THERE OUGHT TO BE BEARSTHERE OUGHT TO BE BEARS

Red Almer, versatile plumber-cum-publican and bandsman, erstwhile county commissioner and high-top logger, sat opposite me in the living room of Swede Park. A water-heater crisis averted, we settled down to an ale before the cookstove as an October gale ripped leaves off the oaks outside and pasted them to the windows like schoolroom decorations. Red’s scarlet jacket and red Oasis tavern cap echoed the oak leaves and seemed to stain his paler russet hair beneath the cap. We talked about the early deer season. I asked Red whether he’d seen any bears this year.

“My hunting partner saw one last week,” Red replied. “But that’s the first one I’ve heard of for a while. Twenty-five years ago, I’d see a bear every weekend. We’d run into them in the brush, or hear ’em crunching apples in the old orchard up East Valley. But anymore you hardly ever see a bear. You can’t find one if you want to.” Red frowned at the thought.

Joe Florek, a current commissioner and a logger, told me a similar tale in a café conversation. “Used to be, when a cow was sick and you couldn’t afford the four bucks for the vet, the cow wasn’t worth it, you’d shoot it and take it into the woods. The bears would clean it up in no time. You can’t do that anymore—no bears.” Joe went on to relate a tale of walking down a long log and meeting a bear coming up the log right toward him. Joe froze and the bear kept coming. When the bear got close enough to spot and smell the man with whom it shared the log, it started, tumbled over, and scampered back down again. Joe tells the tale with real delight, and it is obvious he misses the bears.

“Between the hounds and guys hunting with CB radios and jeeps, they haven’t got a chance,” Joe explained. “Although I did know of one ol’ bear, he escaped into that tangle of brush up Duck Creek we call the Torture Chamber. If you’ve ever been in there you know what I mean. It’s about the only place a bear can get peace.”

Our bear-talk continued months later at a meeting. “And another thing,” Joe picked up, “we could cut down on a lot of spraying of herbicides if the bears came back. They used to eat the salmonberry shoots down so they never got out of hand.” Joe and his colleague, Commissioner Bob Torppa, reminisced on how they ate the shoots too as kids—the Indians called it “shinny”—but without the bears, you don’t have the tender young shoots since the salmonberry goes all rank and tall, so the logging companies spray it along with the alder.

So it’s not just me. In seven years, and scores of trips into the woods, I have yet to see a single black bear in the Willapa Hills: and that seems perfectly strange to me, for the hills look like bear country. I began to think it was bad luck, or that bears were more secretive here than where I know them elsewhere; or maybe I just wasn’t looking hard enough. But no: according to the guys who should know, the old-timers, the hunters, the loggers, and the pioneers, there really aren’t many bears around these days.

One of the few palpable benefits of clear-cutting is the creation of vigorous seral scrub that black bears like. They require a diversity of habitats and foods, mature woods as well as successional; clearcuts by themselves won’t do. But as part of a landscape matrix, cuts and burns and blowdowns and insect infestations create that untidy adolescent kind of forest that just suits scavenging bears. So by all rights, one of the compensations of life in a largely logged-off land should be frequent sightings of bruins. But it doesn’t work that way. Not satisfied with taking the trees, the timber companies have taken away the bears as well.

“Why might this be?” ask visitors. The ostensible answer is that bears eat trees, so the timber growers dislike them. And so they do. Bears do eat trees. They favor the cambium layer of young Douglas-firs and hemlocks, which they may girdle while stripping the tasty layer; or the succulent terminal shoots of younger trees. This means they like little Christmas trees as well. If they don’t kill the trees outright, they may damage their growth and form. So, on the surface, it seems that the tree growers have a case against bears. But how many trees do they really hurt?

One day in July, I hiked with British visitors on the Mount Angeles trail from Hurricane Ridge, Olympic National Park. Someone spotted a bear a few hundred feet below us. As we stopped to watch, we saw two cubs emerge from nearby foliage to join their mother. She sat on her haunches and pulled the tips of little subalpine firs down into chomping range, then she and her cubs took turns eating the new growth as we might munch asparagus tips. Made it look so good that I later tried the closely bundled, soft needles of a fir-tip myself. While satisfying to bite into, they made a terribly bitter taste in my mouth. (But then beavers love aspen bark, which is even more bitter.) After this display, I never doubted that bears eat trees.

Yet—funny thing: I also noticed that there were still plenty of trees around where the bears were working. Right there in the national park, where the bears live abundant and unhunted, lo, the subalpine forest stood intact. Extensive hiking at different altitudes failed to reveal a single area where the bears could be implicated in deforestation or serious stand-damage, outside of small glades here and there. Porcupines, I am not alone in observing, take a greater collective tree toll than bears. Of course, those Olympian forests were not the cornrow conifer stands favored by the corporate timber interests. Rather, they shag and poke and clamber together at different heights, ages, and species, making mixed systems of which the bears and their appetites are a part.

The logging giants (who had names more like Weyerhaeuser and Zellerbach than Bunyan) wanted no such dynamic woodlands in place of the old growth they first removed, so they initiated practices to discourage undesirable species. One of the best known and least popular of these is aerial spraying of herbicides to prevent regrowth of alder. Another is reduction of populations of animals that might eat the preferred trees. Bears were targeted, along with concentrations of deer and elk that might browse on young conifers. Soon the belief that bears and firs could not coexist became widespread, despite their obvious coevolution.

The pogrom against offending browsers has had three prongs. First, the companies hired, until quite recently, their own professional hunters, with the remit to go forth and plug as many bears as possible. Second, private hunters are encouraged to do the same. Each year the companies print a map to the log roads of the Willapas for free distribution to hunters, on which areas of heavy game populations have been highlighted by shading. (By varying the color, they give the impression of new maps; but as far as I can tell the maps are never updated, except perhaps to add new mistakes and misleading information.) Third, the companies encourage the hunting of bears by packs of hounds in damaged areas, and the hound clubs are only too happy to oblige. Washington and several other states still permit this unsporting, medieval practice: the bears (or pumas) don’t stand a chance; having been treed by the hounds, they are followed by rabid men with high-powered rifles.

These practices can continue only through the complicity of the Washington Department of Game. Without it, bears could not legally be hounded, professionally hunted, or otherwise overhunted here or elsewhere in the state. This really came home to me one day early this year when I entered Appelo’s general store in Gray’s River and saw posted some new game-season regulations: there was to be a spring bear hunt in this district. A spring hunt, when sows are with cubs and weak from hibernation, their most vulnerable time; in these hills—these hills, where I’ve never seen a bear at all! And with no bag limit at all.

Archers as well as riflemen and houndsmen are encouraged to hunt (in the process wounding and harassing) bears far beyond what the population will withstand. This can only be accounted for by the Game Commission’s buckling under to the timber companies and hunters. Citizens’ petitions to the Game Commission to stop bear hunting with hounds in certain districts have been ignored. In fact, the hound lobby has been catered to aggressively, through the adoption of “Hot Spot” black bear damage hunts. Under this program, the game department sends dog packs to the aid of private and public landowners complaining of bear damage. Packs may chase and catch bears beyond the permit boundaries, leaving nonproblem bears vulnerable. And the word is out that damage claims often originate with the hunters themselves, who tip off landowners to bogus bear problems in order to get permits. The managers of the wildlife resource go along with it, in an apparent attempt to satisfy both hound and timber interests at the same time.

So what does it get them? A few more young trees, fewer certainly than their foresters themselves will cut during pre-commercial thinning a few years down the line. It’s true: when the regrowth manages to come in densely (where the soils haven’t been laterized or eroded by steep-slope logging and compaction), crews will cut thousands of young firs and hemlocks so as to let the others thrive—stuffing the downed trees into the spaces between the standing crop in an unsightly manner that blocks all travel over the forest floor. What the bears took up to this point can matter little. So why not accept the modest depredations of the bears as a precursor to precommercial thinning, perhaps reducing the need for stand management later on?

The foresters reply that bears actually prefer the best trees after thinning: Douglas-firs twenty to thirty feet in height, twelve to fifteen inches in diameter. The Washington Forest Protection Association (WFPA) maintains that black bears destroy millions of dollars’ worth of commercial Douglas-fir trees each year on public and private timberlands. Others feel that figure is highly inflated, based on extrapolated costs and profits not likely to be realized in any case. No doubt, some bear loss is incurred by the industry. But is it worth the whole of the bear population over an entire district?

One biologist engaged in bear management told me that an aerial survey for bear damage is like looking for dead blades of grass here and there in a lawn. Except for the occasional patch, where a troublesome bear could be dealt with on an individual basis if necessary, the degree of damage appears to be greatly overrated.

Bears should be viewed as a contribution to the vitality of the forest. If they entail costs to those privileged to harvest the forest resource, then the cost must be borne. Black bears should be a part of every working forest in Washington. Those glorious forests that built the industry should have all their working parts intact—that’s how they were made in the first place. The greatest temperate forests on earth had bears in them. Why shouldn’t their successors, pale and depleted replacement though they be, have their bears too?

Interestingly, one of the bruins’ chief persecutors thinks the woods should not be bearless. Ralph Flowers is Animal Damage Control supervisor for the WFPA. As such. he has overseen the battle against bears in the woods for ten years. Prior to that, Flowers served WFPA as a forest protection agent for sixteen years, trapping and snaring bears himself. He is responsible for recommendations to the Game Commission concerning bear damage hunts. Yet, Flowers claims a strong concern “for the bear as a resource to be enjoyed by future generations.”

Pointing out that Japanese foresters on Honshu have controlled bears so effectively as to have eliminated entire local populations, Flowers has been looking for another way. “A system of reducing bear damage levels other than killing bears,” he says in a WFPA report, “would prove an invaluable asset to the timberland owner as well as to the wildlife resource.”

Flowers explains that black bears strip the bark of rapidly growing, fifteen- to thirty-year-old conifers in order to feed on the exposed sapwood. This takes place mainly between the middle of March and the end of June, when the cambium layer is changing to sapwood and the bark peels readily. Bears cease stripping trees when the trees grow tougher and berries ripen in summer. Sugars, trace minerals, and perhaps some additional elements are thought to comprise the trees’ allure for bears. Noting that damage tended to occur shortly after bears emerge from their winter dens, “when the animal’s physical condition and the availability of nutritious food are both at their nadir,” Flowers proposed that a partial solution might be achieved through an intensive supplemental feeding program during the critical period.

Subsequently, Flowers and the WFPA launched an experiment involving sugar-beet pellets impregnated with minerals that were left about in areas where bears might find them. The objective was to satisfy the beasts’ spring needs with a ready source that would cause them to leave the trees alone. First year results on five test plots adjacent to the feeding stations were encouraging, showing substantial decrease in damage levels. Better pellets will be field tested in 1986.

The study suggests that a full-scale program of supplemental feeding, if successful, would be cost-effective. And the fact that such an approach exists at all shows the WFPA’s sensitivity to public dissatisfaction about continued bear slaughter. “As Ralph nears retirement age,” a WFPA press release confides, “he has been looking for a way to save the bears as well as the trees.” I would guess his retirement would be more satisfying if he succeeds. And I, for one, would be happier.

Of course, there is no guarantee that the timber companies would adopt the bear-pellet procedure across their empires. The Willapa Hills, while included in the study, will apparently provide “control” sites where spring hunts and “Hot Spot” hunts will carry on as usual for the time being. While I am intrigued and encouraged, I plan to withhold unbridled praise for such a reform until I see it in practice throughout the region.

Some may object to the unnatural nature of the feeding program. But this in itself would be nothing new: since when have the timber growers followed any natural precepts whatever? Whatever nature does, they can do better, they think. It is not that one opposes management; even nature reserves require intensive management at times. But land management should be, in Ian McHarg’s fine phrase, design with nature—not instead of nature. A highly manipulated forest yields—for a limited time, until disease or erosion or overcutting or market factors take over—a higher profit. So nature gets dumped in the balance, along with the bears. At least this new form of manipulation promises to redress that balance to some extent—and I’m all for it.

Ironically, just as the pressure from the logging lobby should be cooling with the retreat of the corporations to their big-city lairs, the hound clubs are growing in power and organization. A wildlife agent I spoke with figures the dog-followers exert more pressure to keep the heat on bears than the timber companies do.

The combined result of all these forms of directed persecution, together with the removal of nearly all the big-timber sanctuaries, hibernation sites, and privacy by overextensive logging, has been the extreme depletion of the black bear in the Willapa Hills. Only on Long Island do they remain numerous, thanks to isolation and old growth. We have lost a grand wildlife spectacle to the profit books of the timber bosses and the bizarre pleasures of the hound hunters; all the people who care about bears—many loggers and hunters included—have lost out in the process.

But that’s not all of the story. I frankly don’t believe that the bears make that much difference to the profitability of the logging sides. The extensive experience of many woodsmen with whom I have talked makes that clear. There is another factor operating here, and I believe it has to do with historic attitudes toward predators in general, as well as a universal need for a scapegoat.

Dr. Stephen Kellert, of Yale University’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, has conducted extensive polls on American attitudes toward wildlife. His fascinating findings have shown, among other things, that predators continue to receive the brunt of public censure. True, attitudes have changed sufficiently for bounties to be mostly a thing of the past and for poisons to have been reduced in predator control (although the Reagan administration has brought back the use of poisons on the public ranges banned since Richard Nixon’s term). Wolves and mountain lions now have their vociferous clienteles, just as whales do, calling for their conservation and celebration. But as Kellert has shown, this constituency exists largely among the young, well-educated, urban population. Rural attitudes still tend to debase predators and to consider them enemies to be tightly controlled, if not eradicated.

Of course, there has been some historical cause for competitive feelings toward predators; these animals did pose a certain threat to humans and livestock. Yet incidence of wolf and mountain lion injuries to humans has been vanishingly small; and while predation on stock has always occurred, it can usually be controlled by removing the offending individual animal rather than attacking the population outright. Even if staunch attitudes toward predators may have had some basis in reason during pioneer days, they no longer make any sense.

Nonetheless, wool growers, cattlemen, hunters, foresters, farmers, and others continue to clamor for the wholesale destruction of coyotes and bears and the strict cordoning of cougars and wolves. And the people in general, especially rural people, go along with it. They may not string owls and hawks up to the fence posts the way they used to do, but they still view raptors and predators in general in judgmental, suspicious, and often downright negative terms. Of course, there are many exceptions, and predator enlightenment is slowly spreading across the land. But the commercial interests seek to keep the big-bad-wolf myths alive.

How does the antipredator lobby get away with it, when the facts are against it? Why do the people give it the time of day? There are reasons. For one, many of the rural people I know are hunters, so they don’t oppose the killing of animals in general, and more than likely they’ve shot a coyote or a bear themselves. For another, they suspect the urban-environmentalist/university establishment that proffers the new attitudes and sympathize instead with the agricultural interests on the other side of the predator issue. After all, their meal ticket comes off the land. If they can be convinced that predators threaten their livelihood, they will be willing to buy the kill’em-off line. Fortunately, a lot of farmers and foresters are smarter than that.

But one other aspect, I believe, keeps the lies alive: predators make a great scapegoat. Working on suspicious attitudes to begin with, it’s not hard for problem-fraught producers to enlist sympathy for their contention that predators are the roots of evil. Wool growers in Wyoming, for example, experience high mortality among their lambs due to rough terrain, harsh weather, disease, drought, an almost total lack of postnatal care, and other factors, among which coyotes come way down the list. The numbers are in on this, and it’s clear that coyotes scavenge on dead lambs a lot more often than they kill live ones. So the sheepmen, in their frustration at trying to run sheep where they don’t belong, where they have converted enormous tracts of public land from rich shortgrass prairie into poor sageland through overgrazing, at the expense of the pronghorn as well as the range, heavily subsidized all the while, need a scapegoat: and the coyote just fills the bill, along with (absurdly) eagles. The poison pogrom across the West, deadly to nontarget wildlife as well, has been the result.

Likewise, cattlemen losing stock in dangerous terrain are likely to blame cougars, wolves, and grizzlies first and ask questions later. So it is, I believe, with foresters and bears: while some loss due to black bears no doubt occurs (just as some cougars eat cows), they receive the blame for a great deal more damage than they do. When a stand fails to regenerate due to damaged soils or poor reseeding or planting, it’s easy to blame the bears.

So the timber interests have abetted, encouraged, and even carried out the exorcism of the bears. For example, as a part of the much-vaunted Shelton Unit project, whereby the troubled Simpson Timber Company and the U.S. Forest Service pooled their lands for long-term productive management in the 1940s, bears were persecuted vigorously. With the active cooperation of both the Washington State Game Department and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, bears were hunted, hounded, and trapped into rarity. Around five hundred bears were killed in three years on the unit.

McCleary, Washington, a small town situated near the Shelton Unit, holds an annual bear festival in midsummer. I heard years ago that the Game Department opened the season and bag prior to the event so that as many terrorist bears might be brought to justice as possible; then a huge bear stew was concocted and the local populace indulged in some atavistic rite that might have come from the pages of Richard Adams’ Shardik, having to do with the vanquishment of the beast and the courtship of fecundity.

This version seemed overblown, so I went to McCleary recently to inquire after the bear festival. It is indeed still held in midsummer each year, and it serves the function of a popular village fete. Yes, they still serve bear stew. But, as I learned from a pioneer whose family has long been involved, most of the meat now is beef. A bit of canned bear from the previous season goes into the pot for authenticity’s sake. And the history of the festival had to do with two newspaper editors vying over who had the tastiest bears in their district, rather than a mass rite of revenge left over from a prehistoric age.

I saw no Neanderthals on that visit, although friends who have attended the festival have reported some on the other end of a Bud. The people I talked with, all enthusiastic about the festival, could hardly be thought of as bloodthirsty bear-baiters. My informant, a gentle ranchwoman, told me that bears were seldom sighted any longer near McCleary. “I never touch the stew myself,” she added. I asked if she didn’t like bear meat. “It’s not that,” she explained. “I just don’t believe in killing the bears!”

I’m glad to know that the McCleary bear festival is not the grotesque and degenerate exercise I’d pictured, involving the slaughter of all available bears and offering up their remains in the main-street blood-feast. Still, the Shelton Unit bear offensive and others like it have accomplished the same result. And few of her neighbors likely share that sensitive woman’s attitude toward bears. The pioneer prejudice toward bears and all predators is alive and well in western Washington.

My ire on the issue first flared when I read a Seattle newspaper article in the late 1960s hailing an Aberdeen woman for her singular success at shooting bobcats. As I recall, she would go out in the woods with a Luger pistol, track the cats, and plug ’em for no other reason than putative “sport” and dislike—she didn’t even use the pelts—averaging around one hundred bobcats per annum! That was after bounties but before closed seasons, and she could shoot all she could find. The heroic terms in which she was portrayed angered me as much as the facts themselves. That this hateful woman could remove an order of magnitude more bobcats from the woods every year than most of us would ever see in our lives struck me as preposterous; that she could be lionized for it, outrageous.

I wrote a rejoinder, “A Case for Predators,” that the Seattle Times published in the Sunday magazine along with a color illustration of a coyote in the sunrise by Bernard Martin. Naively, I thought my counterthrust and the writings of other champions of predators in the embryonic green press would turn the tide of predator prejudice. To an extent, attitudes have changed in the past twenty years; but as Kellert’s survey shows, not by anywhere near 180 degrees.

As I’ve mentioned, one needs to recognize how deep-seated was the pioneers’ antipathy toward large carnivores. Settlers had always battled the beasts, that’s how it was—wolves and bears were wiped out in Great Britain soon after the Norman Conquest, California’s golden bear (a race of the grizzly) went out with the gold rush and became extinct in this century; so what’s new? Charles Lathrop Pack’s progressive text, The School Book of Forestry, hadn’t a good word for predators in 1922: “Predatory animals, such as wolves, bears, mountain lions, coyotes and bobcats also live in the forest. They kill much livestock each year in the mountain regions of the. Western States and they also prey on some species of bird life. The Federal and some State governments now employ professional hunters to trap and shoot these marauders. Each year the hunters kill thousands of predatory animals, thus saving the farmers and cattle and sheep owners many thousands of dollars.” I remember the ads in the back of Boy’s Life in the fifties: “Enjoy a glamorous career—become a government hunter—write the North American School of Conservation,” went the line, accompanied by a Smokey-hatted, rugged character holding a massive puma’s paw in his own, his burnished badge condoning the murder and promising the fun of a lifelong cat-track. The romance of tracking marauders with a carbine and a badge and that hat temporarily overcame my love of wildlife and I wrote away for the details. I believe it was a Disney film of a treed cougar being shot that made me change sides. When I finally got my Smokey hat it was in the capacity of national park ranger-naturalist rather than cougar-basher. Anyway, government hunters went out about then and the ads are no more. Yet the killing continues, hindered but not prevented by closed seasons and bag limits.

Even the Christ-figure of conservation. Aldo Leopold, advocated the extermination of bobcats in New Mexican forests in his early days as a wildlife agent. Later he changed his mind as he came to realize the importance and grandeur of predators in the ecosystem. And it was his classic study of mountain lions and deer on the Kaibab Plateau of the Grand Canyon country that really launched the popular idea of a desirable balance between predators and prey.

Ecologists have since challenged Aldo Leopold’s blithe connection between numbers of lions and the health of the deer herd. When the lions are gone, the deer overpopulate and starve, went the simple argument. Now it seems the story is more complicated than that, and that predators may not “control” the numbers of prey in quite such a direct manner. Nonetheless, it is clear that predators and their prey relate intimately and disrupting one will affect the other. As this idea penetrated the collective skull, people began to ask whether we shouldn’t keep a few predators on hand, for purposes of balance and as an appreciative resource in their own right. Aldo’s son, Professor A. Starker Leopold, was appointed to chair a federal commission charged with looking into and ultimately reforming federal practices of predator control.

Soon bounties disappeared and seasons were introduced for most carnivores. Yet absurdities remain: if the Aberdeen cat-killer were still around, she would need only a valid hunting license to hunt bobcats, and though she would have to confine her slaughter to the open season of October through March, she could still kill as many as she wanted in that period: there is no bag limit!

She would, however, face stiffer competition, since the hound packs and trappers pursue wildcats as well as bears. Although they take perhaps 90 percent of the bobcats killed, the hounds have fewer restrictions than the trappers. The numbers of each group are growing. Widespread unemployment in timber-dependent districts has turned many out-of-work loggers into trappers. Falling back on the first resource of the explorers, these latter-day mountain men run traplines for a wide array of furbearers. Animal-rights people deplore the leg-hold trap (I agree with them: it is barbaric) and conservationists believe the annual allowable take of bobcats and lynx set by international treaty and state policy, is far too high. But at least a value has been placed on the animals beyond a bounty aimed at their elimination. Other values, such as the experience of sighting a living bobcat, have not yet been given much importance. Surely, the number of persons who would rather watch than catch a cat outnumber the trappers and houndsmen by a wide margin.

Too late, it seems, has the new interest in predators come to Willapa. Bears, pumas, bobcats, and wolves, if there ever were any, have all been exterminated or drastically reduced by settlers, trappers, hound packs, and professional and private hunters. Only coyotes proliferate. My friend Red and others believe we have quite a few more coyotes than we need. If so, their overabundance is another expression of the imbalances caused by lack of the larger meateaters. Without the competition of the larger animals, and because they are able to adapt to human environments, coyotes proliferate. if they are a problem (I’m not convinced), then it’s a problem we brought on ourselves.

I did see a young mountain lion on a logging road near Deep River a couple of years ago and considered it a near miracle. Only for a few seconds did the puma appear before vanishing into the density of the alders. I have sought cougars in many places, have even found their fresh tracks outside my tent on a Vancouver Island beach. But I had never before succeeded in sighting one.

That brief moment’s encounter with the rusty, loop-tailed cat mattered enormously to me. Yet it is not an experience I can reasonably look forward to repeating in these parts. Still fairly abundant in Olympic National Park, mountain lions may be hunted with hounds outside the park’s protective bounds. Cougars need undisturbed conditions, and the level of activity outside national parks and wilderness areas tends to discourage them. Nor do many places offer the abundance of game necessary to ensure both the hunter’s wants and the cougar’s requirements. Throughout the West, the mountain lion most certainly does not receive the lion’s share of the meat.

What has the local dearth of predators meant to their prey? One might expect a concomitant increase in deer and elk, spared the substantial annual take of absent pumas. But black-tailed deer are not particularly abundant here, nor have they undergone any spectacular population boom and crash as was supposed to have happened at Kaibab, post-puma. Red told me that, as a deputy, he helped recover road-killed deer in the county in 1956. In that year, eighty-six carcasses were recovered on county roads; this year there have been three. Elk, too, are much scarcer overall than previously. Red blames doe and cow seasons, formerly employed as a sop to the companies that wanted game eliminated.

Jay Brightbill, local wildlife agent, believes that the reduction of diversity through forest monoculture and the increase in the size of clearcuts (leaving less edge) has had more impact on the game than specific hunting policies. Either way, it has to do with heavy-handed forest management, and it comes home to roost in the broken branches of the local ecosystem.

As I’ve said, the companies give out free maps to direct hunters to sections of their holdings where they would like to see the game reduced still further. The maze of logging roads and the maps give poachers an easier assignment, and spot-lighting is common. Joe Florek and virtually all of the old-timers I speak with agree with Red in the matter of deer: there used to be more, bigger, and better animals. So the absence of predators has not had a chance to stimulate a boom in the game herds. Rather, the heavy pressure of hunters on the herds helps to prevent the return of the cougars.

Perhaps no other issue illustrates the degree to which wildlife has been perturbed by intensive human land use better than the situation at the Columbian White-tailed Deer National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge, a strip of Columbia River bottomland and islands, stretches between the two Wahkiakum towns of Cathlamet and Skamokawa. The refuge was established in 1972 to provide sanctuary for some 230 of the 350 remaining individuals of the federally designated endangered Columbian white-tailed deer. This disjunct and distinct race of the common eastern deer lost most of its habitat to land clearing for settlement and impoundments from the Columbia River dams. When Congress decided to protect and encourage the little reddish deer, the legislation called for reclamation of some of their old habitat in Wahkiakum County.

Establishment of the refuge required the displacement of a number of farming families and their homes. This gave the refuge and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service a bad image from the beginning: families whose forebears had worked hard to build homes and win pastures from swampland watched them go back to what they saw as worthless wasteland, and they resented it deeply. Sour feelings intensified when the service leased part of the refuge to a single farmer, not one of the originals, for a profitable sharecropping program aimed at enhancing habitat, furnishing feed for waterfowl, and generating some management monies.

Furthermore, the locals were convinced that the whitetails thrived under the old farm system, without federal intervention; and that since the refuge came in they’d gone downhill and become pests in Puget Island fields and in gardens outside the refuge. Certain biologists believed that the USFWS was managing the refuge more for waterfowl than for deer, by clearing willow and alder scrub for grassland under the pretense that the deer needed more grazing. In fact, studies confirmed that the whitetails were not in the best of health and required the scrub browse provided by the woodlots in addition to the grass of the pastures. When I came here in 1979, few good words could be heard about the refuge.

Then K-M Mountain and many surrounding second-growth forest remnants were intensively logged. This reduced cover at the same time hunting pressure was growing. A stressed herd of more than one hundred elk moved onto the refuge. They formed a spectacle that everyone enjoyed, even those who couldn’t care less about the scruffy little deer. To many locals, the whitetails were damned in any case by the attention shown them by the feds, bird-watchers, and city folks. In contrast, most of the cars and trucks that stopped along the refuge roadway to view the elk herds at dusk bore local plates. At last the refuge came to have some value in the eyes of its neighbors. The rutting great bulls and strutting big cows accomplished what no amount of government diplomacy could do.

But it couldn’t last. Under the Endangered Species Act, the refuge personnel were bound to manage for the listed whitetail. The state Department of Game, meanwhile, wanted their elk out where they could provide sport and meat and trophies for tag-holders—or else to open the refuge for hunting. Neighboring farmers wanted the elk reduced, and the game department agreed, since it was responsible for animal damage to private property. New studies determined that the elk were competing with the deer for necessary browse and that they were approximately thrice as numerous on the refuge as the endangered-species recovery plan would tolerate. In spite of local resistance, organized by Skamokawa resident Steve McClain and supported by county residents of all stripes, a hunt was held, and horribly bungled.

Driven from the refuge, frantic elk faced a cross fire from permit-holders on the periphery. Overanxious, underskilled hunters shot elk from the roadway, over the roadway, in sight of the massing public, on the refuge and in the water, where the wounded beasts fled in their frenzy. It was slaughter, fraught with violations. In spite of public indignation and the local game agent’s best efforts to avert such a travesty, the planned hunt resulted in more bad feelings, inhumanely killed elk, and, ultimately, at least one prosecution. In the wake of such wanton violence and lack of sportsmanship and control, an outcry arose from the throats of hunters and nonhunters alike. The locals were appalled, and the state and federal bureaucrats in charge of wildlife were castigated once again.

In crisis now, officials faced a number of volatile issues. The refuge managers, who were generally well liked and respected in the community in spite of their guilt by association, faced a seemingly impossible task. To manage for the deer, they had to reduce the elk. Yet, no one wanted a repeat of the previous carnage, nor did most people want any hunting on the refuge. What they did want was elk on the refuge, which they believed the deer could like or lump. Meanwhile, the two neighboring farmers continued to complain about elk damage to their crops and fences. An expensive, long, and high electric fence (which no one liked) failed to keep the elk off their fields. The refuge’s tenant farmer shot one elk in the act of damaging his crops, as state law allowed him to do, wounding it. He threatened worse if the elk remained.

Other herds, driven from the woods by clearcuts and hunters and drawn to easy pasture, invaded farmlands elsewhere in the county. Another contingent was up in arms about the propane cannon placed by state game agents to frighten the elk back into the hills and protect landowners’ interests. The noisemakers didn’t work, but they did a hell of a job of awakening people all night long and spoiling the quiet of the day. (I went in search of one with a maul by dark of night, but failed to find it, as it echoed so off the hills that its location could not be determined. I had intended to place its wreckage in the river, but the device’s ventriloquistic tendencies defeated me.) Game officials worried that if refuge elk were transplanted to elsewhere in the county, they would simply crowd the resident herds and increase the incidence of animal trespass complaints on private property.

In short, the deer and the elk and their managers and various clienteles all faced what looked to be a hopelessly unmanageable state of affairs. A public forum was held in Cathlamet to discuss alternatives. Too savvy to chance chaos in an open hearing, the bureaucrats dispersed interested members of the public into a number of subgroups to voice their concerns.

Each group had a “facilitator” from one of the agencies involved. These discussion leaders used butcher paper and magic markers to chart feelings and ideas and to dissipate the head of pressure those feelings had gotten up. Consensus was sought on a number of possible alternatives, all of which involved reducing the elk. Each group appointed a spokesman to report its findings. As I stated on behalf of my many-minded group, consensus was impossible, except that no one wanted another hunt on or just outside of the refuge, and we favored live transfer of elk if herd reduction were deemed necessary for the deers’ well-being.

The managers managed, through this clever if manipulative meeting style, to defuse an explosive situation. When the newspaper report came out in the Eagle, we learned that we, the public, favored Fish and Wildlife Service policies for the refuge: a fact of which we had hitherto been unaware. That, I thought, was a deft stroke. Public resource managers are becoming very sophisticated at people management, even if they can’t always get their animal acts together. But no one complained very loudly, and in subsequent actions, the managers seem to have taken some of the more frequently voiced public concerns to heart.

Prior to that time, live-trapping of elk had been considered impractical because first attempts had failed. But those tries were based on bait-traps, inconsequential on a range of abundant food. Now they brought in Bill Clark, an expert from California with experience in drive-trapping tule elk. He instructed the local staff and supervised a drive, in which thirty-eight elk were caught. These were transplanted to the northern frontiers of Wahkiakum County, where they have more or less remained, only two having come back. A second drive this year resulted in fourteen more animals shipped out, all cows and calves.

The number of elk on the refuge currently stands at between forty and forty-five, a number considered compatible with the deer. Mostly bulls with a few cows, the reduced herd includes some large racks that still provide an impressive spectacle. The powerful electric fence, it is hoped, will prevent reimmigration to the refuge, while hunting off the refuge should keep the elk population fairly low within the vicinity. Another on-refuge hunt would be an action of last resort. The fence also helps prevent field damage, and in any case the most vociferous farmer has left the district.

I spoke with Susan Saul, public use specialist for the Lower Columbia River refuges, and Gary Hagedorn, refuge manager, before completing this chapter. They both felt that the situation was now largely under control, with the interests of the endangered deer, the elk, landowners, hunters, and wildlife-watchers all catered to adequately. So it seems they’ve pulled it off for now. One has to hand it to them. But what a lot of trouble.

It would be nice if things were easier, if we could put back the pieces of the ecological puzzle that forestry and farming spilled across the hills and the valley floor. For example, a few more pumas could only be healthy for the blacktail herd, if the game department adjusted the deer season accordingly. And with the turndown in timber activity in the area, they may move back in. The young lion I saw near Deep River has been seen by others; perhaps it is part of the vanguard.

We may wish as much. Yet putting back the former pieces may only complicate the puzzle today. Let one cow be taken by a crippled cougar and the stockmen will be up in arms. Let the pumas proliferate, and the hounds will be Johnnies-on-the-spot. Let the hunters get wind of a significant catamount take of deer or elk, and a few of them will demand the predators’ removal, begrudging their share, as some Alaskans begrudge the wolves their rightful portion of the moose. There is no easy way, when the pattern is as mixed up as it has been in Willapa. Legatees of the logged-off land, large mammals adapt to massive impacts on their habitats as best they can. Our many demands don’t make it any easier.

Willapa may be far too hacked about ever to recover its former balances. The elk and the deer and the hunters and the farmers may all remain in combat with one another, nature, the state, and the feds. And the puma may remain a once-in-a-lifetime miracle sight, for that quick red ghost was the only one I’ve ever seen—and there might not be any more to come.

But it’s not too late for the bears. The people want to see bears. The old-timers miss them and the younger ones never had the chance. There is simply no reason to exclude them any longer. The expulsion of bears by the corporations and the hound packs, with state cooperation, has amounted to a rip-off of a public possession and mismanagement of the wildlife resource.

Now, with the declining population and the pullout of the megaloggers, Crown Zellerbach and Weyerhaeuser, the time is right for bears to make a comeback in the Willapa Hills. In Wisconsin, public care for rare bears has forced the cancellation of this year’s season on hunting them. We should do the same here, at least where the bears have been all but exterminated. The current game regulations list the Nemah, Palix, and Bear River game units as closed to bear hunting in 1985-86, and that is a welcome beginning. The closure should be extended to the entirety of the Willapa Hills and should remain in effect until bear populations have regained a suitable size. After that, we should go easy on bears, so as never to lose them again. If we are to have bears in Willapa, the foresters must call off their overzealous vendetta, and the Game Commission must call off the hounds and the riflemen and the archers. The bears will take care of the rest.

A triplet, scratched in pencil into my field notebook after one day in the hills, tells the whole tale (with apologies to Stephen Sondheim and Judy Collins):

Where are the bears?

There ought to be bears.

Send in the bears.