”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 2

“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)

Drill camp groupies

My next experience with bears occurred during my stay as a geologist in a drill camp in northern Quebec, south of James Bay and west of the Harricana River. The camp was an oasis of slightly higher ground surrounded by a vast area of sodden, swampy morass laden with not much else but flies, and as it turned out more than a few bears as well. The camp had been established by the same company for whom I worked as a geologist in the Ungava region of far northern Quebec, and had been set up to drill a promising copper-zinc discovery. Comfortable by the standards of the day, the camp was a small tent village of perhaps eight or nine tents with plywood floors and half walls raised up off the soft ground. The camp housed the engineering and administrative staff, as well as the teams of diamond drillers that conducted twenty-four hour drilling on the prospect on the basis of two twelve hour shifts per day. A float plane from the town of Amos regularly brought supplies to a point on the Harricana River from where the load was then transported west by a muskeg tractor to the camp some ten kilometres to the west.

The muskeg tractor was a tracked vehicle similar in size to a small tank and looking like a Bren gun carrier from WWll. The operator of the tractor was jammed into a small, body hugging, covered cockpit situated in front of the centrally located engine, leaving high-walled, open wells on either side for cargo loads. The way in from the Harricana River to camp was a westerly track carved through the swampy forest by the muskeg tractor. I say carved because the weight of the tractor, especially when fully loaded, served to sink it into the sodden terrain. This was exacerbated by the churning action of the tracks through softened, thin topsoil underlain by glacial debris consisting largely of gumbo clay. The result was a water laden goop whose depth at times threatened to overflow the five foot high walls of the tractor. With repeated use, sectors of the “road” would become impassable even for the muskeg tractor, forcing detours to be constantly established. Over time, the track from river to camp became a winding, twisting affair that from the air probably looked like a broad, woven belt of individual strips of fibre. The upside of this tortuous trip between camp and river was that notwithstanding the aggravation, the camp could be regularly stocked with fresh supplies, essential to a twenty-four hour per day operation. (See “From Cordon Bleu to Sacre Bleu and Back”).

In the middle part of the last century, before the word “environment” was invented but when its synonym “nature” was understood and respected by most people who lived and worked in the bush, reputable bush camps were by and large maintained in good order, and with particular attention to garbage disposal procedures. Pragmatism dictates that garbage cannot realistically be shipped back to its origins from even small two man fly camps, not to speak of larger and semi-established camps like a drill camp. The latter in my case being the ten men or so affair, operating twenty-fours a day over the course of several years prior to my coming on the scene, necessarily produced not only a significant volume of garbage but did so on a continuous basis. A suitable pit had been dug that was over designed to hold the growing amount of refuse produced from a camp that had become prolonged as the result of drilling success. Nonetheless garbage is garbage and garbage attracts bears. When it comes to garbage, bears are like children; give them an inch and they will take a mile as the saying goes. So it was with the black bears at the drill camp. Initially shy as they normally are in first encounters with humans, the black bears soon became addicted to the charms of the garbage pit. This introduced a number of inconveniences to camp life. Anyone going to dispose garbage could easily become the object of wrath by marauding bears to the detriment of that person’s health. With time, the garbage pit would not prove sufficient attraction for the bears when compared with the fresh smells emanating from the camp cook tent. That, together with food snacks stored in individual tents would produce additional dangers to camp life. In the days before a bear might be trapped and relocated, the aforementioned developments generally spelled doom for the bears involved. The only question was the method for disposal.

Nowadays, it appears rare that bush camp personnel spend more than a month in the bush without some form of respite in civilization. During the time of my bush life however, a spell in the bush might be continuous for a year or more. That sort of social deprivation under the arduous conditions of bush life can do strange things to a man. Inconsequential slights can become the fuel of feuds, make brooding introverts out of extroverts, and silly, giggling children out of the most quiet of men. Whatever the symptoms, weapons such as rifles are not advisable commodities to have on hand in a bush camp. This despite the proliferation of knives and axes that abound in most camps and that can become similarly lethal weapons under a circumstance of determination. In the drill camp I refer to however, was a supply of forcite, commonly known as dynamite, together with the required blasting caps. I do not recall the reason for them being there but suppose it to be for blasting the occasional outcrop in the area.

Lest the following be viewed in the critical terms of present philosophies, let it be said that the solution to bear problems of the time involved eradication in the most expedient fashion of the individuals involved, and not their live removal and relocation. Not only was the latter policy impractical in the environment of an isolated bush camp as opposed to a well equipped urban centre, but the philosophy of the time, for better or worse, gave little consideration to population declines or species extinction. So it was with our black bear garbage groupies. Various methods of dissuasion were attempted, including bells and other noise makers attached to nearby swaying branches, and hot chili powder sprayed over the garbage. None of these worked. A rifle was even brought to camp and a flashlight rigged up to equip the rifle for night use. Various personnel took turns staying up all night at the dump to ambush the intruders. All to no avail, since the bears, most probably acting on their sense of smell, failed to appear and the vigils wore down the participants, affecting their working efficiency. Finally some bright light had the idea to rig up an unattended device that could attract the bears to their doom at night. The idea was simple in concept. Take an old pail and put some honey in it, the latter being irresistible to bears. Add to the pail a small amount of forcite impregnated with a blasting cap and two wires leading back to a battery. Completing the circuit by having the wire leads touch each other would set off the blast. Burying the two wires in the honey with their leads very close together led to the high probability that a bear, while eating the honey, would inadvertently cause the two wire leads to touch, thereby closing the circuit and setting off a fatal blast in the pail, with the predictable result for the bear.

Sure enough, the first evening the device was set, there was heard a tremendous blast that should have immediately raised serious doubts regarding the size of the charge employed. Indeed, upon repairing to the dump site, there was no sign of the marauding bear, at least no immediate signs. The blasted pail was nowhere to be seen and I suspect may still be in orbit along with the remains of the bear’s head. As for the bear itself, bits and pieces were observed to be hanging from nearby branches like some obscene natural carrion that the pine trees produced. Effective in its result but clumsy in its execution, some amendments were made to the methodology. Employing blinding logic that would have made Einstein and Sherlock proud, it was deduced that the use of dynamite in addition to the blasting cap was not only unnecessary in its overkill but could put a serious crimp in the supply of pails required for their normal camp uses. It was thus concluded that the same setup using a blasting cap alone would produce the desired result without the attendant mess, and perhaps even allow recovery of the pail to be used on another occasion. And so it was that, sadly, another foray to the dump by a black bear resulted in a much smaller, contained blast that instantly dispatched it directly to bear heaven without, in an unnecessary detour, spreading its remains over half the country. The method was to see several more black bears dispatched before the problem was contained. Since I was to repeatedly see fresh bear scat around the camp sometime after the last time the blasting ritual was required, I can only assume that some sort of learned or instinctual behaviour caused the bears to cease visiting the garbage dump.

TO BE CONTINUED

Copyright © 2010 Ian de W. Semple