by Ivan Doig
“I’m not one of those Three S guys, if that’s what you’re thinking,” I told Riley stonily. Law on the side of the grizzly notwithstanding, there still were some ranchers along these mountains who practiced the policy of shoot, shovel and shut up. Better a buried bear who’d be no threat to livestock or the leasing of oil rights than a living exemplification of wilderness, ran that reasoning.
“Riley never said you were,” Mariah put in her two bits’ worth.
Actually, except for her contribution being on his behalf it was just as well she did ante herself into this discussion, for my ultimate say on the grizzly issue needed to be to her rather than to some scribbler. I spoke it now, slowly and carefully:
“I don’t believe in things going extinct. But that includes me, too.”
I knew Riley was grinning his sly grin. “A grizzly couldn’t have said it any better, Jick,” issued from him. I didn’t care. From the tight crinkle that had taken over her expression I could see that my words had hit home in Mariah, complicating what she had been remembering, what we both were remembering, of that time of the grizzly twenty-five years before.
It started with a paw mark in the pan of the slop milk Mariah had given the chickens.
Why that pan caught her eye so soon again after she’d done her morning chore of feeding the poultry flock, I do not know. Maybe even at ten years old as she was then, Mariah simply was determined to notice everything. When she came down to the lambing shed to find me I was surprised she and Lexa hadn’t left yet for school, but nowhere near so surprised as when she told me, “You’d better come see the bear track.”
I dropped to one knee there in the filth of the chicken yard, mindful only of that pale outline in the pan. My own hand was not as steady as I would have liked when I measured the bear’s print with it. The width of the palmlike pad was well over six inches, half again wider than my hand. That and the five clawmarks noticeably off the toes distinguished what kind of bear this was. Not just a grizzly but a sizable one.
Considerations of all kinds swarmed in behind that pawprint. No sheep rancher has any reason to welcome a grizzly, that I know of. A grizzly bear in a band of sheep can be dynamite. So my mind flew automatically to the bunches of ewes and lambs scattered across the ranch—late April this was, the tail end of lambing season—like clusters of targets. But before that thought was fully done, the feel of invasion of our family was filling me. The creature that slurped the chickens’ milk and tromped through the still-damp pan had been here astride the daily paths of our lives. Marcella merely on her way out to the clothesline, Mariah simply on her way to the chicken house, Lexa kiting all over the place in her afterschool scampers—their random goings surely crisscrossed whatever route brought the grizzly, coming out of hibernation hungry and irritable, in to the ranch buildings. Nor was I personally keen to be out on some chore and afterward all they’d ever find of me would be my belt buckle in a grizzly turd.
So when I phoned to the government trapper and his wife said he was covering a couple of other counties for the rest of the week, I did not feel I could wait.
It was the work of all that day to pick and prepare the trap site. Up toward Flume Gulch I was able to find the grizzly’s tracks in the mud of the creek crossing, and on the trail along the old burn area of the 1939 forest fire I came across what in every likelihood was the same bear’s fresh dropping, a black pile you’d step in to the top of your ankle. I chose the stoutest survivor pine there at the edge of the old burn and used the winch of the Dodge power wagon to snake a long heavy bullpine log in beside the base of the tree. Around the tree I built a rough pen of smaller logs to keep any stray livestock from blundering in, and even though the other blundersome species wasn’t likely to come sashaying past I nonetheless nailed up a sign painted in red sheep paint to tell people: LOOK OUT—BEAR TRAP HERE. Then I bolted the chain of the trap to the bullpine log and set the trap, ever so carefully using screw-down clamps to cock its wicked steel jaws open, in the middle of the pen and covered it with pine swags. Finally, from the tree limb directly over the trap I hung the bait, a can of bacon grease.
One thing I had not calculated on. The next day was Saturday, and I got up that next morning to two schoolless daughters who overnight had caught the feverish delusion that they were going with me to check the bear trap.
They took my “No” to the court of appeal, but even after their mother had upped the verdict to “You are not going and let’s not hear one more word about it,” their little hearts continued to break loudly. All through breakfast there were outbreaks of eight-year-old pouts from Lexa and ten-year-old disputations from Mariah. As the aws and why can’t we’s poured forth, I was more amused than anything else until the older of these caterwauling daughters cut out her commotion and said in a sudden new voice:
“You’d take us if we were boys.”
Mariah should have grown up to be a neurosurgeon; she always could go straight to a nerve. Right then I wanted to swat her precocious butt until she took that back, and simultaneously I knew she had spoken a major truth.
“Mariah, that will do!” crackled instantly from her mother, but by Marcella’s frozen position across the table from me I knew our daughter’s words had hit her as they had me. Mariah still was meeting our parental storm and giving as good as she got, at risk but unafraid. Beside the tense triangle of the other three of us, Lexa’s mouth made an exquisite little O in awe of her sister who scolded grownups.
That next moment of Marcella and I convening our eyes, voting to each other on Mariah’s accusation, I can still feel the pierce of. At last I said to my fellow defendant, “I could stand some company up there. How would you feel about all of us going?”
“It’s beginning to look like we’d better,” Marcella agreed. “But you two”—she gave Lexa a warning look and doubled it for Mariah—“are staying in the power wagon with me, understand?”
When we got up to Flume Gulch, we had a bear waiting.
Its fur was a surprisingly light tan, and plenty of it loomed above the trap pen; this grizzly more than lived up to the size of his tracks. The impression the caught animal gave, which shocked me at first, was that it was pacing back and forth in the trap pen, peering over the stacked logs as if watching for our arrival. Then I realized that the bear was so angrily restless it only seemed he was moving freely; in actuality he was anchored to the bullpine log by the chain of the trap and could only maneuver as if on a short tether. I will tell you, though, that it dried my mouth a little to see how mobile a grizzly was even with a hind leg in a steel trap biting to its bone.
We must have made quite a family tableau framed in the windshield of the power wagon. Lexa so little she only showed from the eyes up as she craned to see over the dashboard. Mariah as intent as an astronomer in a new galaxy. Their mother and I bolt upright on either side trying not to look as agog as our daughters.
“I better get at it,” I said as much to myself as to Marcella. Something bothered me about how rambunctious the bear was managing to be in the trap. Not that I was any expert on grizzly deportment nor wanted to be. Quickly I climbed out of the power wagon and reached behind the seat for the rifle while Marcella replaced me behind the wheel and kept watch on the grizzly, ready to gun the engine and make a run at the bear in event of trouble. Mariah craned her neck to catalogue my every move as I jacked a shell into the chamber of the rifle and slipped one into the magazine to replace it and for good measure dropped a handful of the .30-06 ammunition in my shirt pocket. “Daddy will show that bear!” Lexa piped fearlessly. Daddy hoped she was a wise child.
Armed and on the ground I felt somewhat more businesslike about the chore of disposing of the bear. Habits of hunting took over and as if I was skirting up the ridge to stay above a herd of deer below, in no time I had worked my way upslope from the trap tree and the griz, to where my shot would be at a safe angle away from the spectating trio in the power wagon. All the while watching the tan form of trapped anger and being wa
tched by it. Great furry block of a thing, the grizzly was somehow wonderful and awful at the same time.
I drew a breath and made sure I had jacked that shell into the chamber of the .30-06. All in a day’s work if this was the kind of work you were in, I kept telling myself, aim, fire, bingo, bruin goes to a honey cloud. Hell, other ranchers who had grazing allotments farther up in the Two Medicine National Forest, where there was almost regular traffic of grizzlies, probably had shot dozens of them over the years.
Abruptly and powerfully the bear surged upright and lurched toward the standing pine tree, as if to shelter behind it from me and my rifle. The chain on the trap was only long enough for the bear to get to the tree, not around it. But as the animal strained there I saw that only its toes of the left rear foot were clamped in the jaws of the trap, not the rear leg itself, which awfully suddenly explained why the bear seemed so maneuverable in the trap pen. Next thing to not caught, the trapper Isidor Pronovost used to say of a weasel or a bobcat toe-trapped that way, barely held but unable to escape, and such chanciness seemed all the mightier when the caught creature was as gargantuan as this grizzly.
I will swear on all the Bibles there are, I was not intentionally delaying the bear’s execution. Rather, I was settling the barrel of the .30-06 across a silvered stump for a businesslike heart shot when instead the grizzly abruptly began climbing the tree. Attacking up the tree, erupting up the tree, whatever way it can strongest be said, branches as thick as my arm were cracking off and flying, widowmakers torn loose by the storm of fur. The dangling bait can sailed off and clanked against a snag not ten feet from me. The fantastic claws raking furrows into the wood, the massively exerting hulk of body launching and launching itself into that tree. The trap dangling from the bear’s rear toes was coursing upward too, tautening the chain fastened into the bullpine log.
Awful turned even worse now. The log lifted at its chained end and began to be dragged to the tree, the bear bellowing out its pain and rage at the strain of that taut pull yet still mauling its way up the tree. I stood stunned at the excruciating tug of war; the arithmetic of hell that was happening, for the log’s deadweight on those toes could—
Then I at last realized. The grizzly was trying to tear its toes off to get free.
All prescribed notions of a sure heart shot flew out of me. I fired at the bear simply to hit it, then blazed away at the region of its shoulders again, again, as it slumped and began sliding down the tree trunk, claws slashing bark off as they dragged downward, the rifle in my arms speaking again, again, the last two shots into the animal’s neck as it crumpled inside the trap pen.
All those years after, I could understand that Mariah was uneasy about that memory of the toe-caught but doomed grizzly. What the hell, I was not anywhere near easy about it myself, even though I yet believed with everything in me that that particular bear had to be gotten rid of. I mean, six-inch-wide pawprints when you go out to feed the chickens? But I knew that what was bugging Mariah was not just the fate that bear had roamed into on our ranch. No, her bothersome remembering was of us, the McCaskills as we were on that morning. Of the excitement that danced in all four of us after I had done the shooting—Marcella with her worldbeating grin, Lexa hopping up and down as she put out her small hand to touch the pale fur, Mariah stock-still but fever-eyed with the thrill of what she’d witnessed, myself breaking into a wild smile of having survived. Of our family pride, for in honesty it can be called no less, about the killing of the grizzly, with never a thought that its carcass was any kind of a lasting nick out of nature. Late now, though, to try to tack so sizable an afterthought into that Flume Gulch morning.
• • •
Clearly this day’s grizzly already knew that matters had become more complicated. The snared bear stood quiet but watchful in a pen of crisscrossed logs—much like the one I built—under a big cottonwood, a respectful distance between it and the two state men beside their truck when the motorhome and the three of us entered the picture.
Riley forthwith introduced himself and then Mariah and me to the wildlife biologist, and the biologist in turn acquainted us with his bear-management assistant, a big calm sort who apparently had been hired for both his musclepower and disposition. After we’d all handshook and murmured our hellos, the immediate next sound was Mariah’s camera catching the stare of the bear. Inevitably she asked, “How close can I go?”
No sooner was the utterance out of her mouth than the grizzly lunged through the side of the pen, lurching out to the absolute end of the cable it was snared by. That cable was of steel and anchored to the tree and holding the bear tethered a good fifty yards away from the five of us, but even so . . .
“Right where you are is close enough until we get the tranquilizer in him,” the biologist advised. He gave a little cluck of his tongue. “I’ve been at this for years and my heart still jumps out my throat when the bear does that.”
Mine was halfway to Canada by now. I got calmed a little by reminding myself that the assistant bear mover had in hand a .12-gauge semi-automatic shotgun with an extended magazine holding seven slugs, armament I was glad enough to see.
Riley went right on journalizing. With a nod toward the bear he asked, “What have we got here?” I sent him a look. We?
“A sub-adult, probably about a two-year-old,” the biologist provided and went on to explain that a young bear like this one was a lot like a kid on the run, no slot in life yet and getting into trouble while it poked around. More than probably it had been one of the assailants on the Hutterites’ fowl. Mischief this time was spelled v-e-a-l, a white-faced calf killed in the fence corner of the rancher’s pasture we were now in.
This contest too is tribal. Ignore the incidental details that one community is four-footed and furred and the other consists of scantily haired bipeds, and see the question as two tribes in what is no longer enough space for two. Dominion, oldest of quarrels. The grizzly brings to the issue its formidable natural aptitude, imperial talent to live on anything from ants to, as it happens, livestock. But the furless tribe possesses the evolutionary equivalent of a nuclear event: the outsize brain that enables them to fashion weapons that strike beyond the reach of their own bodies.
Riley did a bunch more interviewing of the biologist and the biologist talked of the capture event and the relocation process and other bear-management lingo, Mariah meanwhile swooping around with her camera doing her own capturing of the bear-moving team and Riley and for whatever damn reason, even me. Even she couldn’t help generally glancing at the snared grizzly, as we all kept doing. Yet somehow the bear’s single pair of eyes watched us with greater total intensity than our five human pair could manage in monitoring him. And a grizzly’s eyes are not nearly its best equipment, either. Into that black beezer of a nose and those powerful rounded-off ears like tunnels straight into the brain, our smells and sounds must have been like stench and thunder to the animal.
The majority of my own staring went to the rounded crown of fur atop the bear’s front quarters, the trademark hump of the grizzly. Not huge, just kind of like an extra biceps up there, an overhead motor of muscle that enabled the grizzly to run bursts of forty-five miles an hour or to break a smaller animal’s neck with one swipe. Or to rip off its own trapped toe.
My throat was oddly dry when the question came out of me. “What do you bait with?”
The biologist turned his head enough to study me, then sent Riley an inquiring look. Who, goddamn his knack for aggravation, gave a generous okaying nod. Just what my mood needed, the Riley Wright seal of approval.
“Roadkills,” the biologist told me. “I collect them. Heck of a hobby, isn’t it? This one’s a deer, good bear menu.”
Now that he’d obliged Riley’s notebook and Mariah’s camera, the biologist said “We’d better get this bear underway. First we dart him off.”
With doctor gloves on, he used a syringe to put the tranquilizer dose into a metal dart and then inserted the dart into what looked almos
t like a .22 rifle. The assistant hefted the shotgun and with their respective armaments the two bear men edged slowly out toward the grizzly, the biologist saying to us in reluctant tone of voice, “This is always a fun part.”
When the pair neared to about thirty yards from him the bear really lunged now. At the end of the cable tether it stood and strained. My God, even the fur on the thing looked dangerous; this griz was browner than the tan one I’d shot, and the wind rippled in that restless dark field of hair.
Clicking and more clicking issued from Mariah’s camera while the biologist and his guardian eased another ten yards closer to the bear. Riley alternately jotted in his notebook and restlessly tapped his pen on it. I wonder now how I was able to hear anything over the beating of my heart.
When he was no more than twenty yards from the bear, the biologist raised his dart rifle, leveled it for what seemed a long time, then fired, a compressed air pfoop. The dart hit the grizzly high in the hind quarters. As the Fish and Game men rapidly walked backwards to where we were, the bear reared up behind, thrashed briefly, then went down, lying there like a breathing statue as the paralyzing drug gripped it.
The bear men stood and waited, the shotgunner never taking his eyes off the bear, the biologist steadily checking his watch and the animal’s vital signs. After about ten minutes the biologist said, “Let’s try him.”
He reached in the back of the truck for a long-handled shovel. Going over beside the hairy bulk with a careful but steady stride while the helper trailed him, shotgun at the ready, the biologist took a stance and rapped the near shoulder with the end of the shovel handle, not real hard but probably plenty to start a fight if the other party is a grizzly.
When the bear just lay there and took that, the biologist announced: “Okay, he’s under.”