The existence of the presumptive bear was confirmed three days later when Phil, buzzing along the lower road on the 125-cc Kawasaki, rounded a corner to discover an obstruction in his path. The obstruction, on closer examination, turned out to be a lumpy, broad-beamed, auburn-colored thing squatting over a fresh mound of berry-flecked excrement: viz., the bear. With a blare of horror the bear lurched up, feinted to the right and then scrambled off down the roadway, Phil in pursuit. The animal’s great shaggy hindquarters pumped at the dirt, Phil gripped the accelerator like a fighter ace zeroing in for the kill, leaves rushed by in a blur. One hundred yards, two hundred yards, three. And then, as if he’d been schooled in diversionary tactics, the bear suddenly skewed off into a scrub-choked ravine, while Phil, caught up in the heat of the chase, rammed a downed tree, tore the front wheel from the bike and did a triple-gainer into the stiff brown brush. The Kawasaki was wrecked, and Phil suffered a strained shoulder in addition to contusions both major and minor, but at least we’d firmly and finally established the identity of our antagonist.
An uneventful week slipped by, the heat like the flat of a sword, dull and stultifying, and then the bear struck again. This time he chewed through a pipe on the lower slope, and the enormous pressure of the gravity-feed shattered the plastic and sent a jet of water rocketing forty feet in the air. By the time we arrived on the scene, the dripping ecstatic creature had lumbered off, taking a section of deer fencing and eight healthy cannabis plants with him. “This has got to stop,” Gesh growled, kicking angrily at the ravaged pipe. I watched his face through its dangerous permutations, watched as he flung sticks and stones at the mute leaves that surrounded us, bearlike himself in his bulk and his rage. Finally he turned to Phil and me to announce in a dead flat tone that the bear had to go: it was him or us.
Gesh put out poisoned baits that afternoon — marrow bones and kidneys soaked in strychnine — while Phil and I replaced the length of damaged pipe. The bloody heaps of flesh didn’t look particularly appetizing, covered as they were with flies both quick and dead, but I assumed it wouldn’t make much difference to a scavenging garbagophagist with a taste for plastic pipe and Campbell’s Chunky Soup cans. I was wrong. As far as we could tell the bear never touched any of the baits, though one afternoon I did find a dead turkey vulture sprawled in the bushes like a discarded parasol.
As if in compensation for denying himself the baits, the bear took to rummaging through our garbage each night, disemboweling the green plastic bags with the alligator fasteners, gnawing cans and spreading a slick coat of mashed vegetable matter, grease and undifferentiated slime over the porch. Gesh saw this as a provocation. He spent the better part of an afternoon rigging up a battery-powered light system that would illuminate the bewildered scavenger’s shaggy nighttime form just long enough to spell his doom. Pissed off, grim, wrapped in an old poncho and chain-smoking joints, Gesh sat up with the shotgun, waiting for the bear to signal his appearance with the fatal clank of can or bottle. When dawn spread her rosy fingers over the eastern sky, garbage was spread over the floorboards of the porch as usual, and Gesh was staring numbly down the barrel of his gun. “Never heard a thing,” he said, his voice trailing off.
Then, in a succession of lightning raids, the bear consumed three quarts of motor oil, dragged a section of barbed-wire fence half a mile into the woods, punctured two more lengths of PVC pipe and knocked out the back window of the cabin to get at a case of apricot preserves (which he ate, shards of glass and all, without apparent harm). This time he’d gone too far: it was obvious that he had to be dealt with, and dealt with severely. We began to carry weapons when we made our rounds.
It was a clear, baking, Sonoran-desert sort of morning when I ambled through Julie Andrews’s Meadow (now brown as the pampas) on my way to our most remote and least propitious growing area. The plants in the meadow were rigid, verdant and strong, two and a half or three feet high already, and I stopped a minute to admire them. I had a hoe slung over my shoulder, and the.357 magnum pistol tucked in my belt. The hoe was for weeding the sorry marijuana patch we’d dubbed “Duke’s Heel,” in ironic acknowledgment of George Deukmejian, the fanatical attorney general of the state of California, who’d been known to direct paratroop assaults on isolated marijuana farms and bring in a TV crew to record them; the pistol was for the bear. If I spotted him, I would shoot him. Or at least attempt to.
As I gave the springy serrate leaves a final proprietary pat and headed off across the meadow, I thought how incongruous it all was, how primitive, how much an atavism to go gunning for bear in an age when we couldn’t even recognize true dirt. From childhood I’d been taught to revere wildlife, to raise my voice against the multinational corporations, corrupt shepherds, reactionary presidents and robber barons who would strip, rape and pollute the land. I’d sat through ecology classes in high school, turned out for Save the Whale rallies and Tree People boosters and fired off letters to congressmen protesting offshore-drilling amendments. I deplored the slaughter of the bison and passenger pigeon alike, recoiled from the venality of those who draped themselves in ocelot or wore boots fashioned from the belly of the gavial. Who wouldn’t? But then it was easy to take a moral stance while munching an avocado-and-sprout sandwich in a carpeted apartment in New York or San Francisco. Now I was on the other side of the fence, now I was confronting nature at the root rather than lying back and reading about it. And at root, nature was dirty, anarchic, undisciplined, an enemy to progress and the American dream. Incongruous though it may have seemed, and though I was subscriber to the principles of the Sierra Club and a member of the Coyote Protective Society, I ambled across that field fingering the pistol and ready — no, seething — to kill.
Duke’s Heel consisted of forty stunted plants concealed beneath the canopy of two rugged old serpentine oaks. We’d planted here without much hope, breaking a crust of hardpan to dig the holes for the late-sprouters and withered backup plants Dowst had managed to tease into existence. I was planning to hack out the weeds, water and fertilize the plants, and check the deer fencing. But when I descended the back slope of the meadow, I saw immediately that something was wrong. For one thing, the fence was down, and as I drew closer I saw that an entire section of chicken wire had been accordioned, balled up as if under the pressure of some immense crushing weight. For another — and this was a shock — the ground was barren. Where before there had been the sweet succulent green of the struggling plants, now there was only dirt, yellow-brown and naked. I threw the hoe aside, drew the gun from my belt and ran headlong down the hill.
After the glare of the sun on the open field, the shade beneath the trees was disorienting, and I drew up short, breathing hard, my eyes raking the shadows. A bear, I thought, and the thought was numbing: I’m going to shoot a bear. No rabbit, no squirrel, no soft-eyed defenseless doe: a bear. Tooth, sinew and muscle, four hundred pounds of raging hirsute flesh, claws the size of fingers, jaws that could deracinate limbs and pulverize bone. Standing there in the penumbra of the tree, blinking back panic and squinting till my eyes began to tear, I suddenly recalled a story I’d read as a boy in True or Outdoor Life or some such place: a grizzly had attacked an Aleut guide and raked his face off— eyes, nose, lips, teeth — and the Indian had crawled twenty miles with his hamburger features and panicked an entire village. Then he died.