Some of the animals there would be extinct by now but for dedicated projects like this, striving for their protection.
Particularly we were impressed by the colony of timber wolves, safe there from poisoning or shooting, wandering, reticent from people as is their inclination, in the distance among the trees, on their vast, well-wooded hillside. I shall always remember being studied, too, by the intelligent eyes of a huge grizzly bear, his face no more than a foot from mine.
He was one of a trio of orphaned cubs found eleven years previously in the Swan Hills country, which lies to the 50
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north-west of Edmonton. There had long been stories of a particularly large type of grizzly in this region, believed to be pure descendants of the long-extinct Plains Grizzly. The largest grizzly ever recorded in Canada had come from the Swan Hills. Shot by a mountain guide thirty years before, it reared, when mounted as it would stand when facing up to a man, to more than ten feet high.
Now however, with oil being discovered there in increasing quantities and the oil companies moving in to set up camps and bulldoze roads, the Swan Hill grizzlies were being exterminated. Shot as they puzzedly tried to follow their old trails, or as they wandered in, as bears have a penchant for doing, to feed at the campsite garbage dumps. The advent of the three cubs, found by an Indian trapper who walked sixty miles to the nearest settlement to phone the Director, was a great day for the Alberta Game Farm.
When the cubs arrived, Big Dan, the male of the trio, weighed seven pounds and his sisters, Lady Edith and Swanie, weighed five and four pounds respectively. Brought up by bottle, eleven years later Big Dan weighed nearly a thousand pounds (the weight of six 11-stone men) and his sisters were pretty big too. They were fed on meat, eggs, lettuce, bread, pastries and carrots... but still they had their daily milk bottles.
To ensure they got their individual requirements of vitamins, explained the naturalist who took us round, they’d had these in their bottles as cubs and if now they just had a communal tub of milk in their pen, the male would drink the lot and get all the vitamins. So they still had their daily bottles. Being hand-fed helped to keep them tame – and a short while before this had solved a perilous situation.
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The Coming of Saska It seemed that someone had left the door of their enclosure open and the bears, by nature inquisitive, had discovered this and promptly walked out. When spotted they were padding, past the other enclosures, looking in at the animals, and the Game Park staff held its breath.
Tame they ostensibly were, but grizzlies are notoriously unpredictable. If they once got the killing lust nothing would stop them. They could kill an animal – or a man
– with one blow.
So the naturalists fetched their rifles and took up strategic positions as the bears shambled one behind the other along the paths. Was this to be the end of all the years of work –
having to shoot their charges deliberately?
In some places, with panic and less understanding, it might have been. Here, however, the watchers waited patiently and a little later, as it got near feeding time, the grizzlies turned, padded massively back past the pens of nervous deer... straight into their own enclosure, where they sat up on their haunches, in a row behind the chain-mesh fencing, and happily awaited their feeding bottles.
It was feeding time now. Would I like to give Big Dan his milk? enquired the naturalist. And now it was my turn for a surprise. The bottle, when it arrived, was about three feet long and held three-and-a-half gallons. I had to balance it, to feed him, on my shoulder.
The attendants sometimes feed the grizzlies actually inside the enclosure and no scene is more photographed by visitors... the huge bears sitting up, paws around the bottles, while the attendants tilt them helpfully as they empty. I, for safety’s sake, fed Big Dan through the mesh. Even so, looking at his huge black claws holding the mesh at the side of my hands, his enormous head and his deep-set eyes...
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eyes that gazed thoughtfully into mine from a scant 12-inch distance as he noisily sucked at his bottle... never, I thought, had I expected to get this close to a grizzly. Was it a good omen for our trip?
It must have been. When, two days later, we set out on our own trail to the Rockies, little did we guess the adventures that awaited us. Meantime we watched enthralled as the Game Farm grizzlies, having finished their milk, embarked on the business of actual feeding, padding across to where three huge piles of food awaited them – a mountain of green-stuff, another of smashed eggs, and what looked like stale doughnuts from every baker’s in Edmonton. Swanie went for the lettuce. Lady Edith started on the eggs, cramming them into her mouth with both paws. My boy Big Dan? Monarch of all he surveyed, he made straight for the doughnuts.
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Six
THAT WAS ON SATURDAY. We’d changed into ordinary clothes to visit the grizzlies. We’d done a good many things the past few days in stovepipe trousers and hobble skirt but they weren’t very suitable for running in. We were back in costume that evening, though, for dinner and dancing in a replica of a nineties banqueting saloon. We were in costume by six o’clock next morning, too, for the crowning event of Klondike Days... the famous Bonanza Breakfast, held on the Edmonton racecourse.
It seemed an unearthly hour to us, but outdoor social breakfasts are an old Canadian custom and as our party arrived at the racecourse entrance dead on 7.30, there were the Edmontonians in their hundreds, converging in trailing skirts and cartwheel hats, toppers and frilled shirt-fronts, to eat sausages, bacon and pancakes in the grandstand and stroll up and down in leisurely promenade 54
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watching the racehorses being exercised. The band, the gorgeous costumes, the long-legged horses flashing past on the emerald turf... it was My Fair Lady come to life. It was difficult for a moment to realise that this was Western Canada.
Not so that afternoon, when we watched the raft races on the North Saskatchewan River. They might look funny and they were intended to be... the rafts swirling along on the current with chicken coops on top, smoke coming out of tin-can chimneys, sails flapping from broomsticks lashed to barrels labelled Dynamite... but even they were an echo of the early days when men unable to afford any other kind of transport built rafts, put provisions, furniture and often their families and livestock on board, and poled their way to a new land-stake up the great rivers of the West.
The melodrama we saw that evening at the theatre...
that, too, was a projection of the past, with the audience cheering the heroine, enthusiastically stamping at the hero, and throwing over-ripe fruit at the villain, who promptly hurled it back. It could so easily have been a real frontier show, and we prospectors about to leave for the Klondike.
What we were about to leave for, however, were those grizzlies. Next day, relinquishing our costumes with considerable nostalgia... it had felt all this time as though we really were living in the past and we were reluctant to leave it for the present... we headed for the Kentwood Ford offices on the outskirts of Edmonton to pick up our camper.
Our spirits soared as soon as we saw it – as compact as a ship’s galley with sink, cooker and refrigerator on one side, a furnace on the other for cold nights in the mountains, bench seats and a movable table in the body of the camper, 55