark when I finally had the heavy tarpaper roof on, plus two barred windows and a door. We carried the travelling box to the cub house and contemplated the problem of transfer. We didn’t want to lose them, especially in the dark. I decided I would imitate Anatoly’s technique. Reach in, grab a cub by the scruff, lift her into the cabin, and quickly close the door. Even with gloves on, it was intimidating to reach into that dark space. I groped and finally made contact with a squirming cub in a far corner. I sorted out which end was which and got hold of the loose skin at the back of the neck, but could not hold her by the slippery fur. I shed the gloves and tried again. This time I could hold on. Squirming and howling, Rosie ascended into the open air. I dropped her into her new home. Chico, likewise, posed few problems. Biscuit, however, sensing she was alone and in trouble, dodged my hand again and again. She was screaming with pure fury, and had a lot of chances to bite, but chose not to. Finally, I had her in the cub house as well. All the grabbing and lifting had given me an estimate of their weight, about fifteen pounds apiece.
The new cabin was a big hit with the cubs. Biscuit expressed her pleasure the instant she was released by climbing a barred window and taking a wild leap from the top into the shavings we’d brought from the joiner’s shop for bedding. We went to sleep that night to the sounds of the cubs still thumping around their cabin.
A little footnote to this episode is that we would notice much later that the cubs never bit each other on the paws, remarkable given that they grabbed and tugged at each other everywhere else. Maybe that was why they left my hands alone when I was fishing for them bare-handed in the box.
The next day, I decided to take advantage of the good weather and fly to the east coast for firewood. Maureen worked in the storage cabin, readying a place for what I brought back. She had decided to make a studio space for herself, also in the storage cabin, so she could have a work space that afforded privacy from the other human member of the camp—the sort of freedom from disturbance she was used to at home. The trick was to have room left after everything was stored.
Once I crossed the divide to the east the air was calm, even though the North Pacific was still heaving from the recent storm. A mist hung on the coastline, where breakers smashed the rocks at the base of some cliffs. I flew along the cliffs for a while hoping to see bears. While there was still snow on the ridge tops, the lower slopes were green with early grasses, a micro-climate the bears must have used for thousands of years to break their six-month fast. I found some females with yearling and two-year-old offspring, grazing slopes of such steepness they had to be near the point of falling off. That there weren’t many bears suggested either other spring feeding spots existed, or that quite a few bears were still in the den.
The winter storms had done well by my wood supply. The area near the mouth of Gavrilova River that I had cleaned out the year before was replenished with drift logs and stray lumber. I landed on the quiet water near the river mouth, fired up the chainsaw, and cut a week’s worth of wood. Though only a dozen miles from our camp here, the snow was gone and the warm, pleasant air was sweet with the scent of new growth.
It took the rest of the day to ferry the wood. Kolb as wheelbarrow. On one flight, I spotted Steller’s sea eagles with two hatchlings in a nest atop a twisted stone birch. One of the adults flew up to meet me, and I throttled back to let it come close. The look in its eye was brave and fierce, as though it would tear into my wing if I let it catch me.
For a couple of days, our activity with the cubs was restricted to feeding them. We were starting them off on the porridge mixture Dr. Pazhetnov had used, according to one of the papers translated by Igor. Basically, it was oatmeal and raisin porridge. Maureen made a big bowl of it in the morning, enough for both meals of the day. Before she added oil and sugar, I would sneak in and grab a bowl for myself. (Maureen hates porridge and wouldn’t go near it.) We served it to the cubs with milk. Right from the start we added sunflower seeds to the mixture, the idea being to increase the percentage as the cubs grew.
The immediate challenge was to get them to buy into a system of one feeding bowl per bear. As they had been fed in a common bowl at the zoo, they all jumped on the first bowl to hit the ground, starting an incredibly loud life-or-death battle for the right to eat. Rosie was the first to catch on to the principle of “one bear, one bowl.” Very soon, she was going to her spot to wait for her bowl. Only when the bowl was in front of her did it become an object to be guarded. The smallest bear, she was also the most aggressive about food. But it wasn’t too long before the feedings could be accomplished with some semblance of calm.
The matter of giving the cubs supplementary food was something we had agonized over. We did not want our feeding methods to make our bears dangerous later on. In my observations of animals, everything from chickadees to kangaroos, animals fed in some kind of feeder or bowl tend to be better mannered around people than animals fed by hand. That was our reasoning behind using three bowls. Maureen and I had an agreement not to feed them any other way.
Another of our feeding principles was something I had brought from my ranching background. I had found that I could condition cattle to associate the sound of a whistle with feeding time. I could call them with it. We reasoned that, if we could do the same with the bears, it would be a handy tool for locating them when they became separated from us. From day one, each meal was preceded by a loud toot on a whistle Maureen had found in her survival kit.
The next step was to let the bears out for their first taste of freedom. We had to screw our courage up for a few days before we did so.
We dedicated June 2—our fifth day in camp—as the day we would let the cubs out for their first run. It was a big day in their lives, and ours. We decided that, for the first go, we would let them out one at a time, so the siblings would serve as a lure back. Chico went first. For a moment or two, she looked the situation over. Her sisters were on the bars of one window, chuffing in vicarious excitement. Then Chico started to run. She ran in a circle around the cub house, and her sisters jumped from window to window, keeping track of her. Chico sped up but did not take on much more territory, apparently wanting to stay within a certain radius of her sisters. Besides running, she leapt off a few snowbanks and dug a hole in the layer of snow under their cabin. She was puffing by the time I put her back inside and gave the next cub her liberty. They each got fifteen minutes and seemed to be copying what the others had done before them.
The inaugural outing was a success. Next day, we let all the cubs out at once. We staged this experiment just before their usual feeding time. We threw open the door and called their names. The snow was compacted enough that we could walk on it without skis. Out a ways from the buildings, the bears started to run. As before, they ran in circles, but now Maureen and I, rather than the cabin, were at the centre. Occasionally they stopped to investigate some object of interest, but then were off again. The circles got bigger until they were including the nearest patch of pines in their circumnavigation. Some of the pines had melted out enough to appear as green islands in the white. We started to realize that we would be able to track the bears quite easily if they got carried away by their freedom. They were disappearing into hollows and behind bushes, then reappearing, always at full speed. They seemed to keep the cabin in view. Our biggest fear as we watched them tear around was that they would run into an adult bear in the bush, but there was no way of giving them their freedom without running some risk.
Finally, Chico, Rosie and Biscuit trapped themselves in a bay in the pines and got lost trying to navigate through it. Maureen thought it might be a good time to test the effectiveness of the whistle. She gave it a strong blast, and it worked like a charm. Within a minute, the bears were back, gulping down food at the compound.
It had been a banner day for all five of us. We relaxed a little thereafter in the role of grizzly parents. From that day on, we tried to stick to a regimen of two runs a day for the cubs, each lasting at least an hour. Only during severe storms would we leave them inside.
On June 6, a mother bear and a yearling cub came out of their den and spent their day snow-sliding. It was striking that bears coming off six months of living from their own flesh would have anything on their minds but food. Who would have expected them to play? But there they were, sailing down the long slopes. Any argument that it was transportation rather than play falls short of explaining why they climbed back to the top and had another go, and another. They played for hours, the mother with more gusto than her cub.
Our own cubs were full to the brim with wild enthusiasm for life, and Maureen and I found it completely infectious. With better weather, and with the cubs to watch and nurture, we were happier at Kambalnoye Lake that spring than we could have imagined possible. Our initial worry that the bad manners the cubs picked up in the zoo would create problems for us turned out to be unfounded.
Between walking and feeding our bears, we soaked up sun on our porch and made use of the spotting scope. A hole had opened in the ice by the lake’s outlet, and there we saw the first ducks of the season. Closer to the cabin, the mountain ptarmigan, still in pure white winter plumage, were strutting their mating ritual. Red foxes took advantage of their distraction to hunt them. On another day we saw a river otter crossing the lake at a ropey gallop. It disappeared into the alders, not to be seen again.
We started to notice that, almost every morning, a male fox came by the cabin on the way to his den. One morning we followed him and found the den downriver, deep under a clump of alder. We saw the female fox, but no pups. Wherever the pups were, they must have been eating all the food the male brought home. Sometimes he had a ptarmigan, but lately we had seen him carrying some sort of rodent the size of a ground squirrel, an animal we had never seen alive. Maureen followed the fox’s tracks backward and found that he had come over the divide at the end of the lake. Whatever the squirrel-like animals were, that’s where they lived.
On another morning, the sun was at just the right angle to cast shadows off every contour and break in the pattern of snow. In this excellent light, I was scanning the slope across the lake when I focused on two grapefruit-sized snowballs rolling down. I followed their path up to the source, and there was a grizzly with its head poked out of the snow. I yelled for Maureen to come so we could watch the entire emergence. For a while, the bear stayed with just its head out, taking in the view of the sparkling mountains, the frozen lake, the cloudless sky. At length, the bear pushed itself the rest of the way out. Without looking back, it walked up to a naked outcrop. It lay there for almost an hour, soaking up the heat. When the bear got up again, it climbed to the top of the ridge and over. It was a great thing to see, a great chance to imagine ourselves in the mind of a bear at a moment that would only occur maybe thirty times in its long life. The last bear we saw come out of its den that spring emerged on June 17. If the bear had gone in at the normal time in mid-November, it had been under the snow for seven months.
I used the opportunity of that late spring in another way, and that was to go into the recently vacated bear dens to learn more about them. I found that some were quite shallow, while others were deep and roomy. One lazy bear’s den was only a depression in among some pine roots, where he relied on a lot of snow drifting over him. The fact that the deep volcanic ash was easy to dig was one reason why this area was popular for denning. As well, good root systems of alder and pine kept the roof from caving in. When it got warm towards spring, a pool of water would form in some nests. When this happened, the bears dug a new room in the deep snow outside of the den, and that’s where they stayed until early June. Another bear, who probably had several big cubs, had dug her den twelve feet into the mountain slope. The den went in and then upwards, then levelled out into a sizable cavity lined with grass. The way it was built, it could never be flooded, so it represented a superior design. Vents, like stovepipes made of ice, link the dens to fresh air. These vents aren’t something the bear creates, but a natural phenomenon caused by their warm breath.
Naturally, the majority of our time in June was spent with our cubs, and happily so. Maureen liked to run with the cubs, and they loved it too. She would run and call in the high squeaky voice she used to communicate with them. Sometimes they would get carried away and grab hold of one of us, to give us a shake like they did with each other. We had to find a way to inform them we were more delicate. My way was to cuff them and say no. With Maureen, it was enough to say no in a non-squeaky voice when she saw they were about to grab her boot or wrap themselves around her legs.
The bears soon learned that we travelled slower that they did. Life was way too exciting to live at our snail’s pace, so they forged ahead at full speed. They had two ways of keeping in contact with us. Either their tours would be big circles with us roughly at the centre, or they would rush back pell-mell to quickly visit. Often the three bears would converge into one large ball of rolling fur and flashing teeth, as they bit and shook one another’s loose hides.
This tendency to remain in touch enabled us to keep pace and to exert a small amount of control. The exertion of these twice-a-day outings in the melting snow meant a serious workout, especially for me, not being particularly given to workouts. My level of fitness quickly improved.
The three sisters also liked to play around the cabin. If we were doing chores, we let them go at it for hours. There was a big snowdrift at the north end that they climbed and tumbled and slid on, and into which they liked to tunnel. I found that if I started a hole in the face of the drift with the shovel, they would spend hours expanding on it. It was as though they were practising digging a den. Everything was such a game with them that they could never dig long before one sister bit the one digging on the rear, touching off a wrestling match. It would be quite a while before any more digging was done. They would tunnel in and eventually dig upwards and break out the top. Then they chased each other through the tunnel. The uses to which the cubs put a snowdrift were about the same as human children would make. I had never seen an animal enjoy itself so much.
Even after we became comfortable that they weren’t likely to take off, I kept an eye on the cubs whenever they were out. Because of the snow, I could not build an electric fence to protect the Kolb and had been parking it near the cabin as the next best thing. I had to guard a bit against the cubs in case they decided to have a big wild play on it. But all I really had to say was no. A change of tone was often enough to check them.
It was different when we were out on a walk. We got used to watching them head for trouble and our not being able to do anything about it. For example, they loved to run and play on the lake ice. It was still thickly frozen in most places, but dark patches indicated that candle ice had started to develop. Candle ice is a mysterious stage in the spring melt when vertical crystals form. The individual candles are maybe an inch in diameter, and they stand neatly stacked and sturdy until something disturbs them. What appears to be solid ice suddenly disappears in a shower of ice slivers. When the cubs were beyond our reach and playing boisterously on the ice, it was inevitable that one or more would hit a patch of candle ice and fall through. There would be a lot of snorting and struggling as the cold, wet cub fought around in the water, bringing down more of the ice candles until she found a solid sill to climb out on.
One thing we could do, and did do, to protect the cubs was lead them away from the river. The river opened up in sections, and the cubs with their energy and curiosity easily could have fallen into the fast water. If they had washed under a section of ice, they might have drowned. I sprouted plenty of grey hairs imagining such hazards, the various ways beyond predation that a mother bear’s four, three, or two cubs could wind up being one or none by denning time.
We soon understood that, beyond differences of personality, our cubs were also differentiated by their roles. Chico was the leader and the others accepted her as such. On the first voyage together out of their pen, Chico struck out ahead. Rosie and Biscuit seldom went anywhere without Chico to lead them. We honoured this designation and tried to make use of it. If there was a danger we wanted to tell the bears about, we told Chico first.
Chico was also most interested in forging a relationship with Maureen and me. I never had the impression that she was seeking in us a replacement for her bear mother, but she did seem to want our companionship. She liked having us share her world.
Biscuit’s role was a mothering one. She was always watching out for the other two bears. If one of her sisters was out of sight for a moment, Biscuit became alarmed. She would strike out in search of the missing one, chuffing excitedly. If she spotted a suspicious object, and she was usually the one who did so, she would begin a call that sounded like “chiia, chiia, chiia.” Then all three would flee.
Rosie was in many ways the character of the trio. She was always off in a world of her own, checking into things that did not much interest her sisters. The others would be barging along and suddenly realize that Rosie was not with them. They would stop and wait, or go back for her. Maureen called Rosie the artist of the family.
Another interesting thing about Rosie was that she had the bear equivalent of a thumb-sucking fixation. Day or night, when it was time for the bears to rest, Rosie would go to Biscuit and take some of her fur into her mouth to suck. We don’t think this is normal behaviour among bears, but rather something she gained comfort from, an orphan’s lament. She would make the “churring” sound that bears make when suckling. At night we would often hear this sound coming from their cabin. Biscuit, with her mother persona, accepted this. Chico would not allow it.
From the start, the bears were more frightened of other bears than of anything else. The idea that another bear might be near was the one thing guaranteed to put them into flight. A danger during our walking excursions was that they would get far enough away from us, and disoriented enough, that they would not recognize us. If they thought we might be bears, their instinct was to get as far away as they could, as quickly as possible. We soon learned to identify this situation as it developed. We called out to them right then, and they were instantly calmed. It was very pleasing for us that they recognized our sound and were pacified by it.
The bears were also capable of scaring each other. If one disappeared into the bush and came back out at an unexpected place or angle, it often stampeded the other two. In this sense, Maureen and I had better communication with them than they had with each other. They had no linguistic way of reassuring one another of their identity.
Given the number of bears at Kambalnoye, and that our cabin seemed to be a crossroads, it was inevitable that the cubs would have contact with other bears. The first encounter was on June 7 as they were playing in the snowdrift by the cabin. An adult bear came by, and as soon as the cubs smelled him they bolted under the cabin and would not come out for about an hour. This was our first indication of their natural fear of other bears, so important to their survival. We knew it would be impossible to prevent the cubs eventually coming face to face with many different bears, and we could only hope that we could somehow prove wrong Alexander’s prediction of their ending up in the stomach of a male bear.
During the previous winter, I had spent a lot of time thinking about bear food and how the bears, in the absence of a bear mother, were going to learn to identify natural foods. In my overheated imagination, I fancied myself as their hero and teacher. I imagined Maureen and myself pointing out good foods to the poor orphans and thereby playing a very personal role in their growth and fattening for winter.
How reality mocked us! The cubs seemed to know exactly what they needed to eat. Rather than blundering around waiting for us to show them things, they bolted ahead. If there was a bare patch on a sunny slope with shoots of green pushing up through dead mats, that’s where the cubs would go. By the time we got there, they would have tested every available food.
False hellebore is a plant that grows in both Kamchatka and southern Alberta, and I was worried about the fact the plant is toxic until the fall frost. One day later in the summer, I noticed to my horror that Biscuit had just bitten off a stem of that plant, but she just as quickly spit it out. Something in the taste told her it wasn’t for her.
What the cubs liked and didn’t like did not necessarily correlate with our tastes. The previous fall, Maureen, Igor, and I had feasted plentifully on boletus mushrooms. At one point, I saw Rosie eat a big one, and I assumed that as the mushrooms became more plentiful they would be a big part of the bears’ diet. Not so. When the mushrooms reached their peak later in the summer, none of the bears, including Rosie, ate them.
Another unshared taste was wild garlic. Igor had shown us how to identify it, and both Maureen and I were of the opinion that it was the best tasting wild herb we had ever sampled. We picked it by the armload and often built our meals around it. The cubs, to our surprise, didn’t like wild garlic at all. Once we started to watch more closely, we saw that other wild bears didn’t either.
Observing what the bears were eating often meant lying down with my face very close to their mouths as they foraged. The cubs would crawl right over top of me to get to the other side. One day in June, we were in this mode in a little grassy clearing when Chico crawled up into a crooked alder and looked down on me. She started making the chuffing noise that signals concern. She even started to make a popping noise, which is a notch up in the scale. Biscuit and Rosie, who were on the opposite side of me, began making the same noises and then proceeded to stalk me. Biscuit popped loudly and looked very tough. Chico came down out of the tree and then they all converged on me at once. I have to admit it was a bit scary. When they got to where I was, still lying on the ground, they went around me in a counter-clockwise direction, deliberately rubbing on me. Then, abruptly, they quit whatever it was they were doing and went back to feeding. It happened one other time, and again I had a strong sense of its being a game about looking tough. I thought that if they were still doing it when they weighed 800 pounds, it would be downright frightening.
We continued to feed the cubs at their cub house all summer, but we always fed them less than would have satisfied them, in order to to keep their interest in natural food strong. We figured out the amount by feeding them until they left food and then tapering it back.
On June 16, while we were out on our morning bear walk, we heard a helicopter. The sound came and went until finally the helicopter itself came over the north ridge and descended into the bowl on a trajectory for our cabin. It was by then breakfast time for all of us and we started back.
I walked like I had a lead weight on my back, because I assumed the visitors were the authorities about to have the last word on who could have cubs and what the proper channels were for obtaining them. It seemed likely that the insubordination of our approach to adoption was about to be punished, and I could barely stand the thought of losing the cubs.
Maureen stayed back with the bears as I went to meet the visitors. There were four of them and they were arrayed across a high drift near the cabin. Anatoly Kovolenkov, the pilot, was one. Igor was another. Tatiana Gordienko was the third. I didn’t recognize the fourth, a man. What relieved my anxiety was that they were all smiling.
The unknown member of the party was a cameraman for Anatoly’s television station in PK. It turned out that Tatiana had hatched a plan to smooth ruffled feathers back in the city. She thought that if Anatoly made a little television show about us and the cubs, in which we explained what we hoped to do, it might sway people into believing that our reasons for taking the cubs from the zoo were honourable.
The first shot was of Maureen arriving with her entourage of bears. I was very proud, as the bears behaved perfectly and trooped in as they normally did for their feeding. Then Tatiana hosted an interview with us in which we took pains to justify our program with the cubs. We were careful not to appear to be telling Russians about Russian bears. Rather, we concentrated on how sincerely privileged and humble we felt to have this opportunity. It was easy to say because it was true.
It wasn’t long before Anatoly flew the group away again, and peace and silence returned. Maureen pointed out that she had been correct to trust Tatiana. Now that I had seen and talked to her myself, I was happy to agree. We had a friend at court who had gone to some lengths to champion our cause.