”Tales From The Underbrush” documents, with occasional hyperbole, the experiences of the artist over a lifetime of interaction with what used to be called nature, now reinvented as the environment for reasons apparently best known by just about everyone in the world excepting the artist-writer. These wilderness interactions have come mainly while working as a geologist, briefly as a forester, but sometimes as just a guy whose principal happiness in life has been derived from being outdoors. Not that life in the wilderness, be it at work or at play has been without pain, discomfort, deprivation and even danger. Fortunately, the passage of time more often then not artfully blots out or at least dims the recollections that wound, substituting instead a recall that if perhaps not substantiating the aging athlete’s jest of “the older I get, the better I was”, at least allows tales to unfold that warm the memory and give substance to the life that experienced them.
The artist proposes to post monthly herein a chapter from his book “Tales From The Underbrush” in the hope that his adventures may be shared and enjoyed by those who might stumble onto this blog. This month’s entry continues the tale.
BEAR WITH ME: FROM TINKERBELLS TO FORCITE – Part 1
“Or in the night, imagining some fear, How easy is a bush supposed a bear!”
William Shakespeare, 1564-1616 (from A Midsummer Night’s Dream)
It is a sad but irrefutable fact that bush camps and bears do not mix. It is equally sad that it is the bear who while winning the odd battle invariably loses the war, and most often with it, its life.
The tone is normally set by a fairly simple set of equations. Bush camps = people; people = food supplies; food supplies = eating; eating = garbage; garbage = bears; buried garbage still = bears; bears in camp ≠ harmony with, and safety of, people. You will notice that the last equation encompasses the sign for “does not equal.”
Ursus Americanus, otherwise known as the black bear, is one of the two species of bears found in Canada, the other being Ursus Arctos, better known as the grizzly bear, brown bear, or in Alaska the Kodiak bear. Unlike the latter species whose domain has become restricted to the Canadian Rockies and Alaska, the black bear’s habitat ranges the full width of the country, from British Columbia to Newfoundland. Both species have a keen sense of smell, acute hearing, and if such things existed, both species would be required to wear “coke-bottle bi-focals”, being cursed as they are with poor eyesight. The more widely distributed black bear is the smaller of the two with males averaging about 135 kilograms (300 lbs.) and females about half that. Male black bears have been recorded up to 290 kilograms (640 lbs.) and the one that is the subject of one of my tales herein is estimated to have weighed in at close to 225 kilograms (500 lbs.)
The grizzly is a much larger, stronger and fearsome species, with adults weighing between 135 – 680 kilograms (300 – 1,500 lbs). Loners and largely nocturnal, both species are shy of humans but unpredictable, and when cornered or with cubs, are a major threat to life and limb. Both are lethargic of walk but quick to move and can challenge a horse in the short run with speeds up to 60 kph (35 mph). Omnivorous, they feed mainly on plants and berries with insects, small rodents and fish as supplements. Grizzlies often gather beside streams during the salmon spawn, feeding on the spent fish during the latter’s final act of life. Not a true hibernator, the grizzly nonetheless likes to den up in a protected spot during the winter months. Excellent swimmers and tree climbers, black bears are more prone to hibernation during the winter.
The black bear and grizzly do not co-habit and where general territory is common to both, the black bear, no match for the larger and adversarial grizzly, gives the latter a very wide birth.
Under normal, non-garbage related conditions, if bears or their cubs are not threatened in any manner, they have no interest in human contact. Bears are as interested in avoiding you as you are them. A simple device while traversing in the bush, and that alerts bears to human presence in sufficient time for them to avoid that contact with you, is to attach one or two bells to one’s clothing or packsack. The sound of the bells gives ample warning to the acute hearing of the bears that your presence is forthcoming. The bells may also salvage a potentially dangerous encounter with a bear that soft footfalls on damp sphagnum moss from a downwind position might initiate, the bear’s hearing and sense of smell being dampened by both conditions.
During my bush life in Canada, the majority of my experience with bears involved black bears. While the forests of the Canadian Precambian Shield that encompasses much of northern and eastern Canada theoretically defines black bear habitat, said bears, while perhaps being poor of eyesight but not entirely stupid, are not necessarily evenly distributed throughout this expanse. I suspect it may have to do with the fact that much of the northern Canadian bush is so devoid of nutrients that it can support little more than flies and a few birds and small mammals. Likewise, many times have I camped on a beautiful lake, mouth-wateringly resplendent with apparent fishing potential, only to discover the complete absence of fish, the lake being so barren of nutrition that no fish could survive. Often absent of sufficient edible plants and berries, much of this semi swamp landscape also serves as poor habitat for bears.
That environment and its lack of bears was not always the case however and therein lies several tales from my experience. The exploration parties of my early bush life usually consisted of some seven people, two being senior geologists, two others of the junior aspiring type, plus two bushmen and a cook. It should be remembered that we are talking here of the 1950-s and 60’s before nature was re-invented to be the environment and before environmentalists invented themselves in an act of political correctness, allegedly based on the assumption that nobody cared about nature before they came along. I have news for them. A lot of people did care about nature in those days and most of those people knew a lot more about the environment than do many of the present purveyors of the philosophy.
As the introduction earlier noted, people in camps require food that produces garbage in one fashion or another. Main camps that an exploration party might inhabit for a month or more before moving, rarely provided any conflict between man and wildlife. The two principal reasons for this were firstly, garbage pits of good depth were properly constructed and maintained, i.e. well covered with soil, rocks, and logs. No garbage disposal was allowed other than in the garbage pit. The second factor that inhibited conflict with wildlife of the bear variety was that in the main camp, while the geologists and bushmen might be away on the job every day, the camp cook remained in camp to carry out his duties, and as such was an obstacle to be avoided by human-averse wildlife such as bears. Ironically, some of the worst marauders in a camp were mink or other weasel species such as fishers. Fearless and aggressive, mink are the meanest, nastiest species of mammal I have ever encountered. About the size of an egg carton whose contents mink would risk life and limb to eat, if cornered they would just as soon attack you as avoid confrontation. Their removal required deft and careful strategies, usually involving a geological hammer in one hand and a shovel or long, stout stick in another. The possession and use of firearms on an exploration party was strictly forbidden and rare offenders were immediately dismissed. Six months or longer in the bush can sometimes breed strange behaviours and pent up emotions from real or alleged offenses by one member of the party upon another. The proliferation of axes, knives, shovels, hammers and sledges made a camp enough of an armoury without the addition of firearms. An exception to that rule will be examined a little further on in my tale.
In contrast to potential conflict, some wildlife benefited from our presence. I speak in general of the birdlife that invariably inhabited the camp area, and of the Canada Jay in particular. A cocky, unafraid and inquisitive bird, the jay is a born pirate. Should you place a piece of fruit, bread or other food beside you on an outdoor table or log, you are just as likely to have this marauder silently swoop down and divest you of that morsel by the time you turn to reclaim it. With time, pretense was abandoned and most jays would alight on an outstretched hand to directly take a proffered offering. In general, small pieces of food scraps left in crude bird feeders were quickly taken up by the birds or squabbling chipmunks.
But back to the bears. While main camps rarely presented problems of bear-human conflicts or any type of interaction for that matter, fly camps were another story. A fly camp, usually of two men, is a small, completely self sustaining camp set up remote from the main camp and normally for a limited time of perhaps several weeks but sometimes longer. The fly camp is normally used to access an area too remote from the main camp for daily travel but not requiring a new main camp to be set up. Whether accessed by packsack, canoe or float plane, once set up the fly camp and its inhabitants become a microcosm in the wilderness, an inconsequential speck in the universe where not only is the sense of isolation acutely registered but the puniness of one’s existence becomes readily apparent. Twelve hour working days in the fly-ridden, often rain-soaked bush; donning wet clothes most mornings; cooking a limited and basic food supply outdoors over a small fire or perhaps on a small Coleman naphtha gas stove, plus the close quarters of two sleeping bags and their tired occupants stuffed into a tiny tent becomes a challenge for the mind, spirit and body. To not just survive but to succeed requires both self discipline and mutual co-operation between two now kindred souls who must tolerate each other and work together under less than comfortable conditions to accomplish the job at hand. To say the least, the experience can be character building.
As recounted earlier, some environments in the Precambrian Shield bush yielded no occurrences of bears, at least none that ever showed themselves. Such was the case during my initial several years in the bush. Perhaps the black flies were at a peak in their cycle, and were too much for even black bears. Certainly our camps produced garbage no matter how carefully handled, and the presence of bears might normally have been anticipated. Ultimately however, the bears were to become problems as the tales that follow illustrate.
In Ungava, we had a camp that was established for a period of nearly a year. Hind quarters of fresh beef brought in by supply plane was preserved by hanging outdoors in a finely screened box perched on a platform supported by log stilts high above ground. Contrary to popular belief, meat, at least certainly beef, does not have to be frozen to be preserved for significantly long periods of time, in this case up to a month. The key factor is to ensure that the beef has air circulating around it and that absolutely no flies are allowed to lay their eggs in the meat, the result of which would be the kiss of death for the beef. After hacking off a piece of the side of beef, the fresh blood of the wound congeals and dries and the remaining meat maintains its preserved state in the fresh air. I suppose this whole process is akin to the so-called air-dried beef that the Swiss and Italians have produced for centuries, or the beef jerky of native America and the Caribbean.
But while the availability of fresh meat was a luxury for our bush crew it was not so for the bears whose acute olfactory senses made this fresh meat not only a temptation but also some form of cruel torture. Inevitably a bear was indeed to make its presence in camp, and with a persistence that ultimately threatened the safety of the cook who remained there on duty each day while the other members of the party were away conducting exploration work. Such dangers having been anticipated and the camp belonging to a large mining company, a rifle was on hand and ultimately employed on the bear. The result became my first experience in skinning such a beast, scraping the fat off the skin and preserving the hide by salting it. While my efforts would certainly not have passed close scrutiny by any aborigine skilled in the practice, the hide remained in good shape for some years, only to be savaged by moths during my sojourn in South America.
TO BE CONTINUED
Copyright © 2010 Ian de W. Semple
