Learned Lessons Remembered, And Hopefully, Passed On

It was five springs ago when I first saw the bear and the woman, crouched side by side digging into a mound of nesting black ants.

The bear was cinnamon, a female, and still a cub. The woman was small with a sunburned neck and large, calloused hands. Her hair hung down her back in a single, graying braid, frequented with strands that glinted red copper in the early sun slanting through the pines.

The woman plunged her hand into the frantic insects and licked a few from her palm. Taking the cub’s paw, the woman pushed it into the nest. The cub’s small, pink tongue captured a dozen panicked ants and went back for more.

Then the young bear caught my scent, stood on her hind legs, and woofed. Without a backward glance, the pair of them, on four legs and two, ran down a trail that was barely there. They were gone almost before the scene registered in my startled brain. I was too dumbstruck to follow.

The Cabinet Mountains run to the Canadian Purcells and south to the Bitterroots along the border between Idaho and Montana and contain some of the last unspoiled watersheds in the Northwest bioregion. Grizzlies roam there, and lynx, cougar, wolverine, wolves, beaver, elk, moose, eagles. Black bears, too. And me.

Usually I jockey my rig to a logging road’s end, bushwhack until I cross a deer or bear trail, and follow its meander with no destination or deadlines. It was during one of these aimless treks that I came upon black bear and friend for the first time. There would be other meetings.

The woman had made camp in a small, hidden valley halfway up a steep, westfacing slope. A small stream coursed cold and fast down its center from a melting snowfield. It was now midsummer and I had entered this watershed intending to fill my canteen with sweet, cool water when I saw the faint wisp of smoke from her fire.

“Not many folks make it up here,” she said, by way of greeting. Her fading red hair was caught in two long braids. Crows feet and smile lines put her age in the 50s. She stood less than 5 feet and her eyes were a faded blue. She wore no jewelry, not even a ring.

“How’s the bear?” I asked in reply.

She filled a fire-blackened tin cup with pine needle tea, handed it to me, and told me she found the she-cub early in the spring near her camp, crying, weak, wasted, near death. She fed it honey and crushed ants in canned milk until it put on weight. Then the woman began teaching her to find her own food. That’s what the two of them were doing in the anthill during our first encounter.

She took me to the cub’s mother, lying a few hundred yards from a bait pit. The corpse had a gaping wound in her neck, another in her hindquarter. A third bullet had shot away her left paw. A newborn cub, twin of the lone survivor of the family, had starved to death huddled against his mother. The shooter had not looked very hard for his victims and was long gone.

The reeking pit had been baited with rotting chicken guts and fruit. The woman covered it with rocks and dirt, and tore down the blind where the killer hid to ambush the hungry, nursing mother drawn to the smell. Then she began educating the surviving cub in the ways of life in the mountains.

Business took me back East, and it was late fall when I returned to the mountains. I found faint traces of the woman’s old campsite, but she had vanished. It took two weeks to follow her succession of moves to her new camp. Again she invited me to her fire for tea.

“Where’s your friend,” I asked?

“Hereabouts.”

She said the cub was considerably grown now, feeding herself, more independent, with a taste for honey on sourdough biscuits. The woman was moving to winter quarters and eager to be on her way. I drained my cup. She stowed it with the rest of her gear, hoisted her pack, and was off down a faint deer trail as a flurry of snow sifted down from the peaks. A cinnamon shadow joined her just before she faded into the trees.

During our two meetings we exchanged little more than a few dozen words. Feeling as an intruder, I never asked her name or how she came to be in this back country. And though I continue to roam the forests and ridges and valleys of the Cabinets, I’ve never seen her again.

But the cinnamon bear still lives in these mountains. I catch rare, fleeting glimpses of her, always far from the noise and nonsense of people, once with two cubs roaming close at her heels.

True to her teacher, she remains wary of the tricks and traps and trespasses of the human animal and, I hope, teaches her offspring a similar wisdom. And I like to imagine that the redheaded woman and the cinnamon bear still dig up an anthill on occasion, and share a honey biscuit on early spring mornings as they rekindle an ancient affection sparked within nature’s tenacious tangle.

xxxx