Bear Read online

  During the time of the gold rush, the repeating rifle came onto the market, an advance in technology that made the brutal land conquest considerably easier for the newcomers. The government paid ten dollars apiece for slain bears. In those times, ten dollars was good extra income for hunters, and some of them even killed up to two hundred bears a year. In 1870, bait laced with strychnine sped up the extermination. In 1922, the mission had been accomplished and the last golden bear of California was shot. Ironically enough, that same year the golden bear was chosen as California’s heraldic animal that still graces the state flag.

  The California state flag

  Meanwhile, the plight of native peoples in California also carried on. In 1911, the local sheriff captured and jailed the last free native who had been found hiding in a slaughterhouse when he previously still had been in the wilderness. The starved and exhausted man was the last of a small clan of Yahi, who had hidden from trigger-happy white men under an overhanging cliff out in the wilderness. They had called their last refuge Grizzly Bear Hideout, as if hoping to conjure up the mighty spirit of the most powerful inhabitant of the country. Anthropologist Alfred Kroeber of the University of California, Berkeley, read about the capture of the wild native in the newspaper and, in the name of science, took him under his wing. Ishi, as he became known, lived in a university building where he then died in the spring of 1916, the last Stone Age human being of California.

  Hippies who built communes in the late 1960s in Northern California and cultivated marijuana revered Mount Shasta as a sacred mountain. A full-bearded forest dweller once told me that the bears and the Native Americans live inside Mount Shasta, but one day they will come out again when the world becomes a less evil place.

  Chapter 4

  Forest Maidens and Feral Mountain People

  What seems so odd to us about bears is how humanlike their movements are, the way they tread on their soles, stand up, and the way they use their front paws like hands.

  R. Gerlach, Die Vierfuessler

  For modern city people of today, a bear is just another animal like any other. It is known in zoos as a clumsy, ravenous, over-sized “teddy bear” or from books and television films as a funny and dumb cartoon character. Except in some more serious media, such as National Geographic articles, bears are often portrayed as cute, cuddly creatures. The bear itself seems less interesting than the fantasies about it.

  The idea of a godly bear sounds as strange to modern city people as it does to cowboys and ranchers who see a bear as an incarnated devil and a dangerous beast of prey that ravages cattle and sheep. Ranchers are not willing to admit that bears, by nature scavengers, usually do not kill animals but are just the first to find the perished creatures, chase all other scavengers off, and make a meal of them. But bears have no chance against ranchers’ firearms, which they use freely even though the state reimburses such loss of livestock.

  Bears as objects of fantasy (illustration from a sheet of music, England, 1910)

  Native peoples, who learn about the secrets of nature starting from childhood, see the bear as a hunter, fisher, and gatherer just like they are themselves. The kind of thinking that puts humans, animals, plants, and spirits into neatly separated categories, the way that so-called civilized people do, is foreign to them. They see bears not only in the forest but also in their visions and dreams. The bear spirit appears to them in the rituals of the shamans, and they know that bears speak in a language that can be understood if one listens deeply to one’s own heart. They know bears and it is no problem for them to see them as god-like, or at least as beings similar to humans. Consequently, for them it is conceivable that their ancestors were bears, that a mother bear may adopt lost human children, or that a bear might even occasionally steal a human woman.

  Indeed, who can deny certain similarities between bears and humans? Bruin does not walk on his toes, like most four-legged mammals; he walks on the soles of his feet like humans do, stepping down on the whole foot, from the toes to the heels. He often stands up like a two-legged being, and, when he comes out of hibernation, his soles are soft and tender like human feet are when they kick off their shoes for the first time in the spring. He has thick fur, but Siberian hunters find it uncanny how skinned bears resemble humans. When a female bear is skinned, they say for example, it looks astonishingly like a human woman particularly in the breast area, the hips, and the thighs.

  Bears use natural caves for their dens or dig holes in bushy embankments and cover them with branches, earth, and sod. They make themselves comfortable beds of moss, leaves, or hay and strew bracken and aromatic herbs on them to keep fleas, ticks, and other parasites at bay. Nomadic Stone Age humans, prehistoric Native Americans, and Siberian forest people hardly did things much differently; they, too, built cave homes for the harsh time of winter then left them in the summer (for leather, teepee-like tents).

  25a: Sole of a bear’s foot.

  25b: Skeleton of back legs and back paws of a bear.

  Glutton and Gourmet

  A bear’s favorite bill of fare is hardly different from that which human foragers eat. Its dentition shows that, just as the human being, it is an omnivore. Bears use their front paws when they eat, bringing them up to the snout, just as human beings use their hands. They are regular gourmets with a liking for sweet and sour. They are renowned for their love of wild honey, and they also cherish the sweet spring sap of maple trees, which they lick after slicing the bark with a claw. They are also fond of sweet and sour berries. They have even been seen slurping sweet clover blossoms and other blossoms that are especially rich with nectar. As a special sour delight for the taste buds, they like ant larvae and ant eggs. Bears like sour tastes so much that they will even lick batteries that have been tossed in garbage dumps. They can resist the sour smell of the silage in farm silos as little as they can resist honeycombs.

  When Bruin awakes from winter hibernation, he first quenches his tremendous thirst with fresh water. Then he searches for fresh, juicy grass, wild onions, young ferns that are just beginning to unroll, fresh stinging nettles, sour dock, taro roots, young yarrow shoots, skunk cabbage, and various other fresh greens. Whenever he comes across a squirrel’s nest, he will plunder that, too. Not a few half-starved trappers and mountain men have eaten that which a bear will eat to survive themselves when their supplies had run out during the severe Rocky Mountain winter. Many believe that primeval humans also learned quite a bit by observing bears.

  In the summer, bears continue eating herbs and roots, skillfully swat fish straight out of the water, and unearth mice, snails, grasshoppers, caterpillars, frog spawn, mussels, and other small animals. They scratch small crevices open and turn over big rocks to find worms and bugs hidden there. The lenses of their eyes function like magnifying glasses from which none of these small creatures can hide. Behavioral scientists have been surprised at how many moths—up to thirty thousand a day—a black bear eats in the summer months.

  All in all, bears have a well-balanced, protein-rich diet on which they thrive very well. We modern people, who are used to cellophane-packed foods, find the thought of eating such foods horrible, but for native peoples who shared and still, to a degree, share the same habitat as the bears—such as the native peoples in Siberia—most of these things are also welcome human nourishment. Bears are mostly vegetarian; about 75 percent of their nourishing calories come from plants and the rest from animals. Anthropologists have recorded the same ratio in most hunters and gatherers.

  Bears also like to eat slain animals as much as humans do. But whereas humans cook, cure, or dry the meat, bears bury it for a few days to make it tastier. Bears also like small portions of raw meat, like human gourmets relish a medium rare steak or the Inuit like rancid, raw meat with maggots as a very special delicacy. But they are not enthusiastic hunters. Instead of hunting, they tend to rely on the “might is right” principle and steal freshly slain prey from wolves, pumas, and even Siberian tigers! In 1996, a bear was observed dr
iving nine wolves off a fresh stag cadaver. Studies in Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks have shown that grizzlies are able to take away up to one fourth of a cougar’s prey (Busch 2000, 85).

  In the fall, bears fatten themselves up with beechnuts and other nuts, acorns, rowanberries, wild fruits, mushrooms, and other delicacies. Research in behavioral science shows that bears strip bushes of up to 200,000 berries a day. In ancient Roman times, bears were veritable pests in the vineyards, which, for them, were nothing but abundant feeding grounds.

  Bears seem to have a weight regulator that works similarly to a thermostat and is of interest to nutritionists. In the summer, they keep a steady normal weight and do not carry any extra weight around at all; in the fall, their metabolism adjusts to fattening up for the winter. Through these studies, nutritionists hope to find out how humans might also learn to control weight gain and loss (Bates 2013).

  Each bear has its own cherished territory that it has been familiar with since it was a cub. However, contrary to other animals that mark and defend their territories, bears do not have a fixed range. The so-called scratched trees at the edge of the territory belong as much to the realm of fairy tales as the old belief that bears are born as a formless clump and the mother licks them into bear shape.1 But there are trees at strategic places (for instance, at bear crossings), and bears rub themselves on them to leave messages for each other—these are the billboards of the bear world.

  A symbol of maternal care: according to fables and myths, the bear mother licks her newborn to give the cub its form.

  Bears, just as human foragers and nomadic hunters and gatherers, move around following the seasons. They follow the staggered ripening of berries and wild fruits into the mountains and up into high altitudes, and, when the salmon run, they come back into the river valleys. If there is an especially big supply of nourishment, very many bears can be in one place at the same time. But they do not act like a pack or herd; instead, they are individualistic, knowing each other personally and greeting one other. Fairly rowdy tussles, which may look like fights to one who doesn’t know them well, are completely nonaggressive. The young bears tussle like this, too, and two bears in love may also seem to be fighting. The pecking order, based on size and strength, makes for peaceful cohabitation. The smaller bear is naturally respectful of the bigger one.

  Bears even tolerate human beings in their berry paradise or on the salmon runs. Cheyenne elders told me that they remember picking berries where bears were eating the same berries, sometimes even on the other side of the same bush. They could hear them smacking their lips. There were no problems as long as the humans always showed them respect and yielded them the absolute right of way. If a bear licked its snout during a meeting like this, it was not because the thought of human meat made his mouth water but because, with a moist nose, he could smell them better. Bears do not like to smell cold sweat, a sign of fear, and become unpredictable in such situations.

  Bear researcher Helmut Heft, who observed these animals for many years in their natural environment, claims that bears usually meet people in an observant and patronizing manner and basically prefer to leave them alone. Bears are chivalrous and do not attack for no reason. It is more the case that dull, civilized humans are the ones who are aggressive. When attacked, a bear will defend itself fearlessly and is never cowardly. A bear will become mean and deceitful only in captivity. Cruel and bloodthirsty, as bears are often called, are terms that fit human beings almost exclusively. A German expression goes, “What I think and do, I trust others to think and do” (Was ich denk’ und tu’, das traue ich dem anderen zu). In this case, the expression could be changed a bit to “That which humans think and do, they trust bears to do.”

  Meeting a bear in the forest (Erik Werenskiold, nineteenth century)

  Bear Love and Matriarchy

  Many years ago, I lived in the mostly pristine forests near the Oregon coast before the environmental degradation in California drove many of its residents there. There were still free-roaming bears in that area. Inexperienced young bears would often be attracted to human settlements by the smell of garbage where they would most likely be greeted with a hail of bullets. I knew a strapping young man who, like so many hippies of the times, had turned his back on civilization. He hunted with a bow and arrow and shot a black bear that was following him up a tree. He proudly wore the claws as a necklace. The neighbor woman shot a bear each fall and turned the meat into sausage. I knew bears from various meetings in the woods, and I never liked the thought of killing them.

  Long before my time in Oregon, I worked for a couple of summers, in my youth, at Yellowstone National Park. One summer, I had the opportunity to observe a black bear mother with her two cubs. It was like a window into a paradise we humans have long lost, a picture of happiness and unadulterated love. The two furry cubs scrambled all day long, played tag, teeter-tottered on pine tree branches, chased butterflies, and curiously sniffed crawling bugs. They played with stones and pieces of wood with the same abandonment as human children do when playing with conventional toys. When the first snow came, it was especially fun to watch them. They were very surprised and curious, sniffed the snowflakes, and tried to catch them. The next day, they slid down the hills in the snow, obviously having great fun. Occasionally, the mother bear hugged them tenderly, licked them clean, and stroked them with her claws as if combing their fur. If a lone hiker showed up, the mother called the cubs with a “woof” and chased them up a tree. When they got out of hand, she grumbled and boxed their ears. She actually even seemed to talk to them. Behavioral scientists have reportedly distinguished a bear “vocabulary” of some thirty sounds.

  Like human beings, bears do not have a mating season. They nurse their offspring for about a year and a half, also the average nursing time for humans. Bears have six teats but only the two top ones swell and give milk. When the cubs are some three years old and leave their mother to strike out and try their luck on their own, the mother starts looking around for a new mate.

  A bear mother with her cubs

  While mating, which is done in the mild springtime, the bears seem to be in love. They dance and scramble around exuberantly. The female bear teases the male and acts uninterested, seeming to possess all the human female allures. The male tries to impress her by boxing around on bushes and carrying out various other demonstrations of strength. After a few days of such games, they pair up, and they are not puny in this act either. They copulate two to three times a day and each time for more than a half hour. One should be careful not to disturb this love play. Especially the female will be very upset, and the male will be eager to show her that he is no wimp.

  If no insemination happens after this first meeting, the menstrual cycle sets in again. Just as with Homo sapiens, the cycle is twenty-eight days. If the female is pregnant, then the male bear can leave without further ado.2 He is not included in the education of the youngsters; she alone is responsible for that. If prehistorians are hard put to find a nonadulterated matriarchy, here is one.

  Like humans, bears sleep at night. Only where they are mercilessly hunted or constantly disturbed do they develop into reclusive night animals. They suffer the same frailties as human beings do: colds, pneumonia, rheumatism, and arthritis. Only the garbage bears suffer toothache due to eating sugar-sweetened foods, leftovers from humans.

  Compared to many other animals, bears are biologically capable of living a fairly long life. They have a thirty-year life span on average—Stone Age humans are said to have not lived much longer than that either. In that amount of time, they become fairly wise and experienced. The bear’s life expectancy today, however, is only about six years, and the reason is not a natural one: some 80 percent of bears killed in the wild are victims of trigger-happy, greedy, or fearful human beings (Busch 2000, 46). Nearly all native peoples claim that bears have a human-like intelligence. Mongolians and tribes of the Altai Mountains say they have a natural, intuitive intelligence like that they say women
tend to have.

  Bears also have an excellent memory. It is claimed that a bear will always remember a person that it has met only once. Bears can reason—and have humor! They will often throw hunters off by disguising their tracks, by jumping from stone to stone, from sedge tuft to sedge tuft, walking backward, or sidestepping. Some bear hunters have sworn off bear hunting after they have heard the human-like death screams of a mortally wounded bear, or been brought to their senses by hearing the pitiful whimpering and crying of a baby bear. It is no wonder that bears were sacred animals to whom native peoples attached taboos. For the Gilyak in Manchuria, bears are “mountain people” and messengers of the god of the forest. Transylvanians believe the bear is a “forest human,” and theosophists and anthroposophists believe bears are descendants of “Atlantean humans” who have sunk to the level of an animal. Anthroposophist Karl Koenig expresses it like this: “Bears avoid humans; I doubt, though, that they are afraid of them. They avoid them out of a feeling of shame, which is at the same time also a feeling of dignity. Bears sense a deep kinship with humans. They sense that they were also once upright, like humans still are today” (Koenig 2013, 98).

  Chapter 5

  Meeting up with Maheonhovan

  The bear possesses power—spiritual power. He can heal himself and other bears. He is a great medicine animal.