So we said when we set out from Cameron but after a while I wondered whether it had been such a good idea. It was a sweltering afternoon and the track wove relentlessly up-wards, snaking back and forth on itself in long switchback bends. After an hour we could still see Cameron Lake below us, and the ridge above seemed as far away as ever. Then we realised we were going round the side of the mountain as we climbed, not over it, and the lake disappeared from view, and we emerged from deep forest on to a high mountain plateau, dotted with granite crags and occasional stunted pines. Many of them had been struck by lightning and the dead brown huddles of their lower branches looked, at first glance and at a distance, as if a bear was standing under them watching us.
‘Always look for a tree in case you need it’... I remembered the oft-repeated warning, and my progress along the track behind Charles at that stage was accompanied by rapid 107
The Coming Of Saska_INSIDES.indd107 107
13/06/2007 17:36:08
The Coming of Saska mental calculations. How far was it to the tree over there...
and if I went up that sloping branch... the one that drooped down to the ground so conveniently... could a bear get up it as well? Or would it be better to take a jump at a tree with no lower branches... and what would happen if I missed?
Which is not to say I regretted being there. I longed to see a grizzly. It was just the feeling, out in the open, of being vulnerable, in No Man’s Land.
Halfway across the plateau we were caught by a thunderstorm and had to shelter under one of the pine trees. The thunder rolled, lightning hissed from peak to peak around us like the striking of angry giant snakes: I had never heard it hiss before: I supposed it was being so near to the peaks. Hailstones slashed down like bullets, ricochetting viciously off the rocks and ground. All it needed now, I decided, was for the grizzly to come along, annoyed at being hit by the hailstones, and see us and blame us for doing it. We wouldn’t get very far up this stunted tree. I imagined him sniffing at our dangling heels... But the thunderstorm passed and the sun came out brilliantly again, raising steam from the pathway and melting the huddles of hail-stones, and on we trudged to Summit Lake, then up again on more of those switchbacks... above timberline now, crossing vivid red scree, with a view of the icefields beyond Mount Custer. We got as far as Carthew Pass – we could see the two Carthew Lakes far below us
– and there we had to turn back. Our three hours were up.
It was too late to go any further. And still we hadn’t seen our grizzly.
We hadn’t seen anything. Not even a mountain goat. It had all been a waste of effort. Or had it... when we looked across at the icefields, and remembered the lightning playing around 108
The Coming Of Saska_INSIDES.indd108 108
13/06/2007 17:36:08
Doreen Tovey
the mountains, and the effect of the sun coming out after the storm?
We made faster time going downhill. We were only half an hour from Cameron Lake when I rounded a switchback bend ahead of Charles and saw an animal on the track. A grey animal, with a head like a fox but with a longer-textured coat, more like a badger’s, sitting on the path in a patch of the orange evening sun which filtered low through the forest branches. I put a hand behind me to halt Charles and we stood there as silent as shadows. For a moment, then the animal saw us and was away up the bank with a gliding motion. Its legs seemed short, but it had a brush like a fox, and I have never seen an animal move so fast.
‘A grey fox’ said our neighbours at the campsite when we told them – and that was what we thought ourselves. Until we described it to the Cameron Lake naturalist that night and he told us we’d seen a wolverine. He’d never seen one himself, he said – only a stuffed one in a museum. They were one of the rarest, shyest animals in Canada... brother! had we had the luck!
It was the fiercest animal for its size in North America, he told us; the only one ever known to stand up to a grizzly. A grizzly could kill it with one swat of its paw but it had to make contact first, and with the speed and temper and teeth of the wolverine, the grizzly usually thought twice. It was really a fox-sized weasel, said the naturalist... that would give us some indication. No, it wouldn’t attack humans. It was far too elusive, which was why people so rarely saw it. Probably the thunderstorm had achieved it for us. The wolverine had most likely been caught in it, got its long coat wet, and was sitting in the patch of sun to dry out. Brother! repeated the naturalist enviously. He’d seen plenty of grizzlies, but to have seen a wolverine!
109
The Coming Of Saska_INSIDES.indd109 109
13/06/2007 17:36:09
The Coming of Saska In the end we saw our grizzly as well, but not until our final week. In the Granite Park area, which was where I’d all along banked on finding one, and with all the more sense of achievement because the previous night I’d got cold feet.
Quite literally. Our camper was parked at Apgar on Lake Macdonald... not all that far, as the crow flew, from Trout Lake where one of the girls had been killed, and for all that we were in a proper campsite there were plenty of bears around. The ranger had been telling us only that evening of the silly things some people did... like a few weeks back when some hikers had gone into a roped-off section of the campsite and slept in the open in sleeping bags.
The area had been roped off to allow trodden-down vegetation to recover and nobody had camped there for weeks. The hikers had slipped in there to avoid paying camp fees, not realising that bears were going through it at night.
One of the boys, who had ginger hair, had been roused by a blow on the head. Fortunately it was a black bear. They thought he’d mistaken the red hair for a marmot. He’d taken a swipe and had run like mad when he heard the screams.
The boy had had to have his scalp stitched but was otherwise unharmed. Had the blow come from a grizzly, it would have killed him.
What with hearing about that, and my bedtime reading of Night of the Grizzlies – we were now in Glacier Park where it had happened – it was small wonder that I woke around three in the morning, with a distinct feeling that there were bears around and a consciousness of being very cold. Clear white moonlight was shining through the camper windows and I realised that Charles, too, was awake. ‘Brrr... it’s cold in here,’ he said. And then, sitting up – ‘Great Scott! The door’s wide open!’
110
The Coming Of Saska_INSIDES.indd110 110
13/06/2007 17:36:09
Doreen Tovey
It was too. One of those temperamental locks again and presumably we hadn’t fastened it properly. But how had it come as wide open as that with the camper completely stationary? Had something clawed or nosed at it? I expected to see a hump-backed head at any moment. Charles shot out of bed, grabbed the door and pulled it shut. ‘It’s all right now,’ he said. But was it? Supposing the door came open again when we were asleep and there was a bear outside... and it came in and there we were with no escape way through to the front?
I lay awake for the remainder of the night asking myself why I never learned... what was I doing getting mixed up with bears when I could be snug in our little valley at home? A question I asked myself even more emphatically next morning, on a cliff face high above the Logan Pass.
This, we’d read, was the best way in to Granite Park. To leave the camper at the top of the Pass on the Going-tothe-Sun Highway and walk the seven-mile Highline Trail.
‘It invades the haunts of mountain goats, big-horns and cougars,’ said the guide book, ‘and is above timberline throughout its length.’ It mentioned also an alpine meadow studded with glacier lilies and gentians and that further on there were slopes of the spectacular bear-grass; tall, with upright plumes, like a sea of cream-coloured red-hot pokers; so far we’d only seen it in photographs. Bears and deer frequented the slopes on hot days, it said, to escape the torment of the insects lower down... adding as if anything more were needed, that ‘nutcrackers, eagles and mountain-loving birds make this their airy home’.