Don't trip a bear

When I told my buddy Mike from the Major Crime Unit that I was off to remote Bute Inlet on a solo trip in two days time, the first thing he asked was, “You packin’ heat?”

Bute Inlet grizzy, Wikipedia

I looked at Mike’s face across the big office; we were standing up, ready to shift to the lunchroom. Was this a joke? He wasn’t smiling. I decided RCMP officers didn’t joke about carrying weapons.

Did I look like a woman who packed a gun? It made me wish suddenly that the answer was, Yes, I kept a .303 from fishing days, but I said, hesitating, “Just the pepper spray variety.” It’d been a long time since I’d owned a .22; I hadn’t found them useful for shooting halibut.

 Mike waved his hand. “That’s good. You’ll be fine with bear spray. Come have coffee, there’s someone I want you to meet.”

A few weeks later, my fifteen-year-old daughter said, “So how was it you met this trophy bear hunter?” Her face was screwed up in a grimace of incredulous disgust.

 “The RCMP Major Crime lunchroom,” I said.

 My daughter shook her head. “Ah. As one does.” A wealth of meaning in her tone, meaning only I, her mother, could be foolish enough. Never mind it’d taken me years of effort, as a writer researching a book, to gain such trust I got to hang with the Major Crime officers.

Now I shrugged, looked at my daughter. “I have no idea what this guy does in the RCMP. He was passing through. But he gave me great advice. I learned a lot more from him than I did in that course I took, the weekend of Hiking in Bear Country.”  

“Bute Inlet?” the trophy bear hunter had said in the Major Crime lunchroom. “Lotsa griz there. Tons of black bears. Great place.”

It’s possible my face had changed expression. All I had in mind was a wilderness experience. I added more sugar to my tea.

  “You’ll be fine,” the bear hunter said. “If you don’t bother a bear, they won’t hurt you.”

 I blinked, thinking, then why do you shoot them? As a sometime member of Greenpeace, this was not sitting well with me.      

  “Don’t push your way through thick scrub around a river. If you can’t see the bears, they can’t see you. You’ll come out onto the river bank and everyone will get a surprise. Bears and surprises—” The visiting officer waggled his hand. “Not good.”

“Don’t follow any trails in the bush that are shoulder high. Those are bear roads. They walk on them for generations. Leave ’em to the bears.

“You can smell bears. If you do smell something, turn around and go the other way.

 “Don’t put your tent where a bear’s gonna trip over the guy ropes. Bears get really mad when they trip.”

  The trip to Bute Inlet was an idea that had coalesced after my mom died. I thought, if I got run over by a bus tomorrow, what would I really regret? The answer was I hadn’t done a solo adventure in the wilderness. For once in my life, no guys. Just me. Bute Inlet had the highest mountains on the BC coast rising sheer from the sea. I used to commercial fish in that area and I’d always wanted to come back. I’d do my research, I’d prepare, but going to Bute was something I was doing. It was so remote I had to charter a plane to get there. A last gift from my mom, I was calling it.

 My daughter and husband were convinced I’d return from Bute in a body bag. I took comfort from the fact that all the hunters in the Major Crime unit thought it was a great idea. I didn’t mention this at home.

Bute Inlet photo, Dan Clancy, Wikipedia Commons

Up Bute, it was the trophy bear hunter I thought of when I pegged down my backpacking tent at the edge of an abandoned logging road overlooking a hanging valley a thousand feet below. I didn’t want to piss off any bears who came wandering down, maybe even the same huge black bear who’d stopped me climbing higher up the mountain earlier that afternoon. “Put your food high up in a tree,” the Hiking in Bear Country course had taught me. “Leave nothing in your tent a bear would want to eat, including toothpaste.”

 Check. My food bags were dangling way high up a fir, too far out on the branch for a bear to climb. You try throwing a carabiner on a rope way high up a fir limb. Takes a lot of tries to get it right.

  I was still vibrating from my encounter with the bear earlier. I thought he’d move. “Bears here, they’re scared of people. Not habituated,” the caretaker at the mothballed logging camp by the airstrip had told me. “Never seen a human before. They’ll run from you.”

 This bear had blocked the road. It had shot out its lower jaw and made a clacking sound, almost woofing. No way that bear was running. But I wasn’t going to act like prey. I backed up slowly for six paces until I was out of eyesight around a corner. Then I had to slog downhill to find the right kind of fir to hang my food bags. I’d been climbing with my thirty-eight-pound pack for hours. I’d been hoping to get to into the shade before I camped. The bear said NO.

 So, I heated up a Mountain Co-op lentil meal on my camp stove, brushed my teeth, hung up the last of my bags, and went to bed.

 I woke with something outside the tent pressed against my nose. And then again, harder. My God, it was the bear snouting me through the nylon! But I was off to the side of the road. I had nothing in the tent he’d want to eat. I wasn’t bugging him. I was doing everything right. I would’ve told you I wasn’t scared. And yet all that came out of me was, Haaaa, a huff of breath like a woman in labour.

 The pressure on my nose let go. I breathed, stupefied with fear, my long climb, the 6,500-foot elevation, the endless August sun, the intervals of 30 percent grade I’d climbed.

I stayed awake until pressure from my bladder said Get up now. Outside the tent, the bear had long gone. The moon glared. Mountains all around me were black cut outs against a velvet sky. I wanted to stay awake forever, looking at the mountains. It was so beautiful I wanted to weep.

 When I was too cold to stand outside anymore, I crawled back to my safe space of nylon and my warm sleeping bag.

In the morning, I looked at the sandy surface of the road where the nose pressure had come from. Wolf tracks. I hadn’t pissed off any bears after all. Yay!

I climbed that mountain looking for the world to give me a good word. Inspiration. I’d lost my way after my mom died, I didn’t know what to believe in or what to let go. My marriage was in trouble and the spiritual group I’d belonged to for years didn’t make sense anymore.

Certainly, I didn’t expect to come away with a connection with a real animal, a nose-to-nose with a wolf. But here it was, the nod from the universe I’d been hoping for. I stood there with the stunning white peaks of the Homathko Icefield all around me, the Homathko and Heakamie Rivers roaring way below. The morning light was clear; it was going to be another hot day. I looked at the tracks beside my green nylon tent, and thought, I am forever different.

And so it’s been.

Did you ever go out on a limb, do something you really really wanted to that felt important? Maybe against considerable opposition? If not, what is you’d want to have done if that out-of-control bus known as Death comes barrelling toward you tomorrow?

An earlier, adventurous version of myself by the plane that took me up Bute.