Beware the Bears

Love the animals. God has given them the rudiments of thought and joy untroubled. Do not think you are superior to them, for you are not.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Of the many wonderful camping trips my brother, Pat, and I took with our family as children, one that we both remember with particular fondness is a trip to Yellowstone National Park in the mid-1950’s. If my memory serves me correctly I would have been about five or six years old. My father had a business trip to Butte, Montana, and so before leaving for Butte he helped to set up the big brown Army tent and left us to camp and wander the geyser basin, to watch Old Faithful erupt regularly, to marvel at the bubbling mud pots, and. . .most wonderful of all, to watch the wildlife that surrounded us on our long walks and in the campground.

There were bison, elk, deer, moose, and for a child of my age, they provided moments of wonder, as if water erupting from the ground 150 feet into the air was not sufficient. The animals captured my attention more than the geysers at that age, especially the bears, which were found more abundantly in the campground where picnic baskets could be gleaned, and bacon and eggs created enticing odors to attract bears in the morning. Pat remembers returning to camp from the restroom one morning and feeling something cold on his fingers. He turned around to find a black bear grabbing a bar of soap he held in his hand. He hastily relinquished the soap, and it is interesting that in telling the story, as he has repeatedly over the years, no one ever seems to express concern that a wild animal with very long sharp teeth might have bitten off his hand along with helping itself to a bar of soap.

Bears were managed more for their entertainment value in those days. In the evening campers would walk to the dump, when the garbage was taken out, and the bears gathered for an easy meal, and the campers gathered to be amused.

It is hard to comprehend how a wildlife management plan like this one would have seemed reasonable then, but I think the truth is that there were no wildlife management plans. National Parks were managed like zoos, a place for watching wildlife in their cages, except that there were no cages.

Many decades later I would visit the park with my daughter and grandson when they came to visit me at my home in Cody, Wyoming. The bison in the photo is about as close as we came to anything wild on that trip. It was close enough. Every spring Wyomingites tell “tourist stories,” in which someone has gotten too close to these massive creatures and been tossed into the air, often with lethal consequences.

A few years ago my husband and I moved chairs in front of the entryway window of our log home and watched while a cougar sat in the driveway and licked its paws and cleaned its whiskers, like a big house cat. We were, it seemed, still spectators. The cougar lingered in this manner for about an hour then wandered away. It returned over the course of the next three days, during which time we stayed indoors, taking our dog outside on leash, and using caution to make plenty of noise with whistles and the like.

As a long-time backpacker of course I have had many wildlife encounters over the years, and they are part of why I return to these wild places, to watch them wandering through my campsites in the evenings, to see the moose stomping its feet and bearing its giant rack in my direction, to see the mama bear and her cubs making their way across the meadow, to remember that there are still wild places in the world and that I am still a part of that wild wonderful world, watching from the window.