BEARS, BOOKS & BEES

When I went to sell books this last time, my hand hesitated over my grizzly bear books, left over from when I was teaching in Heart Butte and did a year-long theme of grizz bears. Bears were practially underfoot, hanging around the school in case of unguarded lunches or walking along way up on the side of Heart Butte, looking for rock marmots. No one ever got hurt by them, partly because everyone gave them lots of space.

I bought mostly picture books because even though I was teaching high school, some weren’t strong readers. Anyway, a photo of a grizz tells you lots more than any amount of written description. The kids pretended they were bears, they told real life bear stories, they told bear tall-tales, they read photocopied newspaper stories, and I read out loud Doug Peacock's Grizzly Years and Ernest Thompson Seton's Biography of a Grizzly. (The first “grownup” book I ever read.) We saved Far Side grizzly jokes. I made a life-sized cutout of a grizz and stuck it to the wall alongside the door.

For several years I had attended the annual grizzly/wolf technicians' conference that formed around Chuck Jonkel, a professor in Missoula and a much-loved and powerful visionary. (It was not easy to attend these conferences since they went out of their way to pick an inaccessible campground and didn't let the public know where it is.) Jonkel, a strong believer in wildlife videos and student video work, loaned me lots of videos about bears. Once, for some reason, he included one about meerkats which knocked us all out. None of us had known anything about meerkats before. Now everyone knows, I guess because of Animal Planet.

We watched the Scandinavian movie, The Bear (The kids loved it, especially when the cub got high.), and an awful grade B movie starring Clint Walker about a demon grizzly that turned out to be very close in plot to one of the stories in The Old North Trail. An early warrior is heroically brave but is killed and burned. He becomes a grizzly and guards the old Cut Bank Pass trail, but then he is killed again and this time becomes a tree that still stands there, looking vaguely bear-like. People on the Rez can point out the very tree.

I described the Bear Knife Bundle, one of the most impressive objects in the Scriver Artifact Collection that went to Edmonton. I read part of the Craighead's book out loud and we watched a pretty inept film of Faulkner's story, The Bear, which was only a black bear anyway.

I got so into grizzlies myself that I rose up at 4 AM and went out to watch a road-killed bull from the safety of my pickup, in hopes a bear would show up. None did. It was cold and rainy, so there wasn't much smell to get the message to the bears. Sitting out there in steely darkness, gripping my thermos of coffee, I felt at last I was becoming a nature writer. I wasn’t. The kids shook their heads. White people are truly crazy.

When I got involved with the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, I went to their conference up at Banff and one of the events was a movie of the Charley & Andy Russell family and their relationship with bears, in that case the giant brown Kodiak bears on the China side of the Pacific Ocean. In remote villages they found two cubs scrunched into filthy cages and bought them, thinking the would set them free far to the north where they were doing studies on the Kamchatka Peninsula. Instead the bears became family members, standing upright in the river alongside “Papa” while he fished because they knew they’d get the results, or piling up with Papa for a nap in the grass. A full bear is a safe bear. But they had to put an electric fence around the garden, the same as the beekeepers around here fence their hives.

I’m thinking about all this because someone gave a copy of “Bronze Inside and Out,” my book about Bob Scriver, to Doug Seus, trainer of Bart the Bear. The bear team became friends with Bob when the latter made a portrait of Doug and Bart, so Doug knows what he’s reading about. Bob tried hard to pull Doug into his life towards the end, to get Doug to take on duties that far exceeded being a customer or even a friend. Doug sat with Bob’s grandkids at the funeral.

Bart the Bear died a natural death in 2000, “surrounded by family,” and has been succeeded by several other bears, including a pair of cubs, one male and the other a female called “Honey Bump.” Riiiight. A little sweet. It is remarkable how much human mammals can pull members of other species into their emotional orbits. Fur. Milk. Body temperature. Appetite. And a lot of not-well-understood capacities for bonding and trusting that humans seem to lose, maybe more than bears do, maybe because we’re the ones living in zoos.

Bart the Bear led to Vital Ground, an organization sort of parallel to Nature Conservancy. (You can Google all this stuff.) Bob Scriver’s Flatiron Ranch was for a while in play between the two organizations until it turned out that one advantage of the sovereignty of the reservation was the ability to enter into agreements on the same level of the State of Montana, which gave Nature Conservancy legal practices an edge.

Bob’s practices at the ranch were not legal or proper. He regularly left carcasses on a ridge he could see from the ranch house so that the carrion pile would attract bears and coyotes. But he wouldn’t let the local bear officials onto his land. Some say he shot at the low-flying airplanes trying to get readings from their telemetry. He was becoming a bear himself, territorial, caring nothing for the children in the adjoining ranches. Lawyers are more predatory than bears. They smashed the hive and took the honey. But maybe they didn’t get all the bees. I have not sold the books.