He sniffed, and tilted his head sideways at me like he had never seen a person before. Although black bears are often secretive and cautious, this one seemed unfazed by our car and indifferent to our rolling down the windows to look at him. He looked about three years old, an oversized yearling in the learning period of his life wandering into strange places for no apparent reason, unprotected by maternal vigilance. Muscles already rippled down his shiny obsidian coat. He had a clean fresh smell like straw or hay. We just stared and stared. Finally, our voyeuristic presence and the running motor became too strange and he chuffed. We slowly drove away in a daze.
Recently I dreamed about this very same bear, now twenty years old. I never knew him as a cub, never watched him grow up, never observed how sensitive he became to his forest, never saw what a fine companion he could be to his sister and littermate whose company he enjoyed all through the years. When he ambled out of that park moving north, he successfully avoided human beings, our civilization, and our food all the rest of his life.
If I thought of him at all, it was only as a potential threat, those dangerous curved claws raking down the side of my tent. I have read that in an absolute mania of aggression, black bears can rush in at thirty miles an hour, swipe an intruder with a giant paw and that’s it. In 1980, black bears killed or mauled more people than grizzlies.
But bears are psychologically closest to human beings of all land mammals and like us they cannot long endure ridicule and embarrassment. They grow up as different from each other as people, varying in size, color, and especially in temperament, none having even the same footprint.
The adult bear in my dream happened to be docile and amiable. We had quite a conversation. I told him I used to teach philosophy. He told me he too is given over to long bouts of musing and contemplation. We slogged over to the muddy shore of his favorite lake where he often sits up against the trunk of a giant spruce, front paws in his lap, looking off toward the mountains.
He also told me that the manner in which he lives his life is remarkably similar to how I live my own, now that I am retired. He meanders along, performs his little rituals, deals with the unexpected, enjoys his harmless pleasures, ruminates upon his experiences relates with more or less practiced skill to others around him, dotes on his days and savors whatever food he finds for himself; healthy, vital, strong, and always hungry for ever more days and nights.
At the end of each day, the dreamy twilight of dusk entrances him as he rests from his ceaseless foraging. He has to eat a great deal, about sixty pounds of fruit and vegetation a day, and is always looking for something: celery root, alfalfa, tree bark, grasses, honey, and now and then a dead animal. All summer and fall, year in and year out, he can be found by this lake, just as I am usually found sitting by our pool reading and watching the mockingbirds splash about in the birdbath.
Of course, our sense of obligation, commitment, and responsibility are not the same. Frankly, I am less sure about his than he is about mine. He is almost always alone even though he seems devoted to his sister who for some reason never had cubs of her own, perhaps because her right forepaw had been severed across the toe joints. He is also rather casual about mud and dirt, unconsciously tracking it around everywhere he ambles, while I am constantly sweeping and vacuuming and cleaning the countertops.
At any rate, he falls asleep with the fragrance of balsam pitch around him listening contentedly to birdsong, the howls of timber wolves and the trumpeting of elk, while I live with the mindless babble and constant interruptions of Twitter. Certainly, a crucial difference between us is physical power. He is a happy strong successful animal who has met up with intimidating moose, poisonous mushrooms, stinging honeybees, hungry wolves, stalking grizzlies, porcupine quills, lightning strikes, and a thousand other formidable dangers, shocks and inconveniences. He has been forced to develop tremendous stamina and will, since emergencies come with surprising suddenness.
In contrast, I am a rather puny human being who lives a life made easy by endless conveniences and who has had only a few clumsy mishaps: falling off a bicycle and getting an infection in my leg; tipping over in a kayak, sliding a jeep into a pick-up truck, and, well, cancer.
But the life of a bear is a life and death struggle every minute of every day and mine is not. Have I ever got caught in a great swimming herd of caribou, sunk up to my ears, struggled valiantly to stay a few feet ahead of the stampeding bull caribou and their huge antlers, finally making it to shore terribly bruised and more dead than alive?
This bear has miraculously survived to become an unassuming adult, not too great or overwhelming, but a serious three hundred pound introspective bear who loves to eat and sleep and have his share of fun. “I do not see myself as a very heroic bear,” he told me modestly, “I have just learned to avoid heedless, headstrong behavior which has saved me from a lot of calamities.”
The other crucial difference between us is stark. While he never tires of exploring the elemental outdoors, I am increasingly enveloped in artificial environments like Facebook, cell phone texting, Google, Webkins, Liv Dolls, and of course the Wii, forced to travel ever more away from his organic reality into an increasingly technological and virtual world. The land of the bear is no longer the source of my existence, no longer where my own spirit lives.
This troubling difference between us was actually the reason I believe he came to me. When I asked him why he had appeared in my dream, he hesitated rather self-consciously, swaying his shaggy head back and forth, his small eyes sad and candid. He did not want to be ridiculed. I just waited. Finally, he said he was hoping for some kind of consideration, some respect for what he has accomplished in his twenty years. He wanted acknowledgement that his own knowledge of the world was intelligent, coherent and relevant. All I could think of were the 20,000 children screaming at the St. Pete Forum when the Jonas Brothers came on the stage, crowned by the huge wraparound interactive digital screen. What relevance would he possibly ever have for any of them? But I kept still.
Because his mother wisely kept the little family far away from any human settlement, he had grown into a young adult without experiencing the tragedy and mayhem of human contact. Only once had he migrated into an unused campground. It turned out I was the closest he had ever come to a human person. Since I had been sitting in the back seat of the car next to his shrubs, we had made eye contact and perhaps even a spiritual connection. After all these years, I began to represent something curious, another way, another adaptation to the world around us. He looked me up.
My poor black bear, so successful in his rugged and uncouth world, somehow had realized that the unfolding direction of my own species, our entrancement with technology and ourselves, might someday make us entirely forgetful of him and his kind. Something in his soul was pained and puzzled. It is hard to truly understand a bear’s heart.
I patiently trudged along with him for awhile. He wanted to show me his day bed. He just wanted me to know about his life. What it’s like to be a bear. We scrambled through some alder bushes swatting mosquitoes and black flies. I asked if he remembered his mother.
Quite voluble now, he said he had been one of two cubs. Their 400 pound mother had lavished affection and kisses upon them, carried them everywhere piggyback, rolled and danced them around, and playfully thrown large pine cones at them which they chewed at night huddled beside each other. She never tolerated disobedience or insolence. With mutterings, nudges, whines and gurgles, (he imitated all the sounds since they were part of his native vocabulary) she showed them how to find berries, grubs, salamanders, roots, and big black wood ants, all the food that her own mother had taught her to find. They all drank from pure lake water uncontaminated by the faint human residue of pharmaceuticals and mercury. She would have died for them.
He had once met his father, a 600 pound boar so big he was often confused with a grizzly bear. This morose boss of the forest had brutalized a rival over the remains of a salmon and suffered terrible wounds to his right shoulder which had eventually healed and left a large white patch.
The little male cub had wandered away into the gray gloom of an evergreen stand. Happy, curious, mischievous, deeply impressionable and with the marvelous nonchalant schedule of a wild animal, he was focused on nothing in particular when he was suddenly confronted by a huge head poking above the alder bushes and a big wet nose shoved against his cheek. It was midday and he had disturbed his father’s nap. The cub stood there on his short legs, a full twenty-two inches tall, quietly staring up at the extraordinary face of someone he immediately wanted to please, his puppy-like head and big round ears trembling with awe. Longing for approval, his eyes were full of wonder and humility. Every instinct of his rough father told him to attack and eat this warm little body. But there was something precious here. The furious gladiator began to moan softly, a sign of uncertainty, then dropped on all fours and disappeared. The cub felt acknowledged by a god. He later found an enormous pad print in the silt. But he never glimpsed the giant with the white patch again.
Stumbling through the blueberries and the willows, trying to avoid poison ivy, I was nonetheless glad that my bear had chosen to live on the extreme margins of our technical world away from motels, gas fumes, beer cans, and the chatter of airplanes, rifles, angry little dogs and bird feeders. I told him so and he was pleased. He remembered vaguely hearing about these strange things from other bears.
We finally reached the steep hill where he had dug his daybed by a large ponderosa pine. It was a nice circle of dirt from an excavated ant mound that could fully accommodate his large belly. He could see in all directions. He sat down and absently placed his paw in the middle of the tiny group of remaining survivors and licked them off his claws. He was still talking about his mother. She saw that their disputes were settled quickly. When he was two years old she pushed him out into the vast territory that was his legacy. His sister had stayed with their mother another year before wandering out to find him. Apparently, that’s when the boulder fell on her foot. He hadn’t gone far. To this day, they wrestle and spar together, although she is rather clumsy.
Black bears are tree climbers. When they were cubs, they had bonded forever over a game they played for hours. One would climb to the top of a young pine tree. The other would follow and their combined weight bent the tree to the ground. The first bear would hop off and the other would be catapulted into the air.
This particular bear had a good memory of his upbringing, and a love for the old sow who raised him and whom he used to see every now and again with other cubs. He often visits their original den in a hollow tree. He was never a burly little roughneck like other male cubs of his generation. Indeed, it seems that he had often showed generosity to the creatures around him. His connection to his twin littermate was profound. Bears are always breaking the rules of behavior expected of them.
Throughout his life, he has demanded very little from his environment, mastering the art of letting himself be carried along. What does he do with his summer days? I was curious. He said there are too many berry patches on his side of the lake to travel around much. He swims every day so all the fleas, ticks and lice are removed from the surface of his fine glossy black fur. He is also quite satisfied with his current neighbors. These include a family of foxes that he is particularly fond of. He has even crawled on all fours in front of their den to show his friendly attitude. He assured me he has never had any desire to terrorize the other creatures of the forest.
As he was about to shyly disclose some of his mating successes, my dream finally ended as all dreams must. I woke up to the ringtone of my phone, glad to be in an air-conditioned room. All he really wanted me to know apparently was that somewhere in the remaining north woods of this continent, somewhere far away from hunting guides and fur trappers, there is a normal healthy black bear who does not think he is a lesser, more foolish creature than ourselves.
To order her book, On a Planet Sailing West”, go to http://www.jlblue.com/
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