The Hidden Life of Deer

by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

  In that case, what was it? Once again, I could only guess. If one’s subject animals don’t wear radio collars or are otherwise interfered with, guesswork is about the only tool at one’s disposal—that and after-the-fact observation, unless one is lucky enough to witness an actual event. So I guessed that if that fawn was lost to a predator, the predator was a bear. I knew for certain that one special bear included our land as part of his territory. He had been injured when he was young, so he was partly disabled, which put him at a disadvantage. For him, a fawn would have been a bonanza.

  Here is what happened to the bear. Late one night in the summer of 2002 while this bear was crossing the road in front of our house, he was hit by a quarter-ton pickup truck driven by our friend and neighbor, Don Schrock. Our house is on the east side of the road, and the bear may have been heading for our grapevines.

  Only Don saw him. He later said that the bear was about as big as a large dog, and weighed perhaps 150 pounds. Don is an experienced hunter and an expert on the local wild animals, and his description would be accurate. This could mean that the bear was about two years old, or else that he was older but not finding adequate nourishment. It was hard to know. He could have been one of two bear cubs I’d seen at the roadside in the summer of 2000 when on my way home. I stopped the car. One cub was standing on his hind legs with his hand on a telephone pole. His sibling was on all fours beside him. They looked at me with shy, polite expressions. Both seemed to be the wrong size, too big to have been born during the past winter but too small to have been born the winter before, meaning that they may have been about eighteen months old or thereabouts, but were undernourished. Unlike many of the large carnivores, a bear seldom gets to eat a large meal. Instead he must range widely, finding a mushroom here, a few berries there, grubs in a fallen log a bit later, often with a long, calorie-consuming walk between bites, which makes it difficult to gain enough weight to survive a winter of hibernation, let alone to grow. Bears had been extinguished from southern New Hampshire by the early farmers, and had repopulated our area only about ten years before, an overflow from the northern population. Our area is not prime bear habitat.

  At the edge of the field behind the cubs was a grassy thicket around a small pool of water, a damp place much favored by animals. Deer hide there, and woodcocks nest nearby. I didn’t see the mother bear. Perhaps she was hiding. After watching me politely for a while, the two cubs went into the thicket.

  This was where the accident happened—the bear who was hit emerged from that very thicket. The truck hit the bear’s right hind quarter hard enough to smash the radiator and front fender with a bang so loud I heard it in my house. The bear bounced off the truck, then picked himself up and climbed a tree. Then he fell out of the tree. Then he scrambled up the bank toward our house and hid in the bushes while Don, who needed an accident report if he wanted to collect insurance, called the police. A police car must have been nearby. From a window I saw the blue lights flashing and ran down to the road, arriving just in time to see the police officer unfasten his holster.

  If, as Don was saying, the bear had been able to climb a tree and then climb the bank, it seemed to me he might recover. I told the men they shouldn’t shoot him. The men said that the bear was suffering. They also said he was dangerous. He had to be shot, they insisted. I said I wouldn’t let them. They told me to go home. I said, “I am home.” They told me to go back to the house. I said I couldn’t. The officer wondered aloud if I might have been drinking. Don said, “She doesn’t drink. She’s always like this.” The officer had not yet taken out his pistol, but he started to cross the road. So before things could go any further, I scrambled up the bank to the bushes and the bear and told the officer to stay where he was. The men looked at each other. The officer said, “It’s not your bear.”

  I said, “No, but it’s my land, it’s posted, and you’ll need a search warrant to walk on it. Go find a judge,” I told him. I also sent a thought-message to the bear. If you can travel, this would be the time to do so. I don’t know how long I can hold them off. Just then I heard what I’d been hoping for, the bushes rustling behind me as the bear moved away. The two men looked at me for a while, then gave up, got back into their vehicles, and drove off fast to show their annoyance. I waited to make sure they didn’t return, and then went back to my house, planning to look for the bear by daylight.

  But in the morning Don came by to see if I’d changed my mind. I hadn’t, so he made a phone call to the game warden, explaining the accident and asking permission to track and shoot the bear. The game warden gave permission. I said that it was still my land, and I did not give permission. Don said he was going anyway. A wounded bear was dangerous, he repeated, and this bear was his responsibility. I said that if he insisted on going, I would go too. He didn’t want this, so he left, letting the door shut noisily behind him. Thus it was me and Sheilah, the more cautious of my little cattle dogs, who went to the place where the bear had been hiding to learn as much as we could about his condition. We found no blood and no dead body. That, at least, was good. We then tried tracking. The Kalahari people were the world’s best trackers, and I had learned something of the art from them, but the forest floor was a jumble of little plants and leaves with not many places where one could say for sure that an animal had walked. So I relied mostly on Sheilah. She doesn’t track as a bloodhound might, nose to the earth, absorbed with what he’s finding. Instead, she stays tight against me and bristles when she catches the scent of something scary. She bristled where the bear had hidden in the bushes, and again a few yards to the south, and again farther on as we followed a likely line of travel, and again when we were deep in the woods. She had reacted this way before to bear scent but seldom to any other scent, so I felt fairly sure we were tracking a bear rather than some other animal.

  This proved to be true. In the sand by a stream we found two overlapping bear tracks, the left hind foot and left front foot, both set firmly. So he seemed to be getting around adequately, and therefore might recover. Sheilah and I went home. I called the game warden and told him what we’d found. The game warden was noncommittal.

  I felt sure we had been tracking the injured bear, if for no other reason than that bears tend to live alone, except for mothers with cubs. That being so, he’d be the only bear. As for saving his life, I saw no reason not to. I don’t credit the “wounded animal as bogeyman” theory. During hunting season, the New Hampshire woods abound with wounded animals whom hunters shoot but don’t kill, bears included, and nobody is ever harmed by any of them. Nor have I any sympathy for putting an animal “out of its misery” unless there is absolutely no hope of recovery, and not always even then. In fact, I find the practice appalling. It shows how poorly people of our culture understand other species or even other human cultures. We in the Western world are terrified of pain, but there are people who are not, and many animals clearly are not, and thus are vastly more capable of enduring pain than is our hopelessly soft population. It’s not that animals don’t feel pain just as we do. It’s that they can cope with it and we can’t. A person whose hip was smashed by a truck would lie in the road, screaming. The equally sensitive bear climbed a tree to escape from the truck, then climbed the roadside bank to escape from the people. Was that the behavior of an animal who didn’t want to live?

  But could he continue to move about on broken bones? I thought he could, as I’d seen similar situations. While participating in Katy Payne’s research project in Etosha National Park in Namibia, watching at a water source where elephants drank, we had seen a full-grown elephant who had recovered from a broken leg, and thus had been vastly more compromised than the bear, as a bear, like most animals, can walk on three legs but elephants must use all four. Our research team also came to know a very young male elephant who always seemed alone. This is unusual for elephants, particularly young elephants, who normally live with their mothers and other relatives. Perhaps he was the only one
in his family who had escaped from a culling operation. Even so, he was a cheerful little guy—for fun, he would chase birds who came to the water, and he even threw some friendly glances in our direction with his trunk held high. One day we saw him walking very slowly and limping terribly, and realized that he had broken his left front leg. Gone was his good cheer—he seemed sad and in pain. An obvious solution to his problem would have been to lie down and wait for death, but this wasn’t his choice. He preferred to struggle on, however painfully. We worried about him very much, but he began to get better. A month later, he seemed substantially better, although the two broken ends of the bone were obviously not quite joined and the healing leg was crooked. Still, he was getting around capably enough, eating and drinking, and promised to recover completely if always with a limp. But then one day the park authorities made a rare visit to the park’s interior, where they noticed him and shot him dead. He was suffering, they claimed. They had put him out of his misery. Despite his obvious strength and courage they probably thought they had done him a favor. He could have lived for fifty more years if they had not so ignorantly assumed, as many other game managers assume, that they know more about animals than the animals know about themselves. And who will refute their arrogance? The animals can’t, of course, and if they could, the game managers wouldn’t listen to them.

  Here again, I would look through the lens of the Kalahari, and see the hunter-gatherers there, and remember how calmly they dealt with pain, even terrible pain. I remember events in which people were in great pain but seemed to ignore it. If those people had been asked whether they would rather endure the pain or be put out of their misery, they would have laughed at the question. All things considered, this seems to be the way of the natural world. It is certainly the way of wild animals who, if in too much pain, can always invite their own death without any help from us, simply by hiding quietly somewhere until death takes them. Desperately sick animals sometimes do this. But, just like us, they mostly prefer pain to death, so if possible, they struggle on, despite the pain, in hope of healing, and if they heal, as many do, they continue their valuable lives.

  That’s what seemed to have happened to the bear. I know I saw him in April 2005, walking through the woods on the far side of the pond. By then he was almost six years old, and even though, in keeping with the accident, his right hip was twisted out of line so that he limped like a dog with hip dysplasia, he had managed to grow much bigger. I’d say he had gained about one hundred pounds. The old injury didn’t seem to bother him—he moved right along in a fairly normal manner. What better evidence than this to vindicate my demand for a search warrant? I had given him many years of life.

  We have a hummingbird feeder and a regular bird feeder, the former hanging from a bracket, the latter on a steel pole, both at the outer side of a long wooden ramp that leads to the kitchen door. The hummingbird feeder had been there for years and seemed safe enough, but every night, I brought the regular feeder into the house so that it wouldn’t attract bears. This preserved the feeder until the end of May 2008, when one night I forgot. In the morning I was disheartened to find the steel pole bent double and the bird feeder in pieces beside it. Only a bear could have done this. I happened to discuss the event with Ben Killam, a noted bear authority, and he said, “The bear was hungry.” And yes, I’m sure he was. Assuming it was my bear, he was bigger than ever and needed more food than ever to make it through a winter. I didn’t begrudge him the birdseed. Instead I bought a new bird feeder and a new pole, and was even more careful to bring the feeder indoors before dark.

  That June, the full moon was so bright I thought I’d be able to see animals in the field if any were present. Hoping to catch a glimpse of the Deltas, I went to the kitchen door, a glass door, and cupped my hands beside my eyes to take a look. Surprisingly, I saw nothing at all—just total blackness. This seemed impossible. I looked out a nearby window and saw the whole moonlit scene of the fields and woods, every leaf, every grass blade. I tried again at the glass door, and again saw nothing. As I looked harder and longer, as my eyes got used to the solid black wall, I wondered if an unknown person for an unknown reason had draped a black blanket over our door. But then the blackness began to seem somewhat fuzzy, and I realized I was looking into fur. The bear was pressed against the other side of the glass. We were just a fraction of an inch apart. I turned on the porch light and saw that he was standing on his hind feet with our hummingbird feeder in his hands, tipping it into his mouth to drink the syrup, as a person might drink from a bottle. As to his size, my eyes are fifty-five inches from the ground, and I had been looking straight at his ribs.

  He didn’t seem to mind the light, but he must have sensed someone near him, because he turned and looked down at me. Our faces were less than a foot apart. Our eyes met. We gazed at each other for a moment, then he dropped to all fours and seemed to float down the wooden ramp to vanish in the shadows. Even with his injury, he was graceful.

  I thought I’d just had the greatest experience of my life. This persisted for several days, until I had a greater experience. My husband, Steve, and a friend named Anna Martin were with me when we heard clumping footsteps on the wooden ramp. We thought someone was coming to visit. We went to the door and saw the bear walking toward us. As he came straight at us, we saw that his left shoulder was disabled as well as his right hip—perhaps injured when his body hit the road. He saw us too but didn’t mind. Instead he stood up on his hind legs, grabbed the new steel pole of the new bird feeder with his teeth and hands, and bent it to the ground, as a person might bend a paper clip. This dislodged the bird feeder. The bear stepped off the ramp, lay down, and began to lick up the spilled seeds.

  We could hardly believe our eyes. It was broad daylight and he wasn’t four feet away. He knew we were there, of course—he was looking right at us—but he didn’t mind. When his pink tongue had gathered all the seeds it could reach, he bit the bird feeder and crushed it.

  Gaia gave us the gift of Fear to keep us out of trouble, but she neglected my husband. He opened the door, walked out, and told the bear to leave. The bear raised his head and stared at him. Anna and I grabbed Steve by the arms, pulled him back in, and slammed the door. The bear lowered his head and went on eating. Then he thought for a minute, as if considering Steve’s brief appearance. He stood up and dragged the bird feeder a few feet away. That was better. He could still see us through the window but seemed unworried. He lay down and again began eating.

  I’d never seen anything like it. Many a feeding bear would stand on all fours, ready to depart in case of trouble. Was this bear lying down because he felt relaxed, or because of his injuries? Did the damage make stooping difficult? I wanted to photograph the scene so I could consult a bear expert. My camera was in my office, which is in another building. I left the house on the far side and went to get the camera, the bear watching me as I went but keeping his tongue busy. I came back to the house, again in full view of the bear, and took a picture out the window. The bear watched calmly from the corner of his eye. I took a number of photos, but glass was in the way, and after a while I quietly eased open the window just a crack, just so I could take another photo without the glass. At this the bear—who had not seemed to mind Steve’s sudden appearance or my travels to and from my office—instantly took fright. He got right up and hurried away, heading for the pond almost by the same route he had taken after the accident, still walking like a dog with hip dysplasia, his left front leg buckling with every step. Without a doubt, it was my bear, but eight years old and enormous.

  No seeds were left in the bird feeder, just a few scattered on the ground. He hadn’t needed to endure us any longer. As for the amazing sight of a large black bear lying on the ground right by our house, my photos didn’t really capture it. I’m no photographer, and the results only show a dark blob against a green background. But a discerning viewer could identify the blob as a reclining bear, so at least the photo confirm
s my improbable story. And I kept the steel pole. It’s a steel pipe, really—the kind used in scaffolding—and in the blink of an eye the bear bent it double.

  When I was a child, I learned of a family that built a low platform near their house, and on the platform put various kinds of foods, from kibbles and meat to vegetables and birdseed. These foods attracted wildlife, which the family would then watch through a window. To me, this seemed ideal. I dreamed of doing likewise.

  But I never did. Instead, I mostly heeded the warnings of New Hampshire Fish and Game, denying myself for several reasons, not the least of which is that if a bear believes that people will feed him, he visits people’s homes, which can result in his death. For instance, a man in a neighboring town saw a bear on his porch. He thought the bear would harm his wife, or so he told the game warden after he had shot the bear. The game warden told him that the bear was after the bird feeder on the porch, not after the wife. As the game warden put it, the bear thought the bird feeder was a bear feeder. Tragedies of this kind occur time after time, and I don’t want to cause any of them. After I realized that taking a bird feeder indoors at night was insufficient, I resolved not to maintain a bird feeder until the bears were hibernating. Even in the autumn, a bear doesn’t get enough food from any one bird feeder to make much difference to his well-being, and other foods are available for the seed-eating birds.

  Yet it was the behavior of my dogs that spoke most strongly of the folly of encouraging bears. When the bear departed after emptying our bird feeder, I went outside to salvage what was left of it, and my two dogs came with me. Miraculously, they hadn’t learned of the bear when he was present. But the moment they stepped outside they caught his scent. Up went their lips, fur, ears, and tails, and they rushed off after him, barking so loudly they couldn’t hear me screaming for them to come back. They had devoted their adult lives to keeping intruders off the property. Now a monster had trespassed, and they felt they must confront him. Gone were the wonderfully cooperative dogs who always came when called. They were all the way to the woods before I realized that calling them was futile. I began yelling NO, and that alone stopped them. Still bristling, they briefly considered what I’d said—the angels—then reluctantly came back to safety.