Bear Read online

  Statement by a Cheyenne (Grinnell 1923,105)

  The bear was a special creature for the native peoples of North America. In the legends about the animal world, the bear is the animal of leadership because of his fairness, strictness and courage. For most tribes, the bear clan is a clan of medicine, leadership and defense.

  Sun Bear, Medizinrad

  Commissioned by the National Parks Administration, we hacked our way through endless virgin rain forest immersed in green, translucent light. We were making the first trails into the forest. Paying no attention to startled deer that fled from us, or silent white-headed eagles swooping high above us, we made our way over slippery moss-covered cliffs and through endless groves of dripping giant ferns. The giant ferns made up the first story in the forest. Above the ferns towered hemlock spruce, fir, Douglas fir, and cedars. Our small troop of youths in their prime had been sent in to open up the Olympic Wilderness for tourists. Where until now hardly a white person had set foot, trails, stairs, and lodgings were to be built. It was during this time that I personally experienced the proverbial strength of bears for the first time.

  At one of the planned rest areas, a garbage pit—large and bear-proof—was to be dug out. We shoveled and shoveled for nearly a week. Stout Fjørd horses pulled thick cedar logs, one by one, to the pit, and it took several of us to lay each one over the pit snugly next to the one before it. Then we secured the massive lid with cross beams. We figured it could now be put to use—the first garbage that plopped down into the deep bottom of the pit was our own. Bears have noses that can only be compared to bloodhounds. Researchers have determined that they can smell as far away as some twenty miles (approximately thirty kilometers). Since they have the same tastes as humans, it was not surprising that we heard loud crashing the very first night. The painstakingly built garbage pit was ruined. When we looked out of our hut to see what was going on, we saw a bear pulling the heavy logs aside like so many toothpicks. Then it slid into the pit and happily licked the tin cans clean, munched on steak bones, and ate whatever other leftovers were there.

  A Bear Is Not a Tail-Tucking Dog

  An old cowboy I met in Montana was personally convinced of the extraordinary strength of a bear’s paw. While emptying a bottle of whiskey, he told me how he had met up with the king of the forest in the wilderness. The grizzly bear that he had taken by surprise hit his horse so hard on the neck that it fell down dead right under him. The cowboy was just able to pull his Colt out and shoot the bear. “Take a big-caliber gun along when you go into the mountains,” he advised me. The good advice was superfluous, as the rancher’s sons I rode out with always had a rifle within quick and easy reach on their saddles. Luckily, though, we did not surprise any bears. In the daytime when we fished in the crystal-clear mountain streams for trout or in the evening when we stretched our legs by a campfire, Bruin never let himself be seen. When the campfire was almost out, with only a soft ruby-red glow, we heard the bears sniffing around, attracted by the smell of our provisions that were hung up a good distance from us and well out of reach of their insatiable hunger.

  Everyone knows the stories about careless campers using as pillows their backpacks full of cookies, apples, chocolate, and sandwiches. Bears have a notoriously voracious appetite and do not know their own strength nor just how frail humans are—they can push someone’s head aside to get at the food and break their neck.

  It is easy to become careless when one sees bears day in and day out in the wilderness. One thinks one has gotten to know them plenty well enough. That is what I thought when I was grilling hamburgers at one of the restaurants in Yellowstone during my second summer in the park. Cartons of fresh ground beef that had been delivered in the morning were still in the parking lot in the afternoon when I took a break from tourists ordering colas and hamburgers. When I went out to gather them up, a black bear was licking with relish the bits of hamburger that still clung to the cartons. Because I was so used to seeing bears all over the place by then, I thought I could shoo it away like a stray dog. I went toward it waving my hands and yelling, “Get out of here! Get! Get!” But bears are not like dogs! The bear looked up, sized me up, laid his ears back, snorted angrily, and whisked one of the cartons with its paw as far as a World Cup kicker would have sent a soccer ball. And then it headed for me.

  Black bear, or baribal

  I was a good runner and even won a couple of medals in high school in running sports—but no human can run as fast as a bear. These otherwise unhurried and ambling animals are almost as fast as a horse and can effortlessly run forty miles per hour even at a short distance. I just reached the back door of the restaurant with the bear on my heels when the cook’s wife, who had witnessed the incident, opened the door and doused the bear’s nose with ammonia from a squirt gun, thus saving my life. It wasn’t the first time a bear had been at the door. The bear turned heel immediately and went off to a distance where it sat down and rubbed its nose with both paws. Even though it hadn’t been able to teach me my well-deserved lesson, it certainly taught me to have more respect for the king of the forest.

  Shining Light in the Bear’s Soul

  Later, in the Montana highland wilderness, I was given a chance to see far deeper into the unfathomable bear’s soul. I had been hiking on a summer’s day without seeing a single person. The characteristic, delightful aroma of prairie sage filled the air, elk grazed in the swamps below, prairie dogs whistled their short communications to each other, and eagles circled up high in a cloudless, azure-blue sky. As the sky began to turn into a glowing red-pink-yellow with the approaching sunset and the coyotes began their evening songs, I climbed up a steep slope toward a solitary and knotted old ponderosa pine where I planned to roll out my sleeping bag for the night. Just as I reached the crest of the hill, I saw three grizzly bears standing directly in front of me—so close that I could have touched them. They were standing upright with their paws raised.

  I was overwhelmed. All thoughts and feelings were gone in an instant. I can only remember that I looked into the eyes of the bear nearest to me, and it was like looking directly into the sun. Bright light came out of its eyes toward me and I experienced what can only be described as a moment in eternity. Then the bear suddenly made a sound, “woof,” as if it meant “hmm,” went back down on all fours, and trotted leisurely past me. The other two followed. Most likely, it was a mother bear with two almost completely grown cubs.

  The Cheyenne, whom I had befriended, told me later that I had seen maheonhovan, “the heavenly bear,” in his earthly appearance, the bear that is seen at night in the sky near the North Star. He is the guardian of the wild animals, knows the strongest medicine, and can speak. He appears to humans as a white, shining bear.

  Primeval spirits and the white bear (painting by Dick West, Cheyenne)

  At that time, I was young and still believed in the exclusive validity of objective science too much to put much stock in such tales. But I did remember this meeting often. It awakened memories of stories about shining bears that my grandmother used to tell me. Snow White and Rose Red tells about a bear that spends the cold winter in the isolated hut of a mother with her two daughters. In the spring, when they let him back out into the forest, some fur gets caught on a nail in the door and golden light shines out from under it. In the fairy tale Bearskin, a golden soul is hidden under Bearskin’s rough, wild appearance. I also remembered some Siberian tales, which tell about the starlight that a bear carries inside. We will go into this subject more later on.

  Just as I was writing this book, a friend sent me a book about the meaning of meetings with animals (Tierisch gut by Regula Mayer). One of the first meetings discussed is one with bears. “The bear’s message for modern people is to remind them of their roots, which they are beginning to long to understand but have nearly lost. The bear connects us to our primeval roots. Bears remind us of our earthly origin and show us the pathway through our human life; they connect us to our human purpose” (Mayer 2004, 20). Be
ars connect us to our ancestors, primeval human beings, who honored bears, and from whom we have inherited the same genetic pattern. “Just as we have driven bears from the forests, we try to distance and free ourselves from our ancestors and their experience. Human beings must learn to live within nature’s laws and grant space for the internal and external animals of prey” (Mayer 2004, 21).

  The bear warns us to come back to a natural consciousness. “Let instinct, intuition, curiosity, and the force of life itself become the tools that guide your zest for life and bestow you with ever new experiences and joy. And when the time is appropriate, have the awareness to sink into the inner depth, the deep inner darkness, where you can draw strength from these experiences in peace” (Mayer 2004, 20).

  Chapter 6

  Grandmothers’ Stories

  The bear is wiser than the human being because he knows how to survive the winter without eating.

  An old saying of the Abenaki people

  Old medicine man Bill Tallbull was worried about his people on the Cheyenne reservation. They were drinking too much alcohol, fighting too much, and getting sick too often in the winter months. Despite traditional sweat lodges, they caught colds and fell sick with pneumonia and the flu. He himself was also not feeling completely well. His heart was constricted and feeling too tight in his chest. He did not go to the doctors in the towns who wore white jackets and recommended pills, vaccinations, hospitals, and operations, which he did not trust. He had long ago chosen the path of his forefathers, the “old ways,” which meant seeking healing through visions by fasting, waking, and praying—done at remote, traditional places of power in the countryside. But so much sacred knowledge had been forgotten. The reservation that had been allotted to the Cheyenne was far away from the places where old medicine men used to find healing plants. And the old medicine people who knew the plants were long dead. In addition, many of the diseases were of a new kind. They had come along with the invaders, just like “firewater,” horses, and the book of religion.1 Many new wild plants, European weeds that now grew on the prairie and in the mountains, had also come along with the white settlers.

  Bill Tallbull had heard about my classes in healing plant lore at the college in Sheridan, Wyoming. “Maybe this ‘pale face’ can tell us something about the new plants and their uses,” he thought, and discussed the prospect with the other elders who decided it could be a good idea to make contact—and that is how we became friends. We took many excursions into the prairie and the pine forests of the Big Horn Mountains. I showed him how to make a heart-strengthening tea out of hawthorn (Crataegus spp.) leaves and blossoms. He tried it and was happy to notice that it actually did help. I suggested hemp agrimony (Eupatorium spp.) and other plants to counter the flu, as they strengthen the immune system. I was expecting an exchange for plant information and that Tallbull would tell me some of the secrets he knew about the plant world, but I was very disappointed how little he was willing to tell me. I knew that Native Americans are generally not talkative, especially regarding what they know, but I had never experienced it personally. Bill Tallbull, in his defense, felt it was disrespectful toward the plant world to reveal their secrets. Idle talk could take away the healing power.

  When it comes to sharing personally accumulated medicine power (mayun), most Native Americans are downright miserly. If I had taken a rifle from the wall or taken off with his car without asking or saying thanks, it would bother him less than taking his personal medicine knowledge without going through the right channels.

  The “spirit-animals-of-down-below,” mainly the bear but also the badger and the buffalo, can reveal knowledge about healing plants. The bear, which radiates like the sun in visions and can talk to human beings, is especially close to the grandmother estsheheman, who lives deep down in the earth and is the mother of the plants. The “spirit-animals-of-up-above,” such as wolves, eagles, or cranes, reveal to us the secrets of the clouds and the sky. The human being who has been blessed with a vision given by a spirit animal is the owner of the vision and the power that comes along with it. That person will provoke the anger of the spirit animal if he or she is not respectful and careful regarding the vision.

  So I had to rein in my desire for knowledge and be patient. But one day finally, after Tallbull had been on a vision quest for four days in a cave at Bear Butte, he told me a story he had inherited from his grandmother—just like healing knowledge, tales have magical power and are basically the personal property of the teller, who is the only person who may tell them unless he or she decides to give them as a present. He gave me the following story, which tells of the hero Little Bear and a Cheyenne woman who lived in magical primeval time. Since he gave it to me, I feel sure he would not mind that I share it here, so to say, in typical Western fashion:

  It was late summer. The men were hunting buffalo herds in the prairie and the women went into the mountains looking for wild fruits and berries to gather. As the women were happily singing and chatting while filling their leather pouches with ripe berries, a huge grizzly bear appeared out of nowhere, grabbed one of the women, and took her off into the forest. The others ran back to the camp to get the men, but the men were not back from the buffalo hunt yet. They began to cry and lament the loss of their sister, believing that she was surely dead now.

  In the meantime, the bear had brought the woman to his cave where she heard a baby bear crying pitifully. Something had happened to its mother and it was starving. The grizzly shoved her over to the baby, letting her know in its way that she should take care of the little creature. She began to nurse it and immediately loved it as mothers do.

  The bear rolled a huge rock in front of the cave every morning when he left the cave so that the woman could not escape. In the evening when he came back, he brought her fresh meat and edible roots, grunted in a friendly manner, and left her in peace otherwise.

  Many moons came and went, and the little bear grew bigger and bigger. One day, he suddenly began to speak. “Dear mother, why are you always crying?” he asked her.

  “Oh, little bear, it is because I want to go back to my people,” she answered.

  Then she sighed because she didn’t believe that the little bear was strong enough to roll the rock away. But the next morning, as soon as the old grizzly disappeared into the prairie and could be seen through the small opening as only a small dot on the distant horizon, the little bear shoved the rock effortlessly aside. They both then ran as fast as they could. When they came to a river, they swam a long stretch so that the old grizzly, who had soon enough discovered their escape, could not smell their trail.

  They walked for many days until they finally reached the Cheyenne camp. The long-lost woman was greeted joyfully, and everyone admired her bear son. Only the dogs didn’t like him and tried to nip his heels. He was given an appropriate name: Little Bear.

  Soon Little Bear played with the other children, and three of them became his best friends. The first one was Fast Foot, who could run faster than anyone, as his name suggests. He often ran the antelope down just for the fun of it, grabbed them by the horns, and stuck their heads under his belt. It was great entertainment for the others and they very much enjoyed watching him.

  American antelope

  Another boy with whom Little Bear became friends was especially strong. He liked to catch buffalo and toss them up so high in the air that it took days for them to fall back down—as bleached skeletons—from the clouds. Even today one can still find such bones sometimes in the prairie. The third friend carried a hammer wherever he went and enjoyed smashing rocks with it. It seemed that the bigger the rock, the easier it was for him to smash it.

  Once, as the four friends walked over the dry prairie in the direction of the setting sun, they came upon a huge cliff that went from horizon to horizon and was so high that only an eagle could fly over it. Little Bear, who was the leader, said, “The cliff is blocking our path, so let’s rest here. Tomorrow Fast Foot can run to the south and see if we can get
past it there.”

  Fast Foot did not return until very late in the evening the next day and could not report any success. “The cliff just doesn’t end,” he groaned. “Tomorrow I will try to get around it in the north.” But in the north, it was the same story. Here, too, he did not return until late in the evening, saying it was impossible to get around it in the north, too.

  Rock Smasher spoke up, “I will smash the rock,” he said and swung his hammer with all of his might against the cliff. There was a thunderous echo in all directions, and the huge formation split into thousands of pieces—and that is how the Rocky Mountains were formed out of a huge cliff. Now humans and buffalo could cross. Rock Smasher’s hammer stayed stuck in the rocks where it (as Obsidian Cliff) can still be admired today near Yellowstone.

  Native American of the prairie

  The Assiniboine (“the people who cook with hot rocks”), nomadic buffalo hunters from north of the Cheyenne, also tell a story of a woman a bear captured. This story also proves to be a key in our search for the secret of the bear’s being:

  It was late summer again, the time of ripe berries, when a bear took a group of women pickers by surprise. The beast grabbed one of the women—she was pregnant—and dragged her into his den. Instead of eating her, he made a prisoner of her in his den by rolling a huge rock in front of the entrance.

  In the spring, she had a child with thick fur. She named the child “Thick Fur.”

  The little fellow was very strong, and as soon as he was big enough, he pushed the rock from the entrance so that he and his mother could flee. When the old bear came home in the evening and found the cave empty, he began to track them down.