I’m with my sister, Eve, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, months after the summer. She is having a knee replacement. In pain before the operation, she is in more pain now, after her operation, but she’s thankful we live in an age where a knee can be replaced. She asked me about my trip. She really wanted to hear about bears. Although out of order, (I didn’t see them until late in the summer) if my older sister wants to hear about bears, she shall.
The photograph of a Barren Ground Grizzly is off the internet. When I encounter bears, I don’t take pictures. I’ve seen many and run up against a few. By the 1980s there was bear spray, cayenne pepper under pressure, like mace, but three times as potent. In earlier days, I would have carried a gun, preferably a .12 gauge shotgun with slugs. I’d have to have the gun loaded and available, not packed away, because you’d never know when the bear would appear. If I only grazed him, he could still charge, or run off wounded. If I killed her, I’d have taken a life. Her cubs could perish. Thankfully, bear spray works. I’ve used it three times. After several hours the spray wears off. After half a day, I stop shaking. I have to let the bear come within ten feet, otherwise the spray could blow away on the wind, or not reach the bear. In either case, I’d be standing there with an empty can of spray feeling really stupid as the bear knocked me over. Most bears leave when they see me. They don’t know what I am, and they’d rather not find out. The ones that do attack have a reason. One was a mother with cubs. One was just too close, and the last, an older bear unable to hunt effectively, stalked me for days.
Years ago, I had come to the end of my summer. On Upper Gary lake is an esker island with an abandoned cabin overlooking the water. Built in the early 1950s by Father Joseph Buliard, an Oblate missionary, the cabin has been abandoned since he disappeared in 1954. Farther Buliard placed a large, flat stone outside of the cabin door to the right. It makes a great seat. The distant view has an island, just a line across the top of the horizon with a large hump of land sticking up in its middle. In the Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the first drawing the Little Prince shows the pilot looks like the island. He asks the pilot what the drawing is, and gets the answer, ‘a hat.’ With distain, the Little Prince says, ‘no, its not: it’s an elephant swallowed by a python.’
I set my tent by the water, and brought the kitchen wannigan up to the mud room adjoining the cabin’s main room. Since being abandoned, decades of people passing through have trashed it, leaving their junk: ripped clothes, fuel and oil cans, ski-do parts, empty food tins, huge spools of tangled fishing nets, bedsprings, old motors. The mud room is smaller and easily made livable. On former trips I’d hidden unbroken window panes, cheese cloth, and put up tarpaper where needed. Instead of a tent, the cabin has four solid walls against heavy weather.
When his OMI brothers flew in to check on Joseph in the spring of 1954, they found his journal open on the table, and his plate and cup, as though he had just walked out. They heard from Inuit living on the lake that Joseph had gone out in October, on new ice, to check his nets, and fallen through. Neither his body nor sled was ever found, however, the brothers discovered Joseph’s sled dogs living with the Inuit. There are other versions of the story, but they all end with his disappearance. I asked the Anglican Bishop, John Sperry, if they ever sent only one missionary to remote outposts. He said, no, always two. They could look after each other.
There I am, looking forward to the next morning to cook pancakes, and enjoy the last of my syrup. During the night a wild storm blew in and knocked the tent around. In the morning, I walked up to the mudroom and to start making coffee, and get the pancake mix ready. I carry pre-mixed batter and add dried blueberries. In setting up the mudroom, I placed a piece of plywood over the entrance to the larger room and tacked cheese cloth to the door frame to dim the amount of misquotes and black flies in the room with me. As the coffee boiled, I heard large thumping noises in the other room. The thumping stopped. I put my head out the door and saw a bear walk through a blown-out window frame. Wet from the storm, he looked small and scrawny. Twenty feet away, moving slowly, he had sheltered in the main room. I pulled out my ‘bear bangers’: a screw on explosive that shoots out up to a hundred feet and explodes, BANG. The banger landed behind the bear making him turn around, but not run. Firing another had the same effect. I had a super-sonic device the size of a cigarette pack, meant to scare bears. I pulled the pin, but it had no effect. I blew the whistle I carry around my neck. I banged pots. I used all my ‘tools.’ I felt like a failed dervish.
The bear backed off, but stayed around, circling the cabin, and making it hard to enjoy myself. As he dried out, his fur fluffed up, and he looked his full fearsome size. On their hind legs they can stand as tall as seven feet. At one point he decided to dig a large hole in front of the cabin, shoveling great mounds of dirt between his legs. Another time he sat down, his hind legs stretched in front of him, and raised his right arm as if he wanted to ask a question. This continued several days. At night I slept in the cabin with a can of bear spray on either side of my head. He let me know he was there by running his claws across the wood wall at the back of the cabin. The sound was like fingernails on a blackboard. I called the float base on the satelite phone. My freind, Trevor, answered, and said, “What’s wrong Rob? You sound upset.” I told him why and he replied,”The storm has not passed. The water’s too rough. We’ll come to pick you up when we can.”
The day I was leaving, I needed to pack the tent. I saw the bear in the binoculars way down the beach, at least a 3/4 of a mile away. I went quickly to gather the tent. I was on my way back to the cabin when the bear barreled toward me, as though he’d made a feint to the beach to lure me out. I dropped the tent and was able to spray him. First, he sat down shaking his head. Then he took off. Later, when the plane roared in, I walked my things to the beach. On the way back for my last pack, I saw a piece of paper in the grass. There had been books in the cabin, but several were scattered outside, decimated by the weather and ground squirrels. I picked up the scrap of paper, and recognized a fragment of an Emily Dickinson poem, “….you can not fold a flood.”
The three bears encountered this summer were not as exciting. I did what I was supposed to do. They did what they were supposed to do.
My prize possession: Tin plate found in Father Buliard’s dump….
