In the next clearing to ours he’d swiped a big bag of buns.
They’d just put them out on the table, the picnickers told us. Then they’d gone back to the car-boot to fetch the rest of the stuff – and when they’d turned round, there he was!
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‘Jumped into the car like jackrabbits,’ said the man when I asked what they’d done. ‘We didn’t even stop to shut down the back.’ The bear had eaten the buns, looked in the empty boot... they’d taken the rest of the food into the car with them. ‘Only because we were already holding it,’ admitted the man, ‘and we were too darned scared to drop it’.
He’d then ambled on to the next lot. He wasn’t so lucky there. They hadn’t got as far as setting out their meal; all they’d done was tether their tabby kitten to a nearby tree and put it down a saucer of milk. When they saw the bear they’d grabbed the kitten and leapt into their car, not even stopping to untie the other end of the tether.
The bear drank the cat’s milk and proceeded on his way.
In the third clearing, where the people hadn’t any food at all, he just looked at them and went on through. In the fourth he ate a plate of ham and some butter. In the fifth an iced sandwich cake. He visited everybody along the lake as methodically as a ticket inspector, turning out the litter bins as well as he went. We caught up with him beyond the last of the picnic sites where a rocky outcrop marked the end of the track. Having finished his successful tour he was now cooling off in the lake, sitting upright, paws on stomach, like a patriarch at a party. Watching the bathers from a distance, neither afraid of them nor aggressive, as though he was one of the family and did it every day.
He didn’t, of course. Bears like this in National Parks, who get ideas about easy food and begin to get familiar with people, are eventually doped with anaesthetic cartridges and taken out of the area by helicopter. They are released in the back country, tag-marked on the ear, so they can be recognised if they come back. They are given three chances.
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The Coming of Saska a warden. A bear which loses its wariness of people is always a potential danger. One day, pestering for food, it may lose its temper and attack. The bear at Pyramid Lake had never been seen there before. This was something he’d just thought up We hoped he had enough sense to take off if he saw a ranger coming... and to make this his sole performance.
We left Wapiti next day. It seemed there was no chance of getting any closer to the wolves than we’d done at Leach Lake and we had a long way to go to grizzly country.
Grizzlies were seen sometimes in the Jasper-Banff area but usually only in the spring. We’d have to get down to Waterton-Glacier to have a fair chance of seeing them in summer. And there we’d better watch out, one of the Jasper rangers advised us. Had we read Night of the Grizzlies?
We had. Waterton-Glacier is an international park, on the Alberta-Montana border. In its nearly sixty years of existence nobody had ever been fatally injured there by a bear until, in 1967, two girls were killed in one night. It had happened on the Montana side. One at Trout Lake. One nine miles away at Granite Park Chalets. In each case the girl was camping out with companions and vital rules had been broken. At Trout Lake, for instance, there was a puppy with the party and his scent was undoubtedly everywhere; particularly on the girl who was killed and her friend, who’d carried him between them when he was tired. At Granite Park the rescuers, hunting for the dragged-off victim, found a candy-bar wrapper and a packet of sweets on the trail. The girl must have taken them into her sleeping bag and a bear’s nose is tuned like a tracker-dog’s to sweetness: it will brave a treeful of wild bees any time for honey There were other factors, too. It had been an exceptionally hot summer with frequent electric storms and forest fires.
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This in itself could have affected the grizzlies, whose temper is always uncertain. To grizzle – to grumble,’ says Chambers’s dictionary – adding, surprisingly that the origin of the phrase is unknown. Anyone who has heard the muttering, menacing rumble of a grizzly knows well enough where it comes from. ‘Like a bear with a sore head’
is another one.
The bear at Trout Lake had been harassing and chasing people all through the summer. When tracked and shot after the tragedy it was found to be old, very thin, with worn down teeth. Raiding camps and stealing fishing catches had become easier for it than hunting and that night, apart from the lure of the campfire cooking smells, there had been the scent of dog on the girl in the sleeping bag.
At Granite Park, where there was a chalet where people could stay overnight, kitchen scraps had been dumped in a gully behind the buildings and grizzlies came regularly to feed on them. They were known to come up the trail that led past a nearby public campground. Not a campground for vehicles; the road was miles away. Hikers who stopped at this one slept in sleeping bags in the open and, despite the frequent bear traffic, no one had ever been attacked.
Until the night a girl had a candy-bar in her sleeping bag and a grizzly decided it wanted it.
We’d read Jack Olsen’s Night of the Grizzlies all right. By our campfire at Wapiti, the hair standing up on our heads. What we were doing going to that very location... but the book also gives the other side of the picture. That of the most magnificent animal on the American continent being driven, inexorably, to extinction. Hounded by bulldozers opening up its age-old territory – and, even in the parks, never with a place it can call its own. People go into grizzly country deliberately to see one 77
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– and if they do and it chases them, they want it shot. It is only a matter of time now, say the experts, until the last wild grizzly has gone. Till the huckleberries and wild raspberries ripen on the mountain slopes and there is no great, hump-backed bear to enjoy them.
While it was still possible we wanted to see one – duly respecting its rights. So we drove southwards down through Alberta with Watenon-Glacier as our goal.
There were plenty of black bears along the road to Banff.
Ambling along the wide grass verges, digging industriously in anthills (they eat the insects for the sweetness of their formic acid content), sitting up like big stuffed toys to watch us as we drove past. Occasionally one mooched with its loose-limbed walk across the road, supremely confident that people would stop for it. The bears seem to know they are safe in the parks and that the visitors enjoy their antics.
Every campground we stopped at had its fund of bear stories. At Rampart Creek they had a prize one from only the previous night. Some people had slept there in their car, with their supplies in the boat they were towing behind them. It had a heavy canvas cover which they obviously regarded as bear-proof. Not against the one who toured the campground that night it wasn’t... who ripped the canvas as if it were polythene, climbed into the boat, gorged himself on biscuits, bacon and butter and then discovered to his delight that the boat-trailer had springs on it. When neighbouring campers, roused by the rhythmic creaking, looked out of their vehicles at day-break, there was the bear bouncing up and down in the boat as if he was on a trampoline, the back of the car going up and down as well – and inside it, lulled by the rocking, the people still sound asleep. ‘They didn’t wake up,’ said the man who told 78