Almost from the beginning of our Kamchatka bear project, Maureen and I had considered how it should end. When the cubs were still the size of badgers, and I could pick them up one-handed by the scruff of their necks, we talked of going on until those little females were bear mothers, and Maureen and I were grandparents. It started out as a joke, but became a sincere target for us, and remained so year after year. As any such blessed events were unlikely until Chico and Biscuit were five or six years of age, we had a lot of project ahead of us as we completed year four and headed into year five.
There was also a feeling of things coming to maturity and fruition. Our real goal, above and beyond anything that would happen in our lives or the lives of Chico and Biscuit, was to cause real positive change in how the world regards bears and responds to them. In metaphorical terms, we had put our shoulders to a boulder many times our size. After four years of pushing, it suddenly felt different. It wasn’t exactly rolling down the hill, but it had perhaps begun to give a little. The act of pushing the stone seemed less lunatic.
The feeling that we were progressing towards our biggest goals also helped us accept those things that were never going to be. Around the millennium New Year, we received an e-mail from Vladimir Mosolov saying that, once again, his committee was refusing us more cubs for Kambalnoye Lake. Given Dr. Pazhetnov’s sight-unseen negative report in the fall, this wasn’t much of a surprise, but it still caused a dramatic change. We had tried and failed so often to get more cubs that being told no yet again should not have stopped us—but it did. Somehow, Maureen and I accepted that this decision was final. We would not try for new cubs again. Instead, we decided that watching Chico and Biscuit mature into parents and putting the anti-poaching program for South Kamchatka Sanctuary into top-notch working order were projects enough to fulfill us.
As we moved into year five, Maureen was putting the finishing touches on the powerful manifestation of what the bears of Kamchatka had drawn out of her as an artist: an exhibition of the substantial body of art that she had created since the beginning of our project. Immediately upon returning from Russia in the fall of 1999 she began creating a sculpture in the form of a concrete pathway of bear tracks, the ones she had cast in Russia, a “bearway” on which people would walk when entering the exhibition.
The exhibition was called Through the Eyes of the Bear and it was the inaugural event at Alberta’s new Art Gallery of Calgary. It was a huge success. And it was only the beginning of what was going to be an amazing year for Maureen. Components of Through the Eyes of the Bear were scheduled to travel to the city of Ljubljana in Slovenia, then to the Camac Art Centre in Marnay, near Paris, and on again the next fall to the Contemporary Art Centre in Moscow. For years I had watched Maureen struggle in a totally committed way. Now the world was going to experience what I had long enjoyed in private. There was little doubt of how much good these exhibitions would do for our project and its primary goal of a more balanced and benign view of bears.
Interest in the Calgary presentation was enormous, and there was some controversy, as some of the professional art community thought Muareen was popularizing her art too much. But rather than worry about that or bask in the glory, we had to pack ourselves up, along with the travelling version of the exhibition, and head for Slovenia. While the travelling edition went up in Ljubljana, I was scheduled to give four slide talks in the region. Then Maureen would be off to France, I to Canada, and somehow we would be ready for Kamchatka in May and June.
The trip Maureen and I took to Slovenia in the spring of 2000 is off the beaten track of this story, but worth mentioning for several reasons. Slovenia is situated between Hungary and the Adriatic Sea, and we arrived in the city of Ljubljana smack in the middle of a brown-bear controversy.
Local farmers had been having bear trouble, and, recently, one of them had been badly injured by a bear. This situation had touched off a reactionary fury and a demand that 200 of the country’s remaining 300 to 500 bears be destroyed. On the other side, Slovenia boasts a wildlife bio-diversity second only to Albania in all of Europe, and conservation advocates were fighting to see that bears stayed part of it. Tensions were high, and our arrival, obviously on the side of bears, may not have seemed as accidental as it was.
While Maureen prepared for her opening, I got the lowdown on the bear attack. It was a typical scenario. The farmer and his dog, walking in the woods, had come upon a female bear with her cubs. The dog ran ahead and barked at the bear. The bear took a run at the dog, who retreated and stood behind the farmer. The bear attacked the farmer, who was hurt badly enough to keep him in hospital for ten days. As in Canada, the tolerance in Slovenia is zero where bear attacks are concerned, despite the fact that such incidents are much rarer than, say, car accidents.
I had all this in mind when we did our slide lectures. One group we talked to were farmers. Their interest picked up when I said I had ranched in Alberta’s grizzly country for eighteen years. I showed them a video taken by a rancher friend on various ranches around Waterton Lakes National Park. At one point, a grizzly and her yearling cub are shown eating a cow that had died of natural causes. Other cows and calves graze calmly within feet of them. The Slovenian farmers watched with interest, though I knew they did not fully trust what they were seeing.
Another audience consisted largely of hunters. Again, I was able to win their attention by telling them I grew up in a hunting family. What I found out was that legislation compelled the hunters to do their bear hunting from a high stand over bait. Once again, I was very disappointed in the people who make a sport of killing. Shouldn’t a hunter have the honour of assuming some small share of the risk? Isn’t a high-power rifle advantage enough?
We were taken to one of these stands by a man who controlled a large hunting territory. We saw bear tracks, but the bears themselves were shy and nocturnal because of the hunting. The hunter was feeding the bears, because warm weather and a lack of snow had kept them from hibernating over the winter. I grilled him about whether the bears had shown any aggression as a result of the feeding. He said no. He claimed it had prevented the bears from going into nearby populated areas and from eating farmers’ crops. Non-hunters told me the practice was designed to control bear movement and increase the hunters’ advantage even more. I took it as more evidence that feeding bears, if done correctly, could become a way of preventing rather than causing bear-human scrapes.
One of our slide presentations was followed by a 70-minute TV debate with a local wildlife expert and a university professor. After watching an excerpt of Ian Herring’s film, the wildlife man called the story of our Kamchatka project “a fairy tale.” For this, he got a blast from Maureen. When she was through with him, he was more careful with his choice of words.
I couldn’t quite understand why these people were so incredulous when confronted with what we were saying and what they saw in our slides and videos. It seemed that, despite a long history of living with bears, the Slovenians were nonetheless persuaded by the idea of bear as unpredictable killer. At the same time, it was an education for us to see how well their bears did living in such a densely populated place. I saw a bear-crossing marked on a highway not far from several villages, and we were told that the bears made a habit of winding their way unobtrusively through these towns to get across the valley to the mountains on the other side. They had been doing it for hundreds of years. Slovenia has also made a considerable effort to keep their bears from having to cross major highways by creating over- and underpasses for them.
If the credibility gap between us could be bridged, there was a lot we could learn from one another. The best thing was that the Slovenians were willing to listen and share, and that their country had gone to the trouble and expense of bringing us in, which was really all we could ask. (To add a happy ending to the Slovenia story, the 200 threatened bears were saved when a more bear-friendly minister was installed.)
MAUREEN: As if continuing the theme from Slovenia my exhibition at Marnay, France, went up at the same time that a bear controversy was being aired between conservationists and the sheep and cattle farmers of the Pyrenees. The farmers wanted the few remaining brown bears to be removed, while the conservationists were arguing for them to stay and for the farmers to live with them in peace as their forefathers had known how to do. In France, I was often asked how farmers and grizzlies could ever possibly share the same country, and it helped to be able to trot out my central British Columbia ranch upbringing: a ranch where bears, cattlemen and cattle had coexisted for a long time.
After some frantic preparation back in Canada, I headed for Russia in May. Maureen stayed at home to complete a big sculpture commission— another bearway—and hoped to join me in late June.
When I arrived in Petropavlovsk to begin year five, the city was deep in snow and more storms were on the way. Naturally, my strongest urge was to get south to Chico and Biscuit. The shock of Rosie’s absence last spring was still reverberating in me somewhere, as was the scene of Biscuit running flat out, inches beyond the claws of the cannibal male. Chico and Biscuit were probably a hundred pounds bigger now, and much stronger and faster, but I knew that food conditions would determine the energy they would have to fight back if a cannibal happened to be operating in the valley again this spring. What kept me from getting south as quickly as I wanted was not bureaucracy, for a change, but weather. Due to a long storm, I didn’t get to Kambalnoye until June 2.
The flight south began the now-annual, one-week prelude to our project year: the reconnoitring of Chico and Biscuit’s behaviour that the administrators needed to satisfy themselves that our bears had not become dangerous. This time, the party included Tatiana, a new ranger named Igor Kuleshov, and me. We flew in by helicopter.
The young ranger’s recent life story provides some insight into the ranger system in Russia. Very recently, Igor had come from Moscow, where he had been a bus driver and a businessman’s bodyguard. He flew the 7,000 miles to Kamchatka on a one-way ticket, paid for by himself, with no job waiting. He had been lucky enough to get on as a ranger with the Kronotskiy Preserve. When he realized the job would take him deep into the wilderness, he asked the director for some equipment: an axe, a knife, a backpack. He was told no. He asked for an advance against his 450 rubles monthly salary (US$16) so he could buy some of it himself and was again refused. While he waited for the helicopter to take him south, he ran out of money altogether and spent the last couple of nights of rain and snow sleeping in the streets.
Igor had never seen a bear in his life. He had no formal training as a ranger. But he did have a dream of living self-sufficiently in the wild. After our week at Kambalnoye, he would be dropped off at the ranger cabin at Kurilskoy Lake for the summer.
The helicopter I had rented was small. Having emptied the cabin last fall, we had to take enough gear back in to support ourselves for the week. It was a squeeze, and the pilot had a little trouble getting the chopper off the ground. Flying south, my thoughts were mostly about Chico and Biscuit, but I did think about the bigger picture too. If the cubs had survived, and if they were as good-natured towards us as they had always been, would it finally make a difference to how grizzlies were perceived in the parts of the world lucky enough to still have them? Would the fact that they were unaggressive to humans, despite having been fed in their first and second years, affect the perception that feeding a bear always leads to danger? One of the stories I had heard at home was about eighteen starving grizzlies being shot at Rivers Inlet, British Columbia, because the salmon had failed to come to their river and they had gone, in their hunger, to the nearest town. If these bears could have been given corn or seeds to get them through, could they have stayed among the living?
As soon as the helicopter landed at Kambalnoye Lake, I knew the cabin had been broken into. A few shutters were off, and the door to the studio/storage annex stood open. I was under the impression that a ranger had been posted for the winter to the river-mouth cabin, and my first thought, or hope, was that he had skied upriver to Kambalnoye during the winter and stayed a while. But, as I looked around at the mess, in and outside the cabin, I couldn’t believe it. Everything was strewn around, not by bears but definitely by people. The linoleum had been hacked by an axe when the interloper had split wood indoors and missed. The place was really dirty. Two jerry cans of aircraft gas hidden in Maureen’s dark room were empty. Surely, a ranger would have more respect.
But, if it wasn’t a ranger, then who? The possibility I hated most was poachers on snow machines. This was more consistent with the state of the cabin and also fit the fact that there were almost no bears around. That day, with the spotting scope, we saw only one bear, on a distant ridge.
That night, I had a hard time sleeping. The wind was lashing the cabin. I still didn’t know what had happened to Chico and Biscuit. I kept imagining them coming out of their den, so innocent of humankind’s darker side. Everyone was afraid of the danger bears posed to people because of their lack of fear. I knew damn well that bears were the ones who were in danger.
But I had also seen evidence of a happier possibility. Outside the cabin on a bit of tundra that had melted out were signs of fresh digging, where a bear had been after roots. Near the cub house was a fresh track in the mud. Last year, I had seen the same signs in almost the same places. Given that the bit of tundra could only have melted within the last week or so, and that the damage in the cabin looked older than that, I persuaded myself that the cubs were probably still alive and maybe not far away. Clinging to that interpretation, I fell asleep.
By morning, the wind had dropped and the sun was shining. The three of us headed out after breakfast along the lake towards Itelman Bay. There is a sun-facing slope above that bay that melts early and supports a good growth of grass. Given how much time the cubs had spent in that vicinity last year, I chose it as our first objective. We travelled on the lake ice, which was all blown clear, watching carefully for the dark, rotten spots of candle ice. I was also watching the shore for bear carcasses.
Rounding the corner into Itelman Bay, I saw a raven about 400 yards away land and start pecking at something that looked like a bone. I searched higher and thought I saw motion in a dense thicket of alder. Looking carefully, I made out the shape of a bear. Then I spotted a second bear. It took some time for the two to move to where I could see more. Once they were in the open, I could see they were both light-coloured, one more than the other. I was sure it was Chico and Biscuit.
When they spotted us, they started to run away. We were standing close together and may have looked like one very large animal. I cupped my hands around my mouth and called as loud as I could, “Hey, little bears!” the same thing Maureen and I had been calling since they were little bears. They stopped, and Chico sat down. I called again, and they started down the mountain. I kept walking in their direction, but Tatiana and Igor stayed back. Watching two grizzlies plunging and sliding towards him was probably a bit much for Igor, who had never seen a bear before. Tatiana had seen our bears, but only when they were small.
The bears and I met where the raven had been pecking. I saw a bear skull, a couple of other bones, and some hair. It looked to me like the remains of a poached bear. It was an odd place to be dealing with the joy of seeing Chico and Biscuit so wonderfully alive. They had really grown, and Chico especially was fat. Biscuit was thinner but not unhealthy. Chico came right to me and I ran my hand down the length of her back. She lay down beside the bear skull. Biscuit sniffed my tracks and then rolled on the pieces of fur in the snow.
I signalled for Tatiana and Igor to come and they did, tentatively. The bears checked out these strange humans, and everything was soon fine. I was struck again by how quickly humans can understand by a bear’s reaction that everything is okay.
Chico was chewing on the skull by now, which looked like it had been dug out of the snow that same day. It still had some meat on it, and she must have considered it quite a prize. While she was chewing on it, I decided to ask to look at it for signs of a bullet hole. It occurred to me that she would let me do this even though grizzlies can be very dangerous to a passerby when they have claimed a dead animal as theirs. When I first reached for the skull, Chico swatted gently at my hand. Then she lay on the skull and pressed it into the snow. Finally on the fourth try, she let me take it. I examined it and gave it back. It had been 261 days since I’d last seen her, but the trust between us held. There was no bullet hole in the skull.
All of us, bears included, eventually walked back along the lakeshore to the cabin. Back on the cabin porch, we sat and watched the bears continue their rounds until they disappeared back into Itelman Bay. The more I considered the skull and remains, the less sure I was that the bear had been poached. It was the skull of an old female, who could have died as a result of not denning. An ancient or injured bear, who can’t put on enough weight to survive the winter, might not dig a den. Such a bear will wander until the cold and snow overtakes them and they die. As far as there being so few other bears, they could have already decamped for the east coast. All of which brought me around to the notion that the cabin had been occupied by rangers, very messy rangers.
As for Chico and Biscuit, our bears had passed another enormous threshold and test. It seemed like all bear watchers had been in agreement that the bears would turn on us eventually, but they ascribed different dates to that event. As of this peaceful reunion, most of those “best before” dates had been surpassed. We were getting into territory where even the worst doubters had to admit that something was happening here beyond what they understood.
If the bears were failing to provide drama that week, I managed to inject a little myself. Tatiana, Igor, and I were out with Chico and Biscuit on a sun-facing mountainside above the lake. The bears were eating early greens on a steep ledge. Wanting to get some pictures of them from such an elevated perspective, I followed. Holding onto a rock on the ledge above me, I took a step out to some grass and slipped. Off balance, I put more pressure on the rock above, and it pulled out. That was enough to propel me off the ledge.
The drop was six feet to another ledge. It was steeply tilted, and it felt like landing on a ski slope. I catapulted off and dropped again. In this fashion, I went off three ledges until the last one cartwheeled me onto a nearly vertical snow slope headed for open water at the lake edge. On my third flip down the snow, I got my feet planted and stopped.
When all this began, I had the digital camera and my binoculars hanging from my neck. I had the thirty-five-millimetre camera gripped in my hand. The centrifugal force of going arse over teakettle threw off the binoculars and the digital camera and sent them hurtling towards the lake. There was a five-foot-wide crevasse in the snow near the bottom and the waterproof binoculars fell into it. The not-waterproof digital camera bounced over the crevasse into the lake.
Seeing the camera briefly afloat, I raced down and plunged in to grab it. By then it had sunk in two feet of water and was about as wet as it was going to get. Through the 100-foot fall, I had held onto the thirty-five millimetre camera, and it seemed to be all right. (When I processed the roll of film later, there was a great shot of Biscuit on a ledge followed by eight frames of the world from various angles. I must have had my finger on the release button and on each bounce down the mountain taken a picture.)
Once the commotion ended, I looked up and saw three sets of eyes keenly upon me: Tatiana’s, Igor’s, and Biscuit’s. Biscuit was peering over the edge of the ledge I had first fallen from, and she was studying me carefully. Chico had wandered off up the mountain and missed the excitement.
The fact that I was good and shaken is evidenced by how long it took me to notice that I had no glasses. Without them, I wasn’t much good at looking for them either. It took twenty minutes for Igor to spot them in the bottom of the crevasse. He squeezed down and got them.
Back at the cabin, I drained the digital camera and rigged up something so that it could hang over the oil stove and dry slowly at low heat. It made no difference. I put out a call to Maureen as soon as I could, asking her to bring another.
Then there was my physical state. I had definitely done something to a rib, but it wasn’t hurting much. I assumed it was only cracked. Two mornings later, I was reaching to light the stove when I sneezed. There was a sudden, severe pain. The cracked rib must have been one attached to the diaphragm, and the sneeze was enough to break it.
For a couple of days, I was flat on my back and very uncomfortable. In a message to the website, I wrote: “Please don’t worry. It’s not about to break loose and stab my lung or anything like that.” My greatest fear was the hiccups. After two days, I could tell I was on the mend, and by the end of the second day I was able to walk, much to the relief of Tatiana and Igor.
By that time, the weather was bad and the helicopter was overdue by two days. We took advantage of an opening in the fog to walk around the lake. After a couple of miles, we rounded a corner and saw a big female with two big cubs coming towards us. The bears were on the lake ice, and they didn’t run when they saw us. They all stopped, put their noses up, had a good sniff, and kept coming.
Tatiana was not used to facing such a situation without a rifle, and she didn’t like it. I asked her to relax because I could tell it was Brandy, Gin, and Tonic. Brandy came right up and I stepped out to say hello. The cubs were two years old by now. They were curious and a bit shy at first but soon seemed comfortable with us.
I was talking away to Brandy during this greeting, and Chico and Biscuit must have heard my voice. They came over the hill to see what was going on, and Brandy promptly decided to run them off, leaving her cubs with us humans while she did so. It was a nearly exact scenario as several occasions last summer. Tatiana thought we were in terrible trouble now, to be so much closer to Brandy’s cubs than she was, and I had to talk fast to settle her down about the situation. After chasing off Chico and Biscuit, Brandy came leaping and sliding down the drifts back to us. She never showed the slightest concern about who had been minding her cubs.