Nobody could remember a time when there had been so many bears in the valley, not even the old-timers who had lived there all of their lives. It was early fall, and the weather was turning. We’d had the worst summer of fires in many years, and endured our ninth year of drought. In the high country of Idaho, the berry bushes were brown, and the streams had dried up. Hungry and facing the prospect of winter, the bears began moving down into the valleys.
They visited ranches up and down the Salmon River, rooted in garbage behind the Clayton Store, and fed in apple trees under the cover of night. Then they grew bold and were spotted even in daylight. It seemed to happen almost overnight, the bears coming into our lives and creating what the locals began calling “the bear problem.”
I guess it was a problem, although when I think of it now, I see it more as a gift. And I think particularly of a certain brown sow and her cub.
It all began one night when the sound of something crashing out on the porch woke my husband and me. I stayed in bed while he went to investigate. He crept into my study, where there was a door to the back porch and a switch for the outside light. When he turned on the light and looked out, he saw a bear standing on all fours next to our overturned barbecue, looking back at him through the window.
My husband called out softly, “There’s a bear out here on the porch,” and I quickly went to see. We huddled together, both naked (and feeling somehow more vulnerable because of that nakedness), and peered out at the bear only a few feet away.
It was a brown bear, and she seemed in no hurry to leave. Of course, she sensed us there at the window, and for a while she stared fixedly at that spot. Her snout was a honey brown color, and her coat appeared reddish in the light. Soon she began snuffling around, nosing the grill on which we had cooked salmon earlier. Then, after three or four minutes, she descended the steps and moved off down the garden path, disappearing slowly into the darkness.
Wolves and bears have long been regarded by humans as the beasts of the forest, the dark others, wildness incarnate. After I returned to bed that night, I lay very still, thinking of the bear roaming about outside. I was excited by her visit. Old notions of the beast surfaced, and I thought of those creatures who terrify little girls in red coats and hover over them as they sleep. I was also aware of the great magical power of bears in literature, how they have been our secret allies, our lovers in disguise.
Throughout the history of art, bears have offered special relationships to women. They have figured in our fantasies and childhood stories, our fairy tales and histories. One might say that on a metaphorical level the bear has become part of us, and we have become part of the bear. In Beauty and the Beast, East of the Sun and West of the Moon, Rose Red and Snow White, and numerous other fables, they are our secret animal selves, or our destined bridegrooms — souls waiting to be freed by the milk of kindness. And we, in turn, have been their beauties, who learn to become more fully human from our beasts. In her wonderful study of fairy tales, From the Beast to the Blonde, Marina Warner concludes, “Beauty stands in need of the beast rather than vice versa. He holds up a mirror to the forces of nature within her, which she is invited to accept and to allow to grow. The animal is no longer seen as monstrous, but [as] a means of charming the monstrous inside ourselves.”
I went out early the next morning to feed the horses and found plenty of evidence of the bear’s visit: The compost heap had been dug up by powerful claws. There was a mound of scarlet scat on the grass to one side of the house, which the dogs circled warily, raising their ruffs.
The horses also seemed spooked, especially the oldest, Gillian. At thirty, Gillian was nearing the end of his life, and over the previous months he had grown increasingly thin and weak. Usually anxious to receive his morning grain, he stood back this morning, as did Gypsy and Nevada. None of them wanted to come into the corral. They were wary of the small enclosure. It must have been a frightening night for all three of them as they stood out in the darkened fields with the bear nearby. This morning, their fear lingered, and they flared their nostrils and snorted, clearing away their breath to get an even sharper sense of smell. They stood clustered together at the end of the field, lifting their heads periodically and staring intently in the direction of the river and the thickets of willows that lined its banks. I watched them, trying to read their behavior, knowing their senses were sharper than mine. And what they told me was that the bear had not left the ranch. The bear was still down by the river.
The next night, the bear came back, this time with her cub. When we turned on the porch light, we could see the cub sitting on the porch railing. He was surprisingly small. A few feet away, the sow was investigating a tennis ball left behind by one of the dogs. She held the ball in her mouth, but when the light came on, she dropped it and seemed to send a quick message to her cub, who climbed the tree next to the porch. In a few seconds, the sow followed, and the thin elm held two bears in its dark bower, one large and one very small.
We turned out the light, went back to bed, and lay in the dark, talking about the bears. We figured that the mother weighed perhaps 250 pounds. The cub probably weighed only about twenty-five. It seemed to us he should have been larger. He would have been born the winter before, in January or February, while the sow hibernated in her den. In the black-bear family, one baby usually makes up the first litter, then later come twins, occasional triplets, or, rarely, quadruplets. I figured the sow was perhaps just a young mother, struggling to feed her hungry cub. “I wish we could give them some food,” I said wistfully to my husband.
“I know. I wish we could, too,” he replied.
Then we fell silent, and I knew each of us was considering the rightness, or wrongness, of feeding them.
The bear and her cub returned the next night, and the following one as well, and we heard she’d also been seen down at the mouth of Malm Gulch, half a mile away. She’d raided Dick Settle’s trash and visited other houses down river. Local fish-and-game officers set a trap near the river near a grove of cottonwoods, in the hopes of catching her and relocating her to a more remote area.
With a bear around, especially one with a young cub, we grew increasingly cautious, even in the way we moved about the ranch during the day. At night we tried to remember to lock the doors, especially the one nearest the pantry. We stopped taking scraps from the kitchen out to the compost heap. And we didn’t barbecue again.
But the fact that the bears were so hungry troubled me. Each night when the bears visited again and I looked out and saw the small cub and his mother, something tugged at me, and I thought, Feed them.
I suppose it’s a normal response to want to feed a hungry animal, especially when one has so much food to spare. And perhaps it’s an even more normal response for women, who are by nature equipped to assume the role of nurturers.
Our urge to provide sustenance is strong and can lead to extraordinary acts. I came across a book not long ago called Wild Brother, a true story published by a photographer named William Lyman Underwood in 1921. He tells the tale of a foundling bear cub brought back to a logging camp by a huntsman who had killed the cub’s mother while she slept in her den. The tiny cub did not even have his eyes open yet, and the problem was, what to feed him? Mrs. Underwood provided the answer. She took the cub and named him Bruno, and called her little daughter, who’d just been born, Ursula, and she nursed them both at her breast. A photograph of her sitting in a rocking chair, with her dress open and little Bruno at one breast and Ursula at the other, appears in the book. Below the photograph, Mrs. Underwood has written: “Mr. Underwood took this picture of Ursula and Bruno and me with my consent, and I am glad to have him use it in this book.” She signs it, “Bruno’s Foster Mother.”
It’s an astonishing picture, shocking yet also wonderful. Better yet, the story has a happy ending: Bruno survived and, in Mrs. Underwood’s words, grew up to be “a most enchanting character.” Eventually, when he became too large to handle, he was returned to the wild.
The temptation I felt to feed the sow and her cub, though in quite a different league from that of Mrs. Underwood, was nonetheless terribly strong. It would have been so easy to take some of the scraps from the lamb we’d recently slaughtered and leave them down by the river at dusk. And yet I knew we shouldn’t feed the bears. Some of our neighbors didn’t think it was such a bad idea to shoot bears— or at least shoot at them — and more than one person was keeping a loaded gun in the house. In nearby communities, a few bears had already been shot. Under those circumstances, it wasn’t exactly a good idea to encourage the mother and her cub to hang around.
As it turned out, food appeared without our having to provide it. A beaver turned up dead on the banks of the irrigation canal one morning. It had been killed in a trap set by a rancher down river whose water was being cut off by the beaver’s dam — accidentally killed, the rancher claimed, in a trap that was meant only to contain it until it could be relocated. I never saw the dead beaver; I only heard about it from a neighbor. By the time I went to look at it the next day, the carcass was gone.
We were pretty sure the beaver had been eaten by the bear. (What else could carry off a carcass of that size, leaving no evidence behind?) And as much as we hated to see the beaver killed, we were also happy to think that the bear and her cub had at least made a meal of it. Two days later, while fishing down at the river, my husband came across the beaver’s remains. There, among the polished rocks, he found a skeleton picked clean, and a single furry paw.
The bear and her cub hung around for almost a week, visiting the porch and waking us each night. And then, just as suddenly as they had come into our lives, they disappeared. I checked with the fish-and-game officer to see if the sow and her cub had been trapped. No, they had not, he said. He was still trying to capture them. I thought she had probably left the area and moved on.
A few days later, I awoke early one morning and let out our dogs, two Labrador-golden retriever mixes, a brother and sister named Mookie and Freda. As I turned to go back inside, something dark streaked by out in the yard and was soon followed by the dogs. Before I could take in what was happening, Mookie and Freda had chased the cub up a big elm tree. The cub climbed to the first branch, high enough to be out of reach, and stopped and looked down at the dogs. I quickly called them off and glanced around anxiously for the sow. Where, I wondered, was the mother?
For some time we waited in the house, my husband and myself and Mookie and Freda, all watching the cub through the window and waiting for his mother to come. But she never came, so we called Mark, the fish-and-game officer we’d spoken with earlier. We told him the cub was up in a tree in our yard, but we couldn’t see the mother, though we had been waiting and watching for some time. And that’s when he told us the sow had been killed on the highway two nights before. She was hit by a semi, he said, while crossing the highway around two in the morning. And, yes, the driver had reported a cub with her. He had seen it in the headlights and knew it was uninjured because he had watched it run away from its dead mother.
So, the cub was now an orphan.
What Mark wanted to do was bring a cage over and leave it in our yard, parked under the tree and baited with food. Would that be all right? he asked. He could come right away.
I hung up the phone and went back outside. The news of the sow’s death left us feeling dejected. She had come down out of the mountains because she was starving, come to our ranch in search of food, and it hadn’t gone well for her here; it hadn’t gone well at all. I looked up at the cub in the tree. He had a pale brown snout and a white patch on his chest and a face that could melt a heart. I cut some apple slices and put one in the crook of the tree below him. He looked at the apple for a long time but didn’t take it. Instead, he sort of smacked his jaws together and looked down at me. He was a tiny and beautiful little thing. So frightened, with his mother now dead. And I knew there was a good chance he soon would be, too, unless we could help him.
“It isn’t easy to catch bear cubs,” Mark said to us an hour or so later as the three of us unhitched the cage from his truck and dragged it carefully into place near the tree. “We haven’t had much luck at it,” he continued. “But if we can catch him, it’ll be his best chance of survival. Without his mother, he won’t know to hibernate, and without her to protect him and help him find food, he probably won’t last long in any case.”
Before Mark left, he looked up at the bear cub sitting on the branch of the tree, clasping the trunk with both paws. “That’s a pretty small cub,” he said softly. “He’s been on his own now for two days and probably hasn’t eaten much. He ought to be hungry. Let me know if he comes down and takes the bait.”
We went about our business that morning as we always did. I worked in my study. My husband fixed breakfast. But all the time we were doing our chores, we were also constantly watching the tree, moving about quietly in the house, hoping the cub would come down.
It took about an hour for him finally to do so. He shimmied down the tree very cautiously, stopping frequently to look around. Once on the ground, he urinated in the grass at the base of the tree, seeming to take a long time to relieve himself. The trap was only a few feet away from him. He began sniffing the air. Mark had left pork chops on the floor of the cage, and more meat hung from a hook that, if disrupted, would trigger the door and make it shut.
The cub’s hunger finally overpowered his fear, and he reached warily inside the cage and pulled out a pork chop and ate it on the grass. Then he took another. And then he went deeper into the cage to reach the hanging meat, and, in an instant, the door clanged shut.
For the rest of the day and into the evening, the little cub stayed there in the cage in our yard while Mark made calls to try to find him a home.
As the day wore on and calls went back and forth between us and the Fish and Game Office, we discovered there were four orphaned cubs in the valley, not only “our” cub but three others whose mothers had been shot. It was depressing to think of this. Depressing, too, to think that the cubs might end up in an urban zoo, Mark’s first idea for a solution.
My husband and I spent a lot of time that day visiting the little bear, going out to sit by the cage, alone or sometimes together. At first, he was so frightened that whenever we approached he smacked his jaws together anxiously. Later, he came to accept our presence, though I don’t suppose he ever lost his fear completely.
He grew calmer as we talked to him and fed him crab apples from the tree growing nearby. The meat no longer interested him — it had led to his capture, and perhaps he sensed it might cause him further trouble — but he did like the little apples. When we pushed one through a hole in the wire mesh, he would reach down and curl his tongue around it slowly and take it into his mouth.
In many ways it was a strange day and a long one, the day we spent with the cub, feeding him, watching him, and simply sitting quietly beside him. We didn’t feel like going anywhere and leaving him alone, nor did anyone stop by to visit. There was a feeling of existing in suspended time. Once or twice, the phone rang, but it was always Mark calling to say that he was still trying to find the cubs a home.
What could home mean in this context? Was a zoo really any kind of home for him? The idea of the cub ending up in such a place hardly seemed like a satisfying solution. Yet what, we wondered, were the alternatives?
As it turned out, no zoo wanted the orphaned cub. Mark tried zoos in Boise, Salt Lake City, and other western towns, but the answer was always the same: thanks but no thanks. Apparently, there were already enough bears in captivity, and no one needed another one. So we fed him more apples and waited.
Later in the afternoon, while sitting near the cage, I experienced something extraordinary. The cub was whimpering, as he had done off and on throughout that long day. It seemed to me he was crying, and why shouldn’t he cry? With the death of his mother, he had lost everything, and now even his freedom was gone. As he whimpered, I began humming to him, soft and low, a little made-up tune I hoped would calm him. I put everything I felt for the cub into that song — all the tenderness I felt toward him, the concern as well as my hopes for his future. And after a while he stopped whimpering and sat listening quietly to me.
It began to grow dark, and still we hadn’t heard anything more from Mark. As the light faded, we wondered whether the cub would just be left at our place overnight.
But then Mark called with good news. He had located a man in Boise, three and a half hours away, who was willing to take all the orphaned cubs and feed them over the winter. This man, whose name I never learned, would keep them in a large barn, where he could feed them without being seen, and try to rear them with as little human contact as possible. In the spring, they would be released into the wild, and, with any luck, they just might survive.
An hour or so later, Mark arrived, and we hitched up the trailer and said goodbye to the cub. The last we saw of him, he was headed up the driveway, looking back at us through the wire mesh of his cage.
The problem with humans is that we so often see animals only as extensions of our own private worlds, and, in writing about the cub as I have, perhaps I, too, am guilty of this sin. After all, bears are really just bears, separate entities with their own dignity — not lovers in fairy tales, nor the beasts of our collective psyche, nor the objects of our amusements.
But whatever happened that fall, the bears did come to us, and we did try to help, not for any other reason than that we wished to do so. What we really wanted was simply to see the bears go on being bears, wild and free.
For a long while afterward, I thought about the cub and his mother who’d been killed on the highway. Their story isn’t meant to prove anything beyond an affection for its subjects. It doesn’t have any moral or even a happy ending, because I never heard any more about the little cub — whether he survived the winter in captivity, let alone his release into the wild.
But I do think of him now and then, and I will always owe him a debt. Animals are good to think with, as Claude Lévi-Strauss once said. Something has happened to me as a result of thinking with that little bear for the time that I did. He charmed me, and I know I will never think of bears in the same way again.
There’s a photograph of my mother that I keep on my desk. It was taken in Yellowstone in the 1950s, when she must have been about the same age that I am now. She’s standing in a grove of trees, dangling something in the air (a strip of bacon? a piece of fruit?), and a bear is standing on his hind legs in front of her, reaching up with both paws for whatever it is that she holds. In the background are several other bears and a few small children, one of whom could be me. The bears and the children are all close together, forming a tight little group. In the foreground, my mother looks radiant: She has the most wonderful, broad smile on her face. The way she stands so close to the bear, facing him, it almost looks like they’re dancing.
I keep the photograph in a prominent place because it makes me feel good when I look at it. In the years since this picture was taken, feeding bears in Yellowstone has been prohibited. We’ve learned it’s not the correct thing to do. Still, there’s an innocence in that old photograph that I love. It’s the innocence of the children mixing so freely with the bears. It’s the innocence of my mother, who doesn’t yet know she shouldn’t feed the bear, and who stands so fearlessly, so joyously, before him. Perhaps my mother and Mrs. Underwood understood something quite important after all.
“Ursa Minor” is excerpted from the anthology Intimate Nature: The Bond between Women and Animals, by Linda Hogan, Deena Metzger, and Brenda Peterson, editors. © 1998 by Linda Hogan, Deena Metzger, and Brenda Peterson. It is reprinted by permission of Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc.
