What the Bears Know by Steve Searles & Chris Erskine

Author:Steve Searles & Chris Erskine [Searles, Steve & Erskine, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2023-10-03T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN THIS BEAR CHANGES EVERYTHING

A crisp October dawn in 2001, only a month after September 11. It’s still early in my stint as Mammoth’s wildlife officer when a creepy and anonymous call comes in at the crack of dawn: “Steve, they’ve shot six bears.”

Click.

I race outside. In the semi-darkness, in a lot near my house, I spot a bear badly hurt, walking on three legs. From fifteen feet away, I can see he is wounded in the right rear hip. I recognize the bear by the distinctive Nike swish on the side of his snout. He’s an average bear, a standoffish bear, kind of a cranky coot. I’ve never used him in the video segments I’ve begun to do because he is such a raggedy-looking bear. In his defense though, I’ve never had a 9-1-1 call of him causing any trouble. He’s such a routine, anonymous bear that I hadn’t even given him a name.

At this point, I haven’t darted a bear. Drugged bears don’t learn a thing. I want bears sober and paying attention and learning every day. Though common in wildlife management, the only way I would resort to drugs would be so we could repair the bear, or diagnose a wound. Perhaps find the head of a hunter’s arrow that we can pull out, that sort of thing.

My buddy Kevin Peterson loads up on ketamine from the vet, and Kevin and police sergeant Paul Dostie race to the local hospital so they can transfer it into barbed syringes for the police department’s pneumatic tranquilizer gun. I stay behind with the wounded bear so that he can’t wander off to where we might not be able to find him.

When Peterson and Dostie return, we load the syringes in the gun, pump it up, and dart the injured bear in the rump. He instantly starts hopping on three legs through the backyards of town straight to my house, a half mile away. Dogs barking, people gawking. What if a stray dog starts biting him? Even Debs and Ty come out on the porch when we arrive. I yell for them to get back inside. The poor bear lies down in my yard, and we whack him again with the ketamine, a serious painkiller they used on wounded soldiers in Vietnam. On three legs, he limps off to a nearby golf course and ducks into a gaping drainage culvert.

At this point, he must feel caught up in some war himself, everyone shooting him. As he limp-hops off on three good legs, you can see the fluorescent-orange syringes flapping in his rump. It is a scene, and I’m running the show. I am very intense and very focused.

Deep into his underground hideout he goes. The bears use the culverts as lairs. They are dark, they are ominous. In these caves, the bears know they will usually be left alone, and they often go to the center point, as far from civilization as they can.

Remember how I’d drop down a manhole

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.