Beyond the Bear Read Online Free PDF Page B

circus bear.
    The fall before my freshman year at Prescott, I took a Sierra Institute wilderness field study course through the University of California Santa Cruz that had me living out of a backpack and sleeping outdoors for two months straight. One of those nights, sleeping under a full moon near Mammoth Lakes, I woke up to a black bear sniffing my face. Although my heart felt like it might make a run for it without me, I lay still as concrete as the bear sniffed its way on by—front leg beside my left temple, followed by sagging belly , then a hind leg, passing me by with hardly a sound. Once the bear cleared my head and became preoccupied with other campsite curiosities, I slowly sat up in my sleeping bag. The rustle of nylon gave me away. The bear stopped, turned, and glanced back at me. I held my breath. The bear swung its head back around and moseyed on. When it was about twenty feet away, I shimmied out of my bag, rose to my feet, and followed barefooted as it made its way to the edge of camp. Now and then the bear would stop, turn, and glance back. I would freeze. It would swing its head back around and take a few more steps. Then stop. Turn. Glance back. Freeze. We kept up this game of red light, green light until the bear strolled into a moonlit meadow, and I decided I’d pushed my luck far enough and stopped to watch. When the bear reached the far end of the clearing, it looked me over one last time, then ducked into the woods. I took that encounter as a gift.
    Only once did I harbor malevolent thoughts toward a bear. Or, in this case, bears. As I remember it, on what was to have been a ten-day trip, a half-dozen or so of us Sierra Institute students and our instructor hiked deep into Sequoia National Park to set up a base camp. After choosing spots on a map, we all took off alone in various directions for three-day solos, leaving our instructor behind to hold down the fort and mind our food cache. While we were off communing with the redwoods, subsisting on gorp, oatmeal soaked overnight in cold water, and the writings of John Muir, our instructor spent those days and nights fighting off a black bear sow and her three cubs hell-bent on stealing our food. When we trickled back into camp three days later, we were met by this wild-haired, wild-eyed frazzle of a man. He turned camp security over to us, stumbled off to his tent, flopped inside, and was asleep before his head hit his Therm-a-Rest.
    Sierra Nevada black bears are notorious for such single-mindedness, having long associated people with food. In Yosemite, some punks of the bear world have learned to think of cars as cookie jars, and have popped windows and peeled back doors going after goodies inside. Minivans seem to be a favorite, probably because they’re built to haul kids, and where there are kids there are Happy Meal remnants and wayward Cheetos. Once inside, they’ve torn through backseats to get at food stored in the trunk. They don’t just go for food; beer or toothpaste will do.
    The bears we were up against on that Sequoia trip were just as determined and relentless. Our food bags were hung high in various trees, and the bears came at them from every angle. Mom would shake the trees, trying to get the bags to fall. The cubs would climb up the trunks and out onto branches to try to snag the bags from above and below. When one strategy didn’t deliver, they would try another. We took turns hollering, waving jackets, and pelting their butts with rocks. They’d scamper off, only to come trundling back fifteen or twenty minutes later. They kept this up all night long. The next day and night, as well.
    Wiped out by then, we decided to abort mission, and hiked halfway back to the trailhead. The bears followed. We’d stop for quick lessons along the way, dropping our packs and huddling around, say, a pile of scat to debate its contents and determine its depositor. The bears would be on our gear in an instant. My pack got gnawed, but a