by Wendy Dudley
house, unable to take a single step without the crutches. Frustrated and helpless, I had no idea how I was going to retrieve Hud, if indeed he was disoriented and roaming high above the cupboards. I flicked on the kitchen light, but Hud was nowhere in sight, and not one of my barnyard figurines was out of place. Mrs. Cow, Mr. Pig, Master Horse, Watermelon Raven, Sunshine Mule, and the Brighty donkeys—all were there, staring down at us from the lip of the shelf. Hobbling into the living room, I studied the bookcase. Everything was in its place. And there, snoozing in his favourite soft chair, was Hud, his leathery nose tucked under his big front paws.
Well, maybe what I had heard came from the outside deck. Perhaps the flying squirrels or barn cat knocked over a garden pot. I shuffled over to the sliding glass doors. We'd left one door open, hoping the night air would eventually cool and drift through the screen. The kitchen light cast a faint glow on the deck. At first I didn't see the dark face studying me from behind the pot of purple and white petunias. But as my eyes adjusted to the low light, I could make out two beady eyes, a brown snout, and a prune-sized nose. Standing just feet away, on the other side of the thin screen, was a black bear, his head lifting in the dark as he sniffed my presence. Needless to say, I felt somewhat vulnerable standing there stark naked and propped on crutches. To shut the outside glass door, I would first have to slide open the screen, then try to drag the door shut across a warped track, all with the bear less than four feet from my arm. Instead, I backed away, waving my crutches.
"Go on now," I said in my most polite voice. "Go on." The dogs took this as a cue to bark, convincing the bear to descend the stairs he had climbed to the deck. Catching a whiff of his scent, the dogs went berserk, jumping in the air and yiking like a pack of hounds.
"What's going on?" Mom asked, appearing from downstairs to investigate the midnight pandemonium.
"Just the bear. He was on the deck, but he's gone now. You might want to shut that deck door, though."
Heading back to my bedroom, I was still baffled by the sound of clanking china. It had sounded so close, a lot closer than the deck. Before switching off the kitchen light, I made one last inspection, my eyes darting back to the side window.
"Just a minute," I said. "Look. The screen's pushed in."
Sure enough, the flimsy screen was no longer attached to the window frame. The bear had shoved it in, knocking aside a set of salt and pepper shakers. Crashing to the counter, they had smashed into an assortment of glass jars. Straightening the toppled glassware, I noticed deep grooves embedded in the sill: sharp furrows left by bear claws. I ran a finger along them, a finger so tiny compared to the bear's curved claws. With the bear this close, I couldn't believe the dogs hadn't barked. Perhaps it was too close, leaving them speechless, just as Mom and I were now, both of us wondering if the bear could actually stuff his entire body through the window. I shuddered at the thought of being trapped inside my bedroom on crutches while down the hall a bear wreaked havoc in the kitchen. This wasn't the first bear to appear at our window, but it was the first one that tried to crawl inside. Because we live in bear country, we're careful with our food, never feeding the dogs or cats outside, and removing bird feeders after the last snow. But on this night, we had fried a trout, and I guess its oily smell wafted through the open window. Not to mention the bag of ripening
bananas sitting on the counter, just a paw's reach from the sill. As hot and stuffy as it was, I shut all the windows. "Just in case he comes back," I said.
The bear did come back, but not until the following afternoon. And he was a she. Maggie and Georgie chased her, but she retreated only so far before turning around to stare them down. The bear had good reason not to leave—high up a tree was her cub, its arms wrapped around the trunk, its mouth wide open in a pitiful cry. Knowing she'd never leave without her cub, we put the dogs inside. Moments later, the cub slid to the ground, like a climber rappelling down a cliff, then bounded off with mamma.
We have little fear of bears, having spent so much time in Ontario's north, where they are as common as blackflies. But we do respect their power and learned long ago to give a wide berth to a mother with cubs. More than once we've waited inside the parked car because a pair of cubs was sitting smack in the middle of the trail to our cabin.
Like here at Burro Alley, the bears in Ontario would come to our back door, smelling wild raspberry pies cooking on the wood stove. Using their long claws, they would hook open the screen door, only to have it slam in their face because of the heavy spring catch. If that didn't send them running, then Mom would chase them, threatening to whomp their hefty rear ends with a worn-out corn broom. On several occasions, with particularly stubborn bears, we struck up a bushland percussion of banging pots and pans, creating enough of a racket to send them scampering for quiet cover. My brother and I often met bears on the trail, especially when we were sent to get water from the rocky spring. But rarely did we see their faces, just their bobtails as they scrambled off the path. Never did we have a bear turn ugly.
Lucy, however, does not share our relaxed attitude towards bears. One sniff of bear and she paces, snorts, and blows air through her nostrils, sounding like a surfacing whale. One day while we were riding along a cutline, a bear appeared suddenly, standing on its hind legs in waist-high grass. It stood dead centre in front of Lucy, right in her blind spot. Quickly, I turned her in a circle, giving the bear enough time to leave the trail. As we continued our ride, Lucy remained relaxed, her ears flopping back and forth. But as soon as we reached the spot where the bear had been feeding, her ears shot forward and her muscles tightened. Softly, I urged her on with a squeeze of my legs, driving her forward on a loose rein. I could hear the bear snapping branches, but I kept my eyes focused ahead. Lucy forged on, but it was several minutes before her muscles softened.
With so much literature and art depicting ferocious open-mouthed grizzlies, it's not surprising that many of us grow up fearing bears, despite the fact that most of us also grow up with teddy bears, relying on their soft faces to ease our insecurities. Ironically, it is our fear that often makes a bear aggressive. My friends Charlie Russell and Maureen Enns have discovered that it is possible for people and bears to live in harmony, especially if humans can learn to adopt non-aggressive behaviour. Having spent six years studying brown bears on Russia's remote northeast coast, the couple documented their pioneering work in the book Grizzly Heart: Living Without Fear Among the Brown Bears of Kamchatka. Charlie, a naturalist who has a deep and spiritual understanding of animals, walks with the bears, holds their massive paws, and reaches inside their mouths. Maureen, a photographer and artist, shares these experiences, mimicking the bears' vocal ranges and dropping to all fours if a bear seems unsure. Once fearful of bears, she learned that many of our fears are built on misconceptions. Together, Maureen and Charlie are trying to make the world a safer place for bears. For Charlie, who grew up near Waterton Lakes National Park in southern Alberta, this work began forty years ago, when he and his father, renowned author and outdoorsman Andy Russell, began filming grizzlies in the wild. For three years, from 1961 to 1963, they shot the documentary Grizzly Country, which toured to sold-out audiences across North America. Throughout the filming, they were never armed, and their footage of nursing bears proved that not all bears viewed at close proximity are dangerous. Charlie went on to study the white kermode bears on British Columbia's Princess Royal Island (he writes of this experience in his book Spirit Bear) and later established the Khutzeymateen Valley in British Columbia as Canada's first grizzly bear reserve.
Charlie warns us not to emulate his actions, but he does encourage us to try and understand this often misunderstood animal. In our mountain parks, black bears are protected, but once they roam on private lands they are in the crosshairs of anyone who wants to kill them. One Alberta conservation officer told me he considered the bears to be mere "pests, like gophers." It is an attitude I do not understand, and one far removed from respect. In traditional Native cultures,
bears were revered and yes, even feared, but they were also respected for their intelligence. I once sat with a Native hunter, who described to me how he had to kill a black bear because the two of them were trying to live on the same hill. After he shot the bear, he sprinkled tobacco at the site, thanking the bear for giving up his life so that he might stay and have food to eat.
While the survival of bears depends largely on changing human attitudes, it also hinges on habitat protection. I fear for the bears who find their territories infested with development from homes, expanding townsites, and resource industries. The bears desperately need some place to go. Like the cougars, they too are being pushed into inhabited areas, where they often die because of conflicts with people. Mom and I try to do our part by declaring areas of Burro Alley off-limits to both us and the dogs. These are places where the buffalo berries grow thick, where the sedges and cow parsnip are lush, and where dead logs harbour ants and wasps. From our window, we can sit and watch the bears rest on their haunches, the parsnips folded in their laps. And from our back deck, we can hear stumps being toppled as the bears rummage for insects. We cannot always see them, but we take solace in knowing they are there.
Chapter Forty-One
Wilderness Hands
The land shapes our hands and our lives.
Never have I seen eyes grow so big on someone so small. My cousin's daughter Jessica screamed and danced as if she'd caught a glimpse of Santa Claus sledding across the sky behind his reindeer. But what she had spotted was a deer, a solitary doe emerging at the edge of the forest.
"A deer. I just saw a deer. Oh, isn't it wonderful! I just saw a deer."
"Yes, Jessica, it is wonderful," I said. "You're a very lucky girl."
"I'm going in to get my camera," she yelled, not knowing her ruckus sent the deer crashing deep into the woods, its heart pounding every time she screeched. But a lesson in the etiquette of wildlife watching could come later —what was so delightful was to see this seven-year-old's genuine thrill at sighting a mule deer pruning willow bushes so close to our home.
Jessica and her sister Anne were on holidays, two kids from the suburbs awestruck by the wild animals roaming our backyard. They didn't care about their mosquito bites, or about the thistle and rose bush scratches on their legs. They were having a ball, scrambling through the fields, where they found blue jay feathers, mottled butterflies, and all sorts of creepy crawlies. Jessica and Anne had come to Burro Alley hoping for a country vacation, and by golly, they were having one! They shovelled manure, rode Raven bareback, fed Peso peppermints, and chastised Lucy for laying back her ears. Down along the Sheep River, they spent an afternoon puddling about and damming a rock pool. Then they watched a herd of bighorn sheep graze high on a hillside. Two days before they left, a young bull moose wandered within feet of their bedroom window. Each evening, they wrote and sketched pictures in their daily journals, recording the magic of their holiday.
When Jessica and Anne left, they waved goodbye to the animals, promising to come back soon. I hope they do. Children need to know that nature can be a precious friend. Whether they walk along a wild river or stroll through a city park, it doesn't matter, just as long as they realize they are part of nature, not separate from it. It helps if parents teach these lessons, but sometimes lasting influences come from adults outside the home—be it friends, relatives, or teachers. My parents immersed my brother and me in the natural world, but others also left impressions as precious as fresh tracks in the snow.
Today, Canadian wildlife artist Robert Bateman is an international celebrity, but I remember him as someone who helped shape my love of the land. Bob likes to say he knew me before I was born. I guess he's right, since he was friends with my parents long before I popped into this world. Searching for great horned owls, Bob frequently visited my parents' property, craning his neck to spot the owls hugging the trunks of pine trees. Algonquin Park was a mutual passion for Bob and my parents, with its mosaic of wild lakes hidden like deep secrets behind rocky outcrops. For three summers, Bob worked at Algonquin's wildlife research station, while my father taught canoeing at the park's Camp Tamakwa and Camp Ahmek.
I don't exactly remember the first time I met Bob, but my recollection is of a boyish naturalist who lived near the Niagara Escarpment in a hillside home among the rolling woods and farmland. In his dining room was a Japanese garden pool, but it didn't impress me: there were no frogs to catch. What's a pond without a polliwog? What did impress me was a painting of a rough-legged hawk tucked among the massive black limbs of an elm tree. I would sit and study this bird as if it were perched to take flight and disappear beyond the painting's borders. I remember the scene as much for the elm tree, since at that time thousands of these stately trees were dying from Dutch elm disease, a deadly fungus spread by the elm bark beetle.
Just beyond the Bateman property was a crazy quilt of fields and concession roads, which I explored with their dog Smallwood, a lumbering and lovable Newfoundland and Labrador cross. Together we hiked Mount Nemo, whose cliffs were a backdrop for circling turkey vultures. In the evenings, I would sit with Bob in his upstairs studio, listening to bird-song recordings and discussing canoeing. Bob would continue painting through our conversations, adding a fly to the nose of an African Cape Buffalo or a fleck of yellow to the savannah.
Bob went on to become one of the world's best-known wildlife artists, but I will always remember those days when he took the time to show me the wonders of the outdoor world. Years later, when I was living in Banff, Bob and his family dropped by while travelling through the Rockies. It was like old times, as we walked the shores of the Vermilion Lakes, our binoculars focused on a nesting osprey. Bob asked me if I thought his children would grow up to share his sense of wonder.
We agreed there were no guarantees, but we also agreed that parents could guide their children by exposing them to a world beyond concrete and pavement. The children would come to know the feel of soft soil beneath their feet, and they would discover that other adults—not just their parents—are also enthusiastic about the natural world.
Another wonderful mentor I will never forget is Arnold Hodgkins, an artist who shared with me his love of rural tranquility. A spiritual man, Arnold embraced life with a hearty laugh and a twinkling eye. A member of the medical corps during the Second World War, he witnessed life at its cruellest. Upon returning home, he sought peace in the hilly swells near Leaskdale, a small Ontario village that was the home of Lucy Maud Montgomery, creator of Anne of Green Gables. Here Arnold built the Deerfoot Gallery, a unique art space opened in 1963 by A. J. Casson and Frederick Varley of the Group of Seven. Among his paintings were vignettes of leaning barns and lazy country roads vanishing over a round horizon. Left alone in the gallery, I studied these images, imagining what was over each rise and thinking about the animals stabled inside the barns, their heat keeping at bay the cold winter winds.
Arnold's living quarters were dark and subterranean, built beneath his gallery. In his living room was a live tree, its thick bark gnarled and creased with age. It was a part of his home, as familiar and comforting as his old couch and kitchen table. Here was a man who truly lived with nature.
I don't know what I would do without the outdoor world. There is a sense of order in nature that calls to me, whether from a windswept plain, a bluff of aspen, or an aromatic cedar grove. I find a comfort in nature that reminds me of my childhood. On weekends, when we headed to our northern cabin, my homework was done while sitting in the duff beneath a huge white pine. I toyed with mathematics while watching a snapping turtle bask on a half-submerged log. I composed an English essay while canoeing among the lily pads, listening to the mewing and chortling of beaver kittens hidden inside their sticks-and-mud lodge. I contemplated genetics while snowshoeing through waist-high drifts, curious about the bloodied wolverine tracks I was following. So what if I failed sewing class? To me, it never seemed quite as important as knowing how to tap maple trees or how to boil the sap into sweet, s
ticky syrup.
I wish every child could have the chance to spend time in nature's classroom, guided by gentle wilderness hands. I hope that Jessica and Anne never lose their sense of wonder, and that they pass it on to their own children.
I still see Bob Bateman, usually when he's on a book tour. We still find time to talk about those delightful springs in Ontario when the woods are a carpet of violets and trilliums, about the family of river otters that play outside his home on Salt Spring Island, and about the bears and cougars that wander the aspen trails of my Alberta home. And though Arnold Hodgkins has long since passed away, I am sure he is listening to us. Above our hearth hangs one of his paintings. Entitled Swamp Cathedral, it is of a beaver swimming through an arch of bulrushes, its wake forming a large V like flying Canada geese reflected in a sky of water.
Wilderness landscapes remain the bedrock of my life. It was the land that called my mom and me home to Burro Alley. Our lives have moved in a circle, like the earth and its seasons, like day and night, settling in this place that every day massages our souls and rocks us to sleep at night. A place where two ravens view beauty and then take flight to carry its message far and beyond.
Acknowledgements
There are many people who share the journey of writing a book. Without them, it would be an arduous trek; with them, it is an exciting adventure. I would like to pass along my thanks to my parents, Ken and Penny without them, who would I be?; to my brother, Jon, for sharing those early paths; to my dear friend, novelist Rick Mofina, for being there, always; to writer Marsha Boulton, for her everlasting faith; to authors Brian Brennan and Bruce Masterman, for their unselfish support; to the late Timothy Findley, W.O. Mitchell, and Grant McEwan—their creativity and passion for the natural world inspired me deeply; to Susan Scott, for taking a chance those many years ago; to the late Ken Hull, who took that chance and ran with it; to Mike Spear and Bev Oberg at CBC Radio, who laughed and cheered in all the right spots; to the staff at Fifth House, for sharing and understanding my vision; to all the animals that have enriched my life, for without them, there would be no Burro Alley; and to all those who work to protect ranchland and wilderness places.