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The Coming of Saska It was just as well, said Babe. They’d eventually have had to go to a zoo. She couldn’t have kept them when they grew bigger, and half-tamed animals in the wild were sitting targets for hunters. But she’d never forget the magic of having been, for a short while, the friend of two small grizzly bears.
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Eleven
BABE’S BROTHER-IN-LAW is Andy Russell, author of Grizzly Country, who lives a few miles from Yarrow Creek in a rambling, log-built ranch-house high up on the edge of the Rockies.
Andy, one of Canada’s most ardent conservationists, is considered to be the foremost non-scientific authority on the grizzly, whom he has known as a hunter and mountain guide, and now as a naturalist and photographer, all his life.
It was one of the highlights of our trip to meet him and we cared nothing for the frantic falling out of the pots and pans from the cupboards in the back of the camper as we drove to the Hawk’s Nest up a rough, winding dirt road that eventually resolved itself into a washed-out rock gully, bordered on either side by bushes loaded with ripening saskatoon berries. You could pick buckets and buckets of them up here for bottling, said Babe – she and her sister Kay, Andy’s wife, often did – and still there’d be plenty 103
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The Coming of Saska for the bears. ‘Actually on this track up to the ranch?’ we asked. ‘Goodness yes,’ she said. ‘They often see grizzlies up here.’
They did too. Andy has expeditioned, in his study of the grizzly, from Montana as far north as the Yukon and Alaska, but some of his most interesting experiences have been on his own home ground. We sat in front of the log fire in the great ranch fireplace till the early hours of the morning, listening to some of them.
To the tale, for instance, of how his car had stuck one wet night in a pothole in the gully we’d come up. Unable to move it, he’d left it and was walking the last half-mile up to the ranch when, rounding a bend in the track, he heard an unmistakable growl right by the side of him. Unable to see – he hadn’t a torch – all he could do was stand still...
the thing bear experts advocate when there is no other way out, but it takes considerable strength of mind to do it. For what seemed ages he stood like a stone while the unseen bear, annoyed at being surprised, rambled and ranted about people Creeping Up on him and what, for two pins, he’d do. At last, having said his piece, the bear crashed away into the trees behind him and Andy walked, sweating, on up to the ranch. How close he’d been he learned next day when he and his son went down to haul out the car. The tracks of a big grizzly, clear in the damp earth, ended six paces from where Andy had been standing.
The story I liked best, though, was of the grizzly that was fascinated by their cat, and had tolerated their terrier’s barking and charging at him as a sheepdog would do with a puppy. This was extraordinary in itself. Most bears would have attacked the dog on sight. Undoubtedly, as with Babe and the bears at her cabin, the Hawk’s Nest grizzlies sensed 104
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that the humans there meant no harm to them, neither did their animals, and so they were content to browse around in a state of mutual toleration. Except when clumsy clots frightened the daylights out of them in the dark, of course, and had to be taught a lesson.
This particular bear had first appeared as a teenage cub, accompanying his mother and brother. The trio had been around in the vicinity of the ranch for weeks, feeding on a dead horse. They bothered nobody, but several times came quite close to the ranch-house, obviously interested in its occupants. One night, indeed, the Russells, hearing a noise, switched on the porch-light and found the she-bear right outside the door.
She became too confident, however, and one night she went over to a neighbour’s ranch and started looking into a truck that was parked in the yard. The rancher, roused by his dog barking, came out and took a shot at her. She made off, wounded. Fortunately her injuries were only slight, but she had learned her lesson about humans.
Shortly afterwards she and one of the cubs left the district.
So, presumably hearing of the incident did various other grizzlies that had been around. None were seen in the area for ages – except for the second cub who, being now almost adult, had been living for a while on his own, and who some time later started appearing around the ranch-house, as if there was somebody or something that attracted him.
The Russells discovered it was their cat, who had considerable spunk. When the grizzly appeared the cat, instead of running, would raise its back and threaten to pulverise its adversary, while the bear, its head on one side, stood studying it, completely fascinated. One day they found the cat howling its threats on the doorstep and 105
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The Coming of Saska the bear with its head through the porch door, making no attempt to touch the screamer. Just obviously puzzling how on earth it made a noise like that.
All this time the terrier was barking and rushing at the bear, who took no notice of him at all, as if he knew it was part of the Hawk’s Nest set-up and one just had to put up with these things. The young grizzly came again and again to the ranch-house and by late summer the position was such that when Kay, Andy’s wife, was picking saskatoons in the gully, the bear often appeared eating berries in the same patch. Never coming close enough to be embarrassing but obviously liking to be – like Annabel grazing on the other side of the fence when we’re gardening at home – eating in company. With the terrier forever barking around him and the grizzly amiably taking no notice.
It was a marvellous story. So were the many others Andy told us and we’d have given anything to have seen one of the Hawk’s Nest bears, but there were none around right then. The berry season had started and the bears were down in the lower valleys eating them. It would be a week or two yet before they ripened up here and one might see a grizzly stripping them happily with his claws, and we had to get on to Glacier: we had only two weeks left of our trip.
So we said goodbye to the Russells, and to Babe who had to get back to her ranch, and drove on down to Waterton Park and our meeting with the wolverine.
Andy, writing to us later, said the little red gods of the wilds must have been with us on that trip. He had seen only three wolverines in his life – most Canadians have never seen one – and we had to walk straight into one on a trail above Cameron Lake.
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We were up there, needless to say, looking for a grizzly.
We’d stopped at the lake in the early afternoon and when we saw the notice up in the campground saying one had been reported on the Alderson trail... ‘At last,’ we said and were off up the Alderson trail like rockets, though that was hardly the intention of the notice, which warned people that they travelled it at their own risk.
We’d walk as far as we could in three hours, we decided, then we’d have to turn and come back. It would be dusk by the time we got back to the campsite, but that would serve our purpose very well. By then the other walkers would be mostly down off the trail (always supposing, after that notice, there were any on it) and late evening, on a path undisturbed by clattering hikers, was when we might catch a wandering grizzly unawares.