July in South Kamchatka is a month of unbelievable growth. The snow is still deep in the shadows, but the tundra surges with emerald green. Plants grow and flower as if there is no tomorrow. There aren’t any extra tomorrows before winter.
For our bears, July was a frustrating month because they could see and smell the salmon entering the lake to spawn where the springs well up through the gravel, but they couldn’t hope to fish them until the salmon had finished spawning and begun to die off. There were other things to eat—flowers, dead flies, birds’ eggs, salamander eggs—but not enough on which to fatten. Thin, restless, impatient, and losing last winter’s hair in rags and patches, July was not their “beauty month,” which concerned us a little, given that reporters and photographers were on their way to further immortalize our bears in world newspapers and magazines. Ian’s film would be ready in the fall so it really was the year that the cubs would be unveiled to a largely adoring public.
The writers coming were Rick Paddock, Russia correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, based in Moscow, and Paul Rauber from Sierra magazine. Rick was due in late July, and Paul and his wife, Marion, in early August. Rick was bringing a photographer, Yuri Gozyrev, who in the end illustrated both articles. Their interest was due to the wave of publicity produced by our new website. Maureen and I had been posting stories and photos regularly, and James Gosling had reported that the site was getting several thousand hits a day.
With another two visitors scheduled before the end of August, Mike McIntosh, the Ontario black bear rehabilitator, and our friend Dr. Margaret Horne, it was shaping up as a not very private summer. But it was also enjoyable to show off Chico, Biscuit, and Rosie to people who knew how to enjoy them. The best way to counter negative assumptions was to have observers come and record how the bears really were. We needed as much of this kind of publicity as we could get.
My first social occasion was a meeting in PK. The invitation came by e-mail from Jim Thorsell, a Canadian living in Geneva who worked for the World Conservation Union. It was a session between his organization and the Global Environmental Facility, the United Nations Development Program, and the World Bank. The invitation had been extended to both of us, but Maureen was holding fast to her commitment not to fly with me until my medical problem was fixed.
The meeting was at the Hotel Petropavlovsk, the closest thing PK has to a posh establishment. I had no idea why Jim Thorsell wanted me there, and it became no easier to understand as the meeting got underway. The session was about spending us$18 million in Kamchatka on environmental projects, and the first standard of eligibility ruled out Maureen and me. A specific Russian partner was necessary and we had none. In Russian terms, it was a lot of money, and I was pretty sure even a fraction of that amount would touch off a local feeding frenzy. Kamchatka was absolutely cash-starved. Most government employees hadn’t seen a paycheque since April. The agencies that employed friends like Tatiana and her husband Volodya, and Katya and Alexei, accomplished much while operating on a shoestring. It would be interesting to see what could be done with a few hundred thousand dollars. All I could do was hope our friends would be among those rewarded. Personally, all I got out of it was a plane ride.
MAUREEN: While Charlie was in Petropavlovsk meeting with Jim Thorsell, I continued to work on a print-casting project. Part of my exhibition plan was to have people walk in the footsteps of the bear as they entered a bear’s world. While in Kamchatka, I would cast bear tracks in plaster, then return with them to Canada where I would use the casts to print tracks in a more permanent medium. I would eventually build a pathway into the exhibition covered in these tracks of bears and other animals.
That was the plan, but first I had to get the tracks. Naturally, I assumed our cubs would supply many of them. I wanted their paw prints to be part of the larger story told about them in the exhibition. My first method was to gather mud from the marsh and to place a four-foot-long swatch of it on the path the cubs used most often when entering camp. After the cubs had travelled the path I went to check, and there wasn’t a single print on it. Next, I lured them to the mud pie by dragging a stick, a game they could never resist. But when we got to the mud, each bear daintily walked on the outer edges of the path so as to avoid it. Finally, I got it. The mud had my smell all over it. It was “Maureen’s mud,” and the cubs had been schooled to always avoid anything belonging to Maureen. Once I understood, I walked through the mud myself, and seeing this they decided it was okay for them too.
The track collection proceeded nicely, except that I was short a good sample of the right forepaw. Not long after, I discovered a wonderful mud flat on a major bear trail. I went there daily to collect the prints of a variety of bears. On July 15, I persuaded the cubs to come with me to the mud flat, and to my delight, they fanned out, each one leaving her personal track perfectly across it. After six weeks of trying, I had an identifiable set of prints for each of our bears. An hour later, I went back to examine all the prints and found the biggest set of bear prints I had ever seen. This bear must have come through while I was watching a family of foxes I’d become friendly with, no more than a hundred yards away. I cast this big bear’s footprints, as well as a set for each of our cubs. When I finally got back to the cabin, I was able to measure Big Daddy’s prints. The hind paw prints were fourteen inches long and nine wide. When Charlie saw them, he pointed out that they were each much larger than my head in diameter.
Rick Paddock and his photographer Yuri Gozyrev arrived at the lake on July 21, about the same time that a layer of smoke darkened our sky. It was drifting in from the west and, on my short wave radio, I found out it was caused by many forest fires on the mainland, across the Sea of Okhotsk. Some of these fires were near Khabarovsk and others in Manchuria. The smoke would trigger fog when humidity attached itself to the smoke particles.
This weather had complications for the photography, and it also mucked up our communication with the outside world. With so little sunlight hitting our solar panels, we didn’t have enough power to run our computer much of the time. The electric fence was also down, but even given intermittent power, the bears respected it. Its potential to jolt was now part of the world of the bears of Kambalnoye Lake, and they stayed clear.
Our own bears were very well mannered for the LA Times team, and again for Paul Rauber of Sierra after August 3. The only unusual incident came one day when Yuri was walking in line with the bears, in the guest spot between Biscuit and Rosie. Looking back, he saw a shot that appealed to him and he turned to get it. It was a shot of Rosie, and Yuri walked backwards to keep the distance between them that he wanted. Just then, Chico and Biscuit came face to face with a strange bear. They stopped dead and Yuri, still backpedalling, fell over Chico, landing heavily right on top of her. The strange bear ran away and the upshot was that Chico was given a double scare, first by the strange bear, then by the strange man.
Later, when we got to the lakeshore, I could see that Chico was watching Yuri very closely. My guess was she was trying to figure out if what had happened was an accident or intentional. I asked Yuri to talk to her, to explain that he was sorry. Yuri thought I was nuts. He could not fathom the notion of communicating with a bear. At the same time, I was sure it was important and insisted he do it. He should tell Chico, in Russian, that he was sorry, and he had to mean it. I told him to say he was “very” sorry, and to stress the “very.” He tried it a few times and, by the third attempt, I could tell he was getting some sincerity into it. Chico got the message as well. She turned away from him, and we were able to continue on. From then on, Chico acted as though nothing had occurred, behaving no differently with Yuri than with anyone else.
The visits went well, and both teams seemed satisfied when they left. Their articles and Yuri’s photographs would, in time, do our project a lot of good.
As August got underway, we started to notice that the bears passing our cabin were heading west. In even-numbered years, there is an ocean run of pink salmon, usually in August, and we surmised from the migration of bears that the pinks had arrived at the ocean mouth of river. I fired up the Kolb and flew west. Sure enough, the first mile above the ocean was stiff with pinks. Reasoning that it would still be a couple of weeks before the pink salmon would enter our lake and pass through it into Char Creek, where our bears could fish them, I made a major, and perhaps risky, decision: I decided to start feeding our bears again, until the supply of pinks rendered it unnecessary. I decided too that this would be the last time I’d do it.
As mentioned, the collective wisdom of bear experts is that we would have trouble when we stopped feeding. But I had come to doubt it. In any event, the final stoppage would provide a conclusive test. When I stopped the sunflower seeds, my hunch would be weighed against the experts’ opinion, and our reputation would hang in the balance.
On August 4, I flew to PK again to have an ultrasound test to see if my aneurysm was expanding. The doctor who had examined me last spring had lined up a specialist to interpret the test. The results showed that the ballooning area of my aorta was holding at two inches. Relatively good news.
The day after, I went to the airport to meet Margaret Horne, a retired psychiatrist from Kamloops whom I had guided in the Khutzeymateen, and Mike McIntosh. Mike had a dozen cubs and three adult black bears in his Ontario rehab facility at the time of his visit, cared for in his absence by his mother.
Mike, Margaret, and I attempted to fly south on August 7. I was in the Kolb, and Mike and Margaret had chartered a helicopter. Although there were no specific hairy moments, my entire flight felt dangerous. The cloud cover was low and dark from the still prevalent smoke. I was clearing the passes by no more than thirty feet. There was also a heavy headwind. It took four hours, often through heavy downpours of rain, to make it home, by which time I was out of daylight and almost out of gas. Margaret and Mike, meanwhile, had been forced back. They didn’t arrive for another twenty-four hours.
Mike and Margaret’s visit coincided with our making solid friends with an adult female bear we called Brandy. Back in 1996, Brandy had been the first bear at Kambalnoye to decide we were trustworthy. It was she who fed on pine nuts right outside our cabin and slept on the path we took each day to fetch water from the lake. This season, Brandy had three cubs and was again living in the vicinity of our cabin. Maureen named the cubs Gin, Tonic, and Rum.
In early August, the first run of sockeye salmon in the lake finished spawning and began to die off. This was the bears’ ideal fishing time. Just prior to Mike and Margaret’s arrival, Maureen and I had gone with our bears to the lake to give them encouragement with their fishing. They liked us to go along and still seemed to hold out vestigial hope that we would transform into proper bear mothers and catch them some fish.
When Brandy saw us coming to the stretch of beach she had staked out for herself, she quite politely tried to move us off. Our cubs sat down behind Maureen and me, letting us do the talking. We pleaded with Brandy to let us stay. She came within twenty-five yards of us before deciding we couldn’t be intimidated.
Now, a few days later, with Mike and Margaret in tow, we returned to Brandy’s beach. This time, the cubs approached Brandy on their own. Without apparent comment, she let them fish for salmon right next to her and her family. In an accepting manner, she sat and watched. When one of our bears caught a fish, she would come to us and parade back and forth with it in her mouth. She would also show off the fish to her sisters. Mike and Margaret had a great time watching our cubs and Brandy’s family, and another young dark-haired male whom Mike named Walnut.
On another outing, we went together, humans and bears, to Itelman Bay. On a small beach, our cubs fished in company with about seven other bears. If another bear approached them, the cubs would come in among the humans, where the other bears dared not go. Peering out from behind us, our bears were thumbing their noses at the other bears, and Margaret got a great kick out of that.
Overall, I had trouble that summer making sense of our cubs’ reactions to other bears. Sometimes, they would seek refuge among humans. Other times, strange bears would scare them right up the mountain. We could not tell from looking which bears would cause which reaction. It certainly had little to do with the bears being scary-looking, or at least not from our perspective. What I had to remind myself was that, for all our interaction with the cubs, we were still witnessing only ten per cent of their non-hibernating lives. We had no notion of many of their experiences, so it was natural for gaps to exist in our understanding.
I had wondered how Mike would feel around brown bears, given his experience was with the much smaller black bear, but he was relaxed from the start. He never got tired of being around them, and only darkness and hunger could get him into the cabin. In the evening, he and I talked bears until Maureen threatened to go stark raving mad if we didn’t stop.
Mike and Margaret were still with us on my birthday, August 19. When the cubs came up the path to say hello that day, Margaret and I went out to greet them. The fence that had given the cubs their protection in year one had long ago been taken down, but their cub house was still standing. I decided to untie the rope latch and swing the door open to see if they might be interested in checking it out. Immediately, all three entered and lay down to roll in the old dry grass that had been their bed when they were small. Then I went in with them, and so did Margaret. With all of us in there, and the cubs so big now, it was cozy. I chatted to them and scratched Chico’s head, much as I would have done when they were cubs, and a remarkable thing happened. Chico began to make the “churring” sound that Rosie made when she sucked on Biscuit’s fur. Rosie was still inclined to do this, but hadn’t been doing it right then. She was lying on the floor with her sisters, waving her feet around and looking happy. Soon Rosie chimed in with Chico on the sing-song, and then, for the first time ever, I heard Biscuit begin the strange “churring” noise as well.
Margaret and I could only laugh at what was going on, one of those infectious good times with the bears that can scarcely be done justice to in a story. Although I try to be careful about giving bear emotions the names of human emotions, I really do think this was pure nostalgia. Chico, Biscuit, and Rosie, all three, were struck by an emotion-laden memory for which Rosie’s nursing song was the appropriate hymn.
Two days before that magic birthday, some sombre news had come in over the short-wave radio. Russia had undergone an incredible economic collapse. On August 17, the ruble was devalued from six rubles to the U.S. dollar to thirty-five rubles per dollar, literally overnight. Though the devaluation and final meltdown were sudden, the symptoms had been everywhere for some time. In our very limited view of Russia and our limited understanding of economics, Maureen and I had still noted the “bubble” feeling in local finances. Prices of various services (helicopter charters, for example) were ridiculously high. People had been importing various foreign luxuries like TVs and VCRs at a clip that suggested wealth. Now, it was as if a portcullis had fallen, and all of it was history. It didn’t take an economist to figure out that the devaluation translated into an extraordinary diminishment of personal savings. The government safety net for the elderly vanished at the same time.
Given this situation, the power shortages and non-payment of government wages that had been going on since spring seemed likely to continue into winter. The suffering that lay ahead was almost unimaginable. There was no way of predicting how any of it would affect our lives and project, but we had made so many close Russian friends that our concern was no longer restricted to ourselves and our bears. Kamchatka was our second home, and it was in serious trouble.
August 23 was the day of Mike and Margaret’s departure. We had arranged for a Kuril Island helicopter flight to pick them up on its way through. It gave them a chance to add to their adventure a visit to that mysterious place before they went home. I had never been to the Kurils and was envious.
Though the helicopter arrangement had been made, the weather was bad, and I considered the whole plan uncertain. When the sky did open up on the twenty-third, I didn’t wait around to see if the helicopter would arrive. I flew over to Kurilskoy Lake to see if any other flights were scheduled for PK in case the Kuril Island one failed. In this way I missed the actual moment of Mike and Margaret’s departure and the totally unexpected and unwanted arrival of Vitaly Nikolaenko and his interpreter Stas.
