The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011 (33 page)

 

Perhaps the reason Herb failed to grasp the situation more quickly was the same reason our dogs were so quiet: they were stymied by the bear's unlikely behavior, its seemingly sheer fearlessness, its clearly predatory intent—for these are not attributes we see in the wildlife on our mesa. Here, seated between the 14,000-foot peaks of the San Juan Mountains and the red canyons and rivers of the Colorado Plateau, there is still a great deal of food and space for humans and animals alike. Unlike their cousins trying to eke out a wild lifestyle within the slim margins of the nation's national parks, and unlike those poor ursines who have had the misfortune of claiming turf near dense populations of humanity, our black bears have had the luxury of keeping almost exclusively to themselves.

There were explanations: Perhaps the bear was sick. Or maybe it was a juvenile orphaned before learning how to acquire food properly. But it's also possible that this bear was part of an escalating and global trend—for some biologists say animals everywhere appear to be changing in new and unsettling ways. One recent study concluded that human impacts are forcing animals to evolve at a pace three hundred times faster than they would naturally. And there is evidence to support that the traits affected are not only size and reproductive capacities but behavior too. David Baron, the author of
The Beast in the Garden: A Modern Parable of Man and Nature,
contends that some regional trends in cougar attacks are "upward and exponential." Boulder, Colorado, is his prime example—where an environmentally minded populace has sought to live closer to nature by building homes on the "edge," the transitional area between forest highlands and desert plains. A zone where deer feed. And where lions hunt. The equation has been disastrous for everyone. The deer overpopulated in backyards while the big cats began stalking, mauling—and sometimes killing—a relatively significant number of household pets and humans. Of course the offending cats were destroyed. But here's the kicker: whenever a guilty lion was removed from an area, others quickly moved in—only to exhibit the same new tactics.

Add to this global scenario of changing behavior the ill effects of climate change. Barren-ground grizzlies, for example, have faced a diminished supply of coastal-plain plants—a food source that is dwindling in a warming Arctic. Without this essential nutritional source, the bears have been forced to alter their foraging and feeding habits, and some have become malnourished in the process. One such grizzly recently killed and consumed two experienced Alaskan-bush backpackers who, in the opinion of the investigating officer, "did most everything right" in their efforts to deter bears from their camp.

Given this new context, it is probably inappropriate to say that such predator behavior is aberrant; rather, these animals are adapting fittingly to a drastically altered environment. There's irony here: the more humans coif the natural world to our liking, the more we push out into the last wild places for recreation and real estate, the more we are finding ourselves back on the food chain—as a menu item.

Herb and I are complicit in this twenty-first-century showdown between wildlife and people; the five-acre parcel we purchased for a home site had been a bull pasture until the rancher subdivided it to subsidize his retirement. The east half of the property is hemmed in by neighboring pastures of grass and alfalfa—a scene utterly bucolic, punctuated by the brays of livestock. The backside of the property is altogether different. A woodland of oak, piñon, and juniper slopes down to a lush creek bottom lined with cottonwoods, wild iris, and tall grasses. The draw carved by the creek begins high on the forested uplands to our south and serves as a natural corridor for wild ungulates that move between desert lowlands in winter and high mountain meadows in summer. The predators—black bear, mountain lion, bobcat, and coyote—all follow suit. Our 800-square-foot house sits smack dab on the dividing line of these two worlds—and depending on which way you turn when you walk out the door, the rules for how to behave, what to watch for, can be very different.

 

Ruby and I return home the day after the bear's visit, and already Herb's story has spread across the mesa like a runaway ditch fire. Like so many small towns in the West, we're a mixed group here—a blend of traditional rural folk and transplants who have fled cities and suburbs alike. For weeks afterward, I am reminded of the dichotomy between the two camps; each time I am asked to re-count the story on Herb's behalf, I receive one of two pat responses.

The New West:
Did he try and talk to the bear? Did he project peaceful energy?

The Old West:
I hope he shot the son of a bitch.

To each individual, I nod.
Yes, he did try to communicate. And yes, he shot it.

The double affirmative isn't duplicitous. In terms of philosophy and aesthetic sensibilities, it is easy to side with the New West's romantic notions about preserving natural landscapes and living in and among wildlife. But the old-timers have a point. They largely blame the newcomers, who flock to places like Telluride (a re-sort town thirty-four miles to the east), where predominantly well-heeled, left-leaning residents supported the Colorado Division of Wildlife's termination of the spring bear hunt. The town's abundant PETA enthusiasts and Humane Society donors also applauded the prohibition of hounds for the remaining autumn hunt—deeming it a cruel example of unfair chase. In response, our enclave's more traditional, rural crowd could be heard grumbling,
Now them bears are thick as thieves...

It's true that resort towns in the West tend to have the biggest bear problems. Garbage cans, greasy barbecues, and bowls of pet food get left out by individuals who tend to be rather naive about wildlife. When the bear comes sniffing for easy extra calories (in late summer a black bear must consume 200,000 calories a day in order to survive winter hibernation), such folks snap pictures when they should be clanging pans or throwing rocks—actions which, with a healthy, unconditioned bear, are almost always enough to scare it off. For minor first offenses, wildlife officers will tranquilize a bear, punch an ID tag through its ear, and relocate the animal—to places with more open country, places like my neighborhood, where they become
our
problem (and perhaps this was the case with Herb's visitor). But in severe cases, or repeat offenses, the bears are put down with a big-caliber bullet—executions that are all on the taxpayer's dime.

Bear stories like Herb's linger on our tongues, in our imaginations, like erotica. They are titillating precisely because they are the closest that most of us come to igniting the ancient physiological and psychological tinder of the predator-prey relationship that lies dormant in the human body. (
Come get me, Mommy!
I see the glowing embers in my daughter's eyes, hear the quickening of her breath, when she asks me to chase her.) And perhaps this is why the cause to protect North America's predators is so feverish, and why it is equaled in pitch only by the efforts to exterminate them. Each side is glaring, garish even, in its shriek of righteousness—and so it is with bears the way it is with everything else: we respond from a black-and-white paradigm; the potent dualities of
us versus them
resound with a faint, prehistoric echo. Instead of man against weather, or man against beast, though, it's Republicans vs. Democrats, tree-huggers vs. wise-users, Buddhists vs. Bible thumpers. The appeal of such binary thinking is that we are able to name not only who we are but also what we are not. We draw the dividing line like a firebreak, and it holds back the advancing enemy while we retreat to safer ground.

But I am the descendant of rural ranchers on one side and artists, scholars, mountaineers, and businessmen on the other. As a daughter of the American West—both the old version and the new—what I have felt about my homeland could easily be characterized as a form of cultural schizophrenia, a psychic swing between my frontier-busting forebears and my Patagonia-clad, Sierra Club card–carrying contemporaries. For many years, I chose a side—shoring up my persona by way of education (higher), occupation (as both a national park ranger and a paid public-lands advocate for the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance), and recreation (bourgeois style, like rock climbing, river running, and skiing). And as I grew into this role, I grew apart from the other side of my family and their cowboy ways. I kept them at arm's length with a subtle (so I thought) sense of superiority. Feeling right served as a shield for my own mind—which felt as if it would shatter if I attempted a mental straddle between two worlds.

What I missed was this: hunting is a vital part of life for both sides of the family—whether it's hooking rainbow trout to grill for a streamside Mother's Day brunch, shooting antelope to complement the garden harvest feast at summer's end, or plucking pheasants to roast alongside the Thanksgiving turkey. For such events my mother's and my father's sides still sometimes come together—the men combining efforts to bring home animal flesh, the women uniting in the kitchen to cook it. The universal acts of procuring and preparing our sustenance have always served as our species' most common denominator—and among my kin, they have always made faint all other disparities.

 

By calling through the shed window, Herb finally got our most geriatric dog, Jack, to come off the porch just far enough to distract the bear while he made a break for the house. For an old guy, the Aussie put on quite a show, and Herb finally got the head start he needed. He and all three dogs just squeaked inside the house; when they turned to look back through the glass, they saw the bear's snout pressed up against it.

The creature pawed at the door, attempting entry. Herb dashed to the bedroom closet, grabbed from the top shelf the only gun kept in the house—the .22 revolver, complete with cartridges. Not that this particular gun could have done much harm—for a bear, a perfect shot would still be nothing more than a bee sting. But Herb was thinking more complexly by this point. There was no time to call for help from the neighbors, and the nearest law enforcement was, at best, twenty minutes away. Besides, he wanted to get to the goat. He was banking on the fact that if the impact of the shot didn't scare off the bear, its report would.

Herb beckoned the two younger dogs, and together the three of them sneaked out the back entrance and crept up on the bear, which was still on the front porch, facing off with Jack through the glass door. Herb got as close as he could, and as the bear turned in his direction, he fired a round at the animal's underbelly—the only place a low-caliber bullet could have any kind of impact. Before Herb could blink, the bear turned and disappeared into the dark of the woods, black devoured by black. Then Herb headed to the goat pen to retrieve Dora's flayed body.

It wasn't the best scenario; the bear was still alive. It could come back for its kill—or for Herb. Nevertheless, Herb was momentarily relieved. His strategy had been a serious gamble, for the animal could have turned on him just as quickly as it had fled into the woods. I can imagine my husband at that moment, contemplating all that was happening along with that which might have been: his jaw would have been set like a steel trap. And yet the encounter would have resulted in bright eyes, flushed skin, and a larger-than-life grin—indications that an ancient inner sense of vitality had been pricked.

Herb was adamant that we not tell Ruby, who was only three and a half at the time, what had happened to her goat. He begged me to speak euphemistically—to say that Dora got sick and
passed on.
But I knew our daughter would see that something was wrong. I thought it worse to lie to her, to undermine her intuitive perceptions by telling her that things were not what they seemed. Besides, to deny the bloody realities of animals eating animals—including our family's consumption of meat—would only distance my daughter from her budding relationship with the natural world. I needed to believe Ruby could handle the fact that something had tried to eat her goat. Just as I was banking on the fact that she would be able to face on her dinner plate the elk I hoped to shoot in the fall, the chickens we had raised and would butcher, and be able to eat both with reverence, gratitude, and delight.

And so I tell her.

She cries.

And after her initial outburst of grief, her pale, tearstained face blooms red with fury: "I hate that bear, Mommy. Bears are bad, bad, bad." I think then that maybe Herb had been right. Maybe this is too much for her. But it is too late to recant.

"We can be sad for Dora, sweetheart. And we can be sad for the bear too—because if he's still alive, he will probably be destroyed."

Yes, and yes again.
I hold my breath and wait for some sort of resolution.

For the next two days, we find the bear's tracks, punctuated with small splats of blood, encircling our fence line. The local game warden surmises that the single small round Herb put in the animal will probably fester in the gut—eventually killing it. On the third day, the bear returns in the middle of the night and digs up Dora's body—which had been buried three feet deep beneath a big rock slab at the far edge of the property. And then we never see sign of him again.

For several weeks Ruby acts out the drama of goat and bear with her toys, and each night at bedtime asks me to repeat the story of what happened. One night she awakes in terror. Shaking, howling, she scrambles onto my lap and tells me she had dreamed that a bear was trying to kill her. I think of Carl Jung, who suggested that the image of the bear in the unconscious is a representation of one's own potency. To run from a bear in your dreams is to flee from your own potential. To turn and face such an animal is to reckon with the Other—not just its beloved aspects but also that, perhaps especially that, which is wild, ravenous, even terrifying—and with the parts of our own wildness that we fear more with each passing generation, with each species' extinction, with each acre of land razed.