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The Coming of Saska and we tiptoed down to the lake and discovered why our comings and goings hadn’t disturbed them. What we’d been listening to wasn’t the reply from the local pack. It was the naturalist sending out his tape-recording.
We joined the others at the lakeside and the naturalist played it again. The effect was still as though it were real, the sound being sent out across the lake by amplifier and echoing back at us from the mountains. The yip-yip-yippmgs, the drawn-out howls, the rising and falling chorus, intermittently a pregnant pause – during which our ears, attuned now to listening, marked the wind in the pines, the water lapping at the lake-edge... and suddenly, in the midst of one of the pauses, a crash from further round the lakeside and the sound of an angrily rattling chain.
Everybody jumped yards. ‘Bear,’ whispered the naturalist.
‘Raiding a trash can at the picnic site.’ There are all kinds of rubbish bins devised to beat the bears – and always, in due course, a bear who will beat the designer. This bin was one of the swinging kind, suspended by a chain from a pole, the idea being that when the bear reaches up to claw it, the bin swings out of its grasp. This bear, presumably a tall one, had evidently swiped the lid off and was now turning it upside down. He must have succeeded. There were no more bangs or chain-rattlings. The wolf chorus rose again, faded, we listened once more. This time, faintly but unmistakeably, far in the distance, we heard what we had been waiting for.
The answering call of the Jasper leader, followed in chorus by the rest of the pack. Timber wolves. They really were out there in the darkness, muzzles raised towards us from the top of some rocky crag. I could scarcely believe it. I was listening to wolves? This, surely, was the most exciting moment of my life.
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Doreen Tovey
Not quite it wasn’t. That came a while later, after the naturalist had suggested we go on to the Athabasca Falls.
We’d be closer to them there, he said, though it would mean listening above the roar of the torrent. Right-ho, said Charles. We would bring up the rear.
The tail-lights of the last of the convoy were disappearing up the track ahead of us when we discovered we hadn’t got the camper keys; they were locked inside it, dangling tantalisingly from the dashboard, where Charles had left them after switching on the lights. My fault as much as his, urging him to hurry for goodness sake or we’d miss out on the wolf-howl, but that didn’t alter the fact that we were stranded 20 miles up in the mountains, with no prospect of anyone realising it for hours. They wouldn’t miss us at the Falls, with the wolf-listeners scattered round in the darkness. They’d be back at Wapiti it might even be next day before anyone noticed we were missing.
We shouted, we signalled frantically with our small pocket torch. It was no use; the convoy had gone. We were locked out of our camper with a bear down by the lake and a pack of wolves somewhere off in the distance. The knowledge that bears are harmless if you are careful of them... that wolves aren’t the ogres they are painted and in this case were miles away... didn’t exactly desert me in our predicament. It was just that I would have felt happier if the camper door were open. ‘What are we going to do?’ I said. ‘We can’t stay here all night. Even if somebody came along, they couldn’t open the door.’
‘I can,’ said Charles. ‘I’ve got my Scout’s knife.’ I should have remembered it of course. For years he’s never gone on a walk without it dangling from his belt, and the times I’d chaffed him about it. What would people think? When 71
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The Coming of Saska would he grow up? What did he expect to meet in Somerset
– Bengal tigers?
Never again will I laugh at that Scout’s knife. I ate my words a million times while, with me shining the tiny torch on it, Charles worked away at the window. It took him an hour, inserting the blade, tapping the catch, determined not to damage the paintwork. The torch gradually faded.
There was a rustling in the bushes below us. Was it that bear coming nearer?
‘Get on the camper roof,’ said Charles when I asked him what we should do if it was the bear and it came out to investigate.
I surveyed the roof. Apart from the fact that it was a long way up there was a snag in that suggestion. Bears are attracted by food smells and, in my agitation at the frying-pan flare-up, I’d forgotten to wind down the roof ventilator after I’d finished cooking. I could see us up there, shouting for rescue, with a bear sitting sniffing down the ventilator beside us.
Under the camper, I decided, and I was ready, feet positioned for the dive (the rustling was definitely getting closer), when Charles said ‘I’ve done it!’ and the quarter-window gave, and he put his arm in and opened the door.
We were in like grasshoppers. If the rustling had been the bear, presumably Charles’s starting the engine halted it.
We didn’t stop to close the ventilator. We turned on to the track, cooking smells coming out and all.
‘Phew!’ said Charles as we drove down the road. ‘Phew from me, too,’ I said.
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Eight
WE DIDN’T TELL MISS Wellington that one. She’d insisted we let her know how we were getting on – otherwise she’d worry, she said. So, knowing Father Adams & Co. would be all agog as well, I wrote to her once a week. Not about getting locked out of the camper with a bear in the bushes, though. By the time Father Adams had said ’twas a wonder we hadn’t bin et, and Fred Ferry had forecast that we would be next time, and Ern Biggs had no doubt added that he knew somebody what was et by a bear. Miss Wellington would have been flat on her back on her front path, letter in senseless hand.
So I told her about hearing the wolves call and the moonlight on the fir-fringed lake, and the glacier the Indians call the Great White Ghost on the side of Mount Edith Cavell, and (since she’d worry equally if we didn’t mention bears at all; we must be holding something back, 73
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The Coming of Saska she’d insist) I told her about the extrovert one we saw sitting in a lake the next day.
It was up at Pyramid Lake. We’d gone there for a swim and, it being a hot Sunday afternoon with lots of people around and the lake a very popular one, only two miles from Jasper townsite, it was the last place we expected to see a bear, because they don’t usually frequent crowded areas in daylight
It was the usual layout for a popular picnic spot, with grassy clearings among the trees around the lake, most of them occupied by family parties. What struck us, when we found a place to park the camper, was the pile of litter, practically knee-deep, round the nearby rubbish basket.
Probably because it was Sunday, we said. Nobody had been round to empty it. All the same it was unlike Canadians to be as careless with litter as that.
We changed in the camper, went in for a swim and after a while I came out to make some tea, leaving Charles floating blissfully on his back gazing up at Pyramid Mountain. I was just backing down the camper steps with teapot and cups in my hand when he came rushing up galvanised with excitement. It was a bear who’d thrown that rubbish about, he said. It was going round the lakeside turning out all the bins and visiting the picnic parties. A man in the lake had just told him.
Dumping the teapot – we could drink tea any time in England – we threw on our sweaters and pants and set out round the lake ourselves. And had that bear been busy!