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us, ‘till the bear went off and somebody tapped on their window. Pity they couldn’t have stayed for another night.
That bear in the boat was really something.’
So was the female bear they told us about at Banff, who’d taught her cubs to turn on the golf course sprinklers and take showers on hot afternoons. Every warm day without fail they’d frolicked along behind her from the ninth to the fourteenth holes, turning on the taps as they went. A grown bear doing that, as the mother was no doubt aware, would have been hauled out by helicopter in no time. But nobody could resist two playful little cubs doing it and it meant she could share the shower as well. Yes, admitted our informant, the greens had got a bit boggy but the golf club authorities found a way of dealing with that. They hired a boy to follow the bears at a suitably respectful distance, turning off the sprinklers when they’d finished with them.
We heard tale after tale illustrating the cleverness of bears. The one, for instance, who met up with a hiker
– presumably for the first time ever – and the hiker had abandoned his pack and climbed up the nearest tree. Sitting there enjoying his haul of sandwiches and chocolate, an idea had come to that bear. Thereafter – until they took him out by helicopter – he worked a Dick Turpin act, hiding behind a bush, jumping out at hikers, hoping to scare them into throwing down their packs. They knew it was the same bear because he was always behind the same bush and eventually, anyway, people began to recognise him. He was completely harmless – if his victim didn’t run away, he did – but they had to move him out. People complained because he would rip up their packs.
Another instance of intelligence... though whether this is actually true... was told us by a ranger discussing the 79
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The Coming of Saska subject of trash bins. Bears could master anything in his opinion, he said. He reckoned they could be taught to operate a power station. Somebody had invented a bin with a chute in it, but they’d soon learned to deal with that: they held the lid up with their heads and reached in with one of their arms... grown bears had a pretty long stretch. So, in Yellowstone Park in America, they’d thought up a trash bin to beat all trash bins. It worked like a fruit machine. You pulled a lever at the side to open it, at the same time pressing on a pedal, and for a while it did baffle the Yellowstone bears. Unfortunately it also baffled most of the campers, who took to depositing their litter around it instead of in it. Then, to beat everything, one night a naturalist saw a bear standing in front of it, his foot on the pedal, pulling the lever with his right paw and scooping out the contents with his left. ‘He must have watched a human do it,’ said the ranger when I asked how a bear could have worked that out. ‘Honestly?’ I asked a trifle doubtfully.
‘Honest,’ said the ranger. But as I say, we were never quite sure about that!
He was right about the copying business of course.
Animals are natural mimics and at one campground they were troubled by a young bull moose which had obviously been studying the bears. That, at any rate, was the only reason they could think of for his being found continually turning out the trash bins. A moose would normally never come near a campground.
Deer, yes. At Wapiti there was a big beige buck with antlers like a Christmas tree who regularly sunned himself in a particular glade outside a large parked caravan. The people were usually away all day and, lying there like a lion on guard, it was His Glade, said his attitude; he just allowed the caravan 80
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to be there. But not a moose. They are elusive creatures but at the same time very bad-tempered. Aggravated, they will charge like a maddened bull – the danger lying not in their broad, scooped antlers but in their raking, razor-sharp hooves.
They can slash another animal’s throat, or open a man’s back or stomach, in an instant. So, said the ranger, the moose was going to have to go. So many visitors thought it was only bears one needed to be careful of, and sooner or later somebody would try to pet him. Already he’d chased a woman into her camper because she’d run out of the bread she’d been giving him and, obviously copying some bear he’d watched, had started scrounging food off the open-air tables.
Being only a moose, they wouldn’t move him out by helicopter – he’d be shot and the naturalists had grown quite fond of him... so now they were throwing logs at him whenever they saw him. Not to hit him, but to try to scare him away.
Charles and I not being dawn getter-uppers... at which time, the vigilant naturalists being asleep, several people en route to the wash-block had seen him wandering about the camp... the closest we came to him ourselves was one evening at dusk, when we were attending a park nature lecture. Usually held in the open, on this occasion, there being a chill breeze coming down off the Rockies, we were gathered in the communal camp kitchen... a long, log-built shelter containing tables, benches and a big wood-burning range for the benefit of people travelling without cooking facilities. The naturalist had tipped a load of logs into the stove, there was coffee brewing in a couple of pots on top, we’d just watched a film about Bighorn sheep and the conversation, as usual, had turned to bears. It always did, whatever the programmed subject for the evening.
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The Coming of Saska Every park naturalist had had his own bear adventures and his audience invariably wanted to hear them. In this case the naturalist, chased by a grizzly one day when he was exploring the back-country at Waterton, had taken refuge up a tree and the bear had shaken the tree-trunk in a rage.
Grizzlies are known to do this on occasion: they are said to be able to tear a moderate-sized tree down. This tree withstood the battering, however, and eventually the bear made off. Rather more quickly, actually, than the naturalist had expected so, having been taught to be cautious, he stayed on up there for a while. Which was just as well because in a very short time the grizzly came back. This time accompanied by a second grizzly, said the naturalist, and they both tried to shake the tree down!
He was answering the usual spate of rapturous enquiries...
how had he got down, had the bears chased him, what would he have done if they’d demolished the tree... when there was a sudden crashing of branches in the dusk outside.
Quick as a flash the naturalist was at the door, and had come back and picked up one of the stove logs. Nobody rushed to follow him because everybody thought it was a bear... attracted by the smell of the coffee, and the naturalist would best know how to deal with him.
‘Scat! Gerrof!’ he shouted, hurling the log into the twilight, and there was a flurried crashing away into the forest that everybody listened to with relief. Except us, when the naturalist came back in and said it was that blasted moose again. Charles and I, hard though we had searched, hadn’t yet seen a moose.
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WHEN WE DID SEE one it was quite by chance and so close that, looking back, I wonder why on earth we were mad enough to take photographs, but at least it proves that it happened.
We’d seen elk, we’d seen mule deer and Bighorn sheep, we’d seen black bears till we’d just about lost count of them, and a golden eagle, spotted by Charles through binoculars, on a crag above Emerald Lake. We had also, in search of moose, waited for hours by salt-licks, been bitten by mosquitoes at boggy lake-ends, lurked behind trees in various parts of forests we were assured they fed in – and still hadn’t managed to see one.