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The bear whisperer
BC's own Dr Doolittle shows city
slickers how to hang with the grizzlies of the Great Bear
Rainforest
by Robb Beattie photos by Tom Rivest
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The first time I ever looked a wild grizzly
bear square in the eye, it was standing on all fours just a metre
away. It had a dishpan face, a noticeable shoulder hump and a bulbous
nose; its snout busily patrolled the air in front of two floppy
paws sporting impressive, razor-sharp claws. Ratty dark fur hung
off its flanks in spiky clumps, wet from the nearby river, and it
was making a grunting, snuffling noise as it drooled disconcertingly
and showed its yellow teeth.
At that moment, Tom Rivest, my host and a
veteran wildlife biologist, sprang into action. Or rather, he didn't
spring into action at all. Instead, he marshalled all the subtle
skills of a man who has spent 15 years in close proximity to one
of the world's largest predatory species without ever drawing on
a can of pepper spray, let alone a firearm.
Tom Rivest and his partner Margaret Leehan
live year round in a remote, otherwise uninhabited West Coast fjord
on the southern edge of BC's newly protected Great Bear Rainforest.
They are eco-tour entrepreneurs in one of the largest contiguous
tracts of temperate rainforest left anywhere on Earth.
People like Tom, who interact a lot with animals,
speak to their diverse charges -- whether they're falcons, horses
or elephants -- in surprisingly similar tones of voice. It's a curiously
inflectionless way of talking, as if the speaker is lazily pacifying
a roomful of houseplants.
Listen more closely, though, and a hint of
resolve emerges from the speaker's monotone, solid as a boulder
splitting a rushing creek. Like the immovable boulder, it conveys
a sense of calm certitude.
Rock Steady
"Go along now, bear," said Tom as if he were speaking to an African
violet. He was less than a metre away from the animal with his back
to it, and completely motionless except for the fingers of his left
hand, which were slowly undoing the pouch on his belt containing
pepper spray.
The grizzly confronting me was a "yearling,"
a young bear spending the last of two summers with its mother, which
luckily meant that it was only about one and a half times the size
of the largest dog you can imagine -- smallish, in other words,
for an animal that can reach over 450 kilograms.
Being a yearling also meant the cub was inquisitive,
inexperienced and unpredictable. Worse yet, as far as I was concerned,
it was accompanied by a shaggy twin a few paces down the riverbank,
as well as a very large mother grizzly, who was becoming increasingly
agitated in the gravelly shallows a mere five metres from us.
"Get along, baby bear," said Tom, now sounding
like he was lecturing a more invasive species of rhododendron. Out
of the corner of my eye, I noticed the mother bear in the water
had begun flinging her head from side to side, like a bull in the
fighting arena.
"Keep going, bears," Tom said, sounding the
way I usually do when I talk to myself while rolling pennies. And
as he drawled on in his unhurried fashion, he did something so uncanny
I'm sure he'd deny being able to do it all: he literally projected
his presence. I became aware that I was one of seven people sitting
in a viewing enclosure that looked over the shoals of an isolated
salmon river, a "hide" reassuringly marked out as human territory
by Tom, who was somehow emanating the kind of solidity you associate
with -- well, a boulder in a stream.
The bears agreed. The cub that was halfway
through the hide's open doorframe vanished. In the blink of an eye,
the bear family was back in the water and thrashing away downstream,
heading for more distant sandbars. Flocks of gulls rose screaming
at their approach as bald eagles overhead performed dizzying acrobatics
or shot like unerring javelins into the recesses of the surrounding
forest.
Hidden Valley
That night, Tom mentioned that the encounter with the cub was the
first time a grizzly had ever attempted to enter a hide. He still
sounded as casual as ever, speaking with the low-key reserve and
neat economy of someone who spends a great deal of time outdoors
in solitary, potentially perilous situations.
Tom and Margaret's isolated location is not
yet permanently protected, and they like to keep their actual site
as secret as they can. The stratagem helps to heighten the romance
of this stunning setting and keep hunters ignorant of the area's
superlative wildlife.
From the mouth of their inlet -- one of many
long fingers of sea that stretch kilometres inland through the green
mountains -- a narrow valley moves back off the open water through
estuaries filled with hummocks and islets of sedge-grass. Further
inland, cold, tumbling salmon rivers course from higher spawning
streams and lakes where, in late summer and early fall, armadas
of fish surge homewards against the current.
This valley, loomed over by cliff faces and
the coast's tangled jungle of towering spruce, fir, cypress and
cedar trees, is prime grizzly bear habitat. On the riverbanks, paths
used by bears for centuries are compressed deep into the forest
floor moss. In early summer, the grass swamps of the estuary become
a maze of flattened bear trails.
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