Bear Stories

And speaking of monsters: have I told any bear stories lately?

in the late 60s and early 1970s, I worked on the edge of the Chilcotin Plateau for a couple of summers and farther north, along the eastern edge of the Alaska panhandle for three, as a surveyor for the BC Department of Highways. The crews had a core of full-timers ranging from 19 to around 57 years old, augmented in May by university students, and sometimes in July by a few high-schoolers.  We July veterans of two months of not shaving and rarely showering—it was a great summer job in many ways—were not allowed actually to harm the high-schoolers. But we were allowed to have some fun with them—the same kind of fun the regulars occasionally tried to have with us.

The Chilcotin years, we were working in grizzly bear country, right across territory on which Connie King, a retired pro hockey player, had been badly chewed up by a grizzly on his ranch. The first year we drove in to the hopping-off point for our job, we had met King in a café, admiring the scar where half his face had been.  So, we did carry rifles with us on some parts of the job, as grizzlies were a genuine threat, if not the commonplace we let the high-schoolers believe.In fact, I don't recall ever actually seeing a bear while on the job, in all five summers. Once in the north, in the evening, out for a drive along the project, we passed a small grizzly on the edge of an old landing strip. That's it. We saw more wolves than bears. By one. Still, bears were the big worry.

The second summer, I had two of the not-ready-to-shave set working with me doing cross-sections of line. They were not exactly quick or productive workers, to put it generously.  But they were willing to listen to wild stories about bear attacks and wonder aloud how to handle a grizzly (it was always a grizzly) if one happened by.

“Well, you know,” I told them, from my several months of non-experience with bears, and a bit of theory gleaned from unreliable sources, “grizzlies cannot climb trees, so if a bear comes after us, we have to get about twelve feet up a solid tree within a few seconds.”

“How many seconds?”

“Oh, depends. Ten or twelve, I would think. That’s why you always have to have a tree picked out as we work ahead. So if I yell, `Grizzly,’ you can get up the tree without thinking too hard.”

Did I mention we were working on a mountain side? One with trees that tapered very quickly from a foot across to a few inches?  Rooted in thin mountain soil?

So I offered to put them through a grizzly bear drill.  I would suddenly yell, “Grizzly,” and then time them to see how long it took them to get out of claw range.  And as we worked along a steep slope one afternoon, that’s what I yelled.

The more agile of the two leaped to a handy fir, and began to claw his way desperately up the trunk. When he was about 7 or 8 feet up, clinging with arms and legs to the rapidly narrowing tree, it came loose from the shallow litter it was rooted in, and rolled off down the slope, with a seventeen year old firmly clinging for dear life.

“You’re dead,” I called after him.

Later that week, we were dropped off along the line by the rest of the crew who went on ahead.  The basic equipment we needed for the day was a hand level, a rod, a tape, and a pogey stick to rest the hand-level on.  And our lunches.  The teens had their lunches, just fine. But as the truck pulled out of earshot, there was this casual,” Do you have the hand-level?” from the sixteen-year-old whose job it was to bring it. “No.”  “So now what,” he asked, looking for a cozy spot to curl up for the next seven or eight hours.

“Now,” I replied, pointing into the bush, along a row of survey stakes, “you walk about two miles that way up the cut line, till you get to our camp, you go to your tent, you get the hand level, and you come back here and start to work.” 

“I can’t go alone.”

“Dave can go with you, since you both screwed up. I’ll just wait right here.” 

“What about bears?” 

“I’m not worried about bears,” I replied.

“No, us?”

“Well, bears don’t like noise,” I reminded them. “So take a stick and beat it against your hard hat as you go along.” 

And that’s what he did. Two miles to camp, and two miles back to our worksite. Without first taking off the hard hat. I was sorry I hadn't told them to bang their two hard-hats together.