Дорин Тови - The Coming Of Saska

And, presumably, grizzly bears. There were still an unusually large number around and they had a reputation for deliberately attacking people. They were believed to have acquired a taste for human flesh and, with the memory of non-resistance in the teepees, to have lost their fear of humans. It could have been so. A grizzly can live to be 40 and their non-fear could have been passed on to their descendants. Gradually the trait had faded, however, and the story of how it started. Nowadays probably few people in the Yarrow district ever think of it. Except on such an occasion as when Babe got caught between the bears.

It seemed that one of her neighbours had a cow which had been ailing for quite a while. The owner dosed it with all kinds of remedies and when the cow eventually died... a couple of hundred yards from Babe’s boundary fence: she could see it from her window... he hadn’t bothered about moving it because there was no value in the carcass.

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Inevitably the grizzlies arrived – a large male, a medium male, a female and her half-grown cubs. They fed always in that order. Woe betide a lesser bear that tried to eat before its superior. In the normal way, said Babe, they’d have eaten the cow in no time, but with all that medicine in it, obviously it hadn’t tasted so good. They’d chew at it, go off again...

they came every day for about three weeks. The males then disappeared, there being little left of the cow – but the mother still came with her cubs, so they could play at attacking and practise fighting with the bones.

Babe had watched many bears in her time, but none so consistently as these. The cubs, she said, were some two years old and seemed to be always squabbling. The mother would stand it for a while, then she’d lose her patience, grow irritable and hit them. A hefty cuff that sent them reeling and they’d hide in the bushes and cry like children for a while. Then out they’d come, bouncing after Mum, a new leaf definitely turned – until they forgot, and started to quarrel, and their mother would whack them again. She was obviously fed up with them. It was nearly time for them to be going off on their own, and for her to think of re-mating, which she couldn’t do while she still had cubs around because a male bear would have killed them. But still they trailed persistently after her

– and of course she would have defended them with her life.

It was just that she wanted them to start being independent, not forever quarrelling and harrassing her.

Babe, all this time, had carried on as usual. Even when there’d been five bears feeding just over the boundary fence she’d gone out to her truck, brought in wood, fetched greens in from the garden. They weren’t interested in her, she said. They’d probably watched her often at the cabin and knew that she presented no danger. All she did make 97

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The Coming of Saska sure of, when she went out into the open, was that the mother and cubs were together.

Until one day she was hoeing the vegetable patch down at the creek-side, thinking the bears were nowhere around, and suddenly she heard the cubs crying and when she looked up, they were on top of the bank on her right...

bawling like mad for Mum who, to Babe’s horror, suddenly appeared across the creek on her left. She had nothing but the hoe to defend herself with. She thought she hadn’t a chance. And then, she said, the she-bear looked at her...

looked beyond her at the cubs... and deliberately turned back into the woods leaving them to their own devices. It obviously knew Babe wouldn’t harm the cubs and as for her trying to steal them (which is apparently a continual fear with mother bears)... this one was patently so fed up with those two that if Babe wanted them, she was welcome!

Another time at Yarrow Creek Babe had actually seen a stolen cub. Apparently bears have a tremendously strong maternal instinct and, even while they have young themselves, if they can get another bear’s cubs away from her they will – fighting her for their possession if necessary, and adding them to their own litter. Unfortunately the instinct stops at that. They never treat the stolen cubs as well as they do their own, acting towards them like Cinderella’s stepmother. You could always tell a stolen cub, said Babe, from the fact that it would be thinner and poorer-looking than the others.

So when this particular procession passed through the Canyon one day... a female grizzly, two sturdy, playful cubs and a third one crying and dawdling in the rear... it didn’t need much deduction to work out that the third cub had been abducted. It was tatty-looking and seemed to be 98

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trying to get left behind. Probably its real mother was still following it through the woods. But every now and then back would come its new mother, growling and cuffing it for being tardy. And on would hurry the little bear, crying more loudly still.

If she could have done anything to help it she would have, said Babe. She was watching from a track higher up.

But if she’d shouted or thrown a stone the she-bear would have attacked her, with such very young cubs in question.

So the procession had passed on... down into a steep gully and up again, the twins following happily on the heels of their mother, the third one dropping once more behind.

Evidently he thought the gully was a good place to get lost in – but alas, he hadn’t a chance. Back came the she-bear to stand impatiently on the rim and tell him what would happen to him if he didn’t hurry... which he obviously decided he’d better do, but, having lagged behind while the others had climbed out, he couldn’t find the way out of the gully. He panicked, said Babe... kept scrambling up and falling down again, till at last he got up and over the top in sheer terror. The she-bear hit him, he fled down the path with her growling after him, and that was the last Babe saw of the group. She’d heard a crackling in the woods a while later, though, and hoped his real mother was still following.

That had been quite an experience, but Babe had had plenty, living all her life in the Rockies. Once, bird-watching up in the hills, she had come across an enormous hole under a rock... and beat it fast when she realised it was a bear-den, with signs that the bear had been recently working on it. And once – she talked of them still with great affection – she had looked after a pair of grizzly cubs.

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The Coming of Saska This was back in the days when her husband was alive and they were acting as guides to a surveying party. A bear kept stealing meat from the cook-tent, which was just behind the tent they slept in and her husband, hearing a movement one night, had raised their back tent-flap to see the huge, steel-hooked feet right in front of him. He had shot the bear... it was coming every night and was a danger... not realising that it was a female. Or, until they heard piteous crying next day from the slope beyond the camp, that she had a pair of cubs. She must have left them hidden in the bushes while she made her raid and they were still waiting for her to come back. Calling anxiously down at the camp because they knew that was where she had gone, but afraid to venture from the spot where she’d put them because small bears are trained to be obedient.

They put food out for them, said Babe. They felt terrible at having killed the mother: at the time they’d only thought of the danger. The cubs had cautiously taken the food and after a few days had ventured into camp, and, because they were obviously lonely as well as hungry, she’d taken on the job of looking after them.