Pecked to death by ducks (8 page)

"So?"

"Well, my guess is that he's the boss bear in that area."

"Yeah?"

"You think some other bears haven't winded that carcass?" Grizzlies have been known to scent a carcass—even a newly dead animal, its flesh not yet putrescent—from several miles away. The animal's sense of smell is more acute than that of a bloodhound. More acute by an order of magnitude.

"So," Tom reasoned, "maybe this bear isn't going to let the other ones in until he's done. And if there are other grizzlies around, where do you suppose they'll be? You think they'll be out in the open? Or hiding in the trees?"

"Point," I said.

Tom had almost walked into the bear the day before. He is a photographer and guides people on photographic safaris in and around Yellowstone Park. Some of his Wilderness Photography Expedition clients had written in with their requirements: They wanted a short walk, no more than two miles, on flat land, and they wanted to see lots of big, hairy mammals. Tom knew of several places that would fit the bill, but he wanted to scout them out first, be sure the animals were there. He had gotten a little carried away on his walk and was five miles in when he topped a

rise and found himself 175 yards from the bear. He dropped to his belly and didn't move for three hours until the grizzly took a nap.

That evening Tom stopped at my house and asked if I wanted to join him the next day. He was going back armed with his longest lenses. He swore that he was not about to take any chances to get good shots.

Last year, in Glacier Park, a grizzly killed a photographer who was said to love the bears, to know their habits. Tom had seen the shots.

"It was a sow, with three cubs," he told me. "I think the guy might have been as close as a hundred yards. And she definitely saw him. You could see she saw him. I think he followed her. This should be a safer situation. It's not a sow with cubs to protect. It's not a young male liable to strike out at anything. This is a big, mature male with plenty to eat. If we're quiet, if we're careful, he'll never even see us. I'm sure he didn't see me yesterday."

We parked by the side of the road and began walking toward the grizzly. The valley floor was a rolling, treeless plain, punctuated by stands of sage. At one point, three miles in—two miles from the bear—we saw several ravens perched on a ridge ahead of us. Tom thought they might be attracted to some carrion below but were afraid to approach it. He thought the birds on the ridge might mean there was a bear below, feeding on something. We belly-crawled to the top and peeked over. We saw a few bison, grazing peacefully, but there, not too far away, was some grizzly dung.

Tom broke the scat apart with his boot. It was soft and very black. "He's been eating meat," Tom said.

"You can tell because it's so dark?"

"Yeah," Tom said. "And here's another clue." He bent over and picked a porcupine quill from the dung.

"This bear"—I couldn't believe it—"this bear ate a porcupine, I mean he literally ate a porcupine? And he passed the quills?"

"Must be a mean motor scooter," Tom said.

He handed me the quill, and I stood there with the white nee-

die in my hand, and it scared me just about as badly as anything I'd ever heard or read about grizzly bears, ever. I couldn't imagine any animal—even a grizzly bear—eating a porcupine, quills and all. We walked down a hill and across a marsh that was full of meandering streams and land that moved like stiffened gelatin under the boot. There was a ridge ahead of us, and the bear, if he was there, was on the other side. The wind was brisk, and it came out of the southwest. We crawled to the top of the ridge—on the northeast, downwind side.

The bear was in a bowl-shaped depression about 250 yards away from us. He was standing on a mound of dirt where he had buried something. The freshly dug mound was perhaps two feet high and ten feet long. I made a mental note to forever avoid mounds of dirt in bear country. The grizzly was black, and he glistened in the sun. In proportion to his massive body, his claws were almost delicate, each as big around and about as long as my little finger. They were bone white: the mark of an older bear. His right ear looked a little ragged, as if it had been bitten and torn in a fight.

There were trees to the west, as Tom had said, but they were a quarter of a mile away and almost directly upwind. Where we were, there was only sage, and no one plant was over two feet high.

Tom and I heard, very faintly, the sound of a cracking branch from the stand of trees. There was a dark shape, moving slowly deep in the woods. With the binoculars I could see that it was a bison. The bear stiffened and stared into the trees, like a dog on point.

It is said that a grizzly's hearing is far more sensitive than a man's, and as proof, scientists point out that a grizzly will begin blindly digging in one spot and come out with a mouse or vole he's located by sound alone.

The grizzly stood there for some time, visibly sniffing the wind. A raven flew over the bear, and he looked up in what appeared to be annoyance as the bird's shadow passed over him. The movement brought him around so that he seemed to be staring directly at us. Some people believe grizzlies don't see well, and in fact,

6$ A TOOTH AND CLAW

they may not see as well as humans, but experiments with brown bears proved that they could recognize their keepers at 360 feet. We were crouched down at 750 feet. McNamee, in The Grizzly Bear, warns that "it should not be assumed that a squinting, blinking, head bobbing grizzly bear is having trouble picking you out of some kind of blur." With the binoculars on him, however, I was absolutely certain that he did not see us. I could see his eyes, and I knew he didn't see us.

The bear began digging in the mound of dirt he was standing on. In less than two minutes he had uncovered the front half of a cow bison carcass. We could hear him snuffling and sneezing in a cloud of dry dust. He reached into the hole and lifted up the head and the front quarters of the bison with a movement that seemed to cost him almost no effort at all. The carcass probably weighed somewhere close to a thousand pounds.

He could, I saw, use his claws—the same front claws he'd used to dig—very dexterously, almost like fingers. There was a disconcerting sound of breaking bones as the bear gnawed away on the bison's shoulder area. He was standing sideways to us, and I could see that his belly was distended. There was a lot of meat on the bison, and the bear had probably been feeding on it for several days.

In point of fact, this grizzly didn't seem very hungry at all. He uncovered a bit more of the carcass, flipped it halfway over, and examined the new arrangement. I had an image of a rich guy counting his money: The bear seemed to have a kind of Scrooge McDuck attitude toward the carcass. "Mine, ha-ha-ha, all mine." He scented something in the woods and turned toward the new odor, then dismissed it. Probably the bison in the woods. A second later the bear was back chortling over the carcass.

After an hour or so he began digging a second hole adjacent to the first. He used the dirt to cover the carcass. Then he lay down in the second hole and took a nap in the sun. He was on his back, and you could just see the tip of his nose sticking out of the ground. It looked silly, and I wanted to laugh, and I knew I shouldn't laugh, so a series of muffled giggles came snorting up through my nose. I felt like a kid in church. The fear that I'd been

living with for twenty hours had stretched itself to the breaking point and finally snapped. The bear couldn't see us, and now he was taking a nap. With his big-bear nose sticking up out of the ground.

Tom needed to move in closer now that the bear was asleep. I chose to stay where I was. Murphy would retreat back over the ridge and come back over the top closer to the bear. He didn't want to crawl down into the bowl because the breeze could swirl around down there, and the bear might wind him. Tom began packing up his gear.

Tired of staring at the bear's nose through my binoculars, I moved behind a small wall of sage and lay on my back, feeling just a tad bearlike. The wind was driving wisps of high cirrus clouds across the sky, and I thought, Storm tomorrow. A dim drowsiness began a slow descent. Couldn't really focus on the sky anymore. Only forty-five minutes of sleep last night. Was I really falling asleep? Now? Two hundred fifty yards from a grizzly bear. In the wild. What was wrong with me?

Tom whispered, "I'm going now."

I heard myself mumble, "Bear's got the right idea." And I fell asleep. Went out like a light.

When I woke, Tom was within one hundred yards of the grizzly. A few minutes later the grizzly woke up—there was a full half hour of stretching and yawning involved in that process— and he uncovered the bison again. We watched him feed for four more hours. Then he took another nap, and it was safe to leave.

And when we got back to town, the first thing Tom told people is that I took one look at the grizzly and fell asleep. Which is true . . . essentially . . . but, you know, I mean, it's not in context, because, uh . . .

Well, hell, I can't explain it. I'm just going to have to live with it. I'm the guy who spent twenty sleepless hours being so terrified of a grizzly bear that when I finally saw him, I fell asleep.

"Falconry," I might have written a month ago, "is that extinct medieval sport wherein guys in metal suits throw birds to fish."

I admit to a large measure of ignorance regarding birds in general and falconry in particular. Tragically, I am afflicted with the agony of ornithological dyslexia. Ignorance, however, if it is sincere and pure of heart, sometimes functions as a knowledge vacuum. Which, I suspect, is the most obtuse and metaphysical explanation of how I ended up attending the 1988 North American Falconers Association Field Meet in Amarillo.

Not two hours after I arrived in Texas, I found myself creeping through a dusty field, sneaking up on a small pond in order to ambush a handful of migrating ducks. The sun had just touched the western horizon, and a full hunter's moon was rising in the east. The colors of the setting sun—pastel oranges and reds— shimmered on the surface of the water. It was a clear, windless day, and the mirrored image of the moon glittered on the shining water as well, so that it seemed as if all of heaven and earth was encompassed in this farmer's stock pond.

The falconer slipped his bird—released her from his fist—and the peregrine took a pitch above, several hundred feet over the

PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS A 68

pond. I was given to understand that the bells, little jingle bells the falcons wear, are necessary to locate a bird feeding on fallen quarry in high cover, though there is something the least bit anticipatory about them. A hunting falcon rising from the fist sounds a bit like Christmas morning.

When the falcon had taken a pitch of about two hundred feet, various humans charged the pond and flushed the ducks. And suddenly, there she was, a peregrine falcon diving at perhaps two hundred miles an hour. I now know that falconers call this power dive a stoop, as in "She stoops to conquer." (The female falcon is a third again as big as the male, and most falconers fly females).

The peregrine's wings were folded in against her body, and the wind through her brittle feathers—through the bell slits— sounded in a rising whistle. Two lines of flight, one horizontal, one vertical, intersected at a moment of savage radiance above the sun and the moon shimmering below.

And that, I learned, is falconry. It is a form of personally engineered bird-watching.

From the outside falconers themselves appear to be a flock of fairly odd ducks. There were over three hundred birds at the NAFA Field Meet, both hawks and falcons. On sunny days, often at midafternoon, most of those birds could be seen out in back "of the Amarillo Hilton, sunning themselves on blocklike perches— weathering—while the falconers stood around arguing proudly.

Falconers argue as a matter of course. A falconer argues, I think, because the sport requires him to bend his will to that of the bird. There is no disciplining an unmannerly falcon. A disgruntled bird will simply fly away next time it is released. Therefore, falconers take out their frustrations on others and bicker endlessly over the fine points of their sport.

They are, I'm obliged to state, monomaniacal in their frenzy. Often they take their birds with them on social occasions, and invariably the bird will mute, which is to say, it will engage its impressive waste-disposal system. When this happens in someone else's house—when the mutes are spread across the couch and new carpet like the contents of several tubes of toothpaste—the

falconer does not discipline his bird. This is simply not done. Nor is he likely to help clean up. Typically, a falconer in such a situation will examine the mutes and proclaim, with great satisfaction, "Now that is a healthy bird."

Perhaps the strangest characteristic of the falconer is a complete lack of trousers on the male of the species. I have not yet observed such conduct in the female falconer, though I intend to be patient in this regard.

The male falconer oftentimes runs around without pants because he forgets them in his frenzy of monomania. There is, for instance, a falconer of my recent acquaintance who lives in Winifred, Montana, not far from the breaks of the Missouri River. I'll call this fellow, oh, let's say Ralph Rogers.

One day Ralph decided to hunt the breaks with his falcon. He packed up the essentials for the bird—food, the weathering block, the hood, the jesses, the lure, the bells, the electronic transmitter and receiver—all the paraphernalia necessary for the comfort and safety of his peregrine. Being an experienced out-doorsman, Ralph packed quickly for himself.

It was a warm day, and the falconer was wearing running shorts. By the time he got to the breaks, the weather had turned cold. The experienced outdoorsman discovered that he had not packed any pants. His partner lent him the only conceivable thing he could wear to cut the wind and blunt the chill. Since the other man was about a foot shorter than Ralph, and not nearly so, uh, muscular, the thermal underwear our falconer now wore had that fashionable over-the-calf look that so fascinates clothiers everywhere. Inevitably, the bird rode a particularly strong thermal, rose out of sight, caught a whiff of the jet stream, and got lost. Ralph had fastened a small transmitter to his bird, and he was using a black box with an antenna—the receiver—to find her.