Haida Gwaii, the archipelago on the north Pacific coast of British Columbia, is home to the largest black bears in North America. We had noticed some signs of bear while on our occasional hikes.
One day, we received a visit from a very large black bear. It was a sunny, spring day, and he stayed down on the beach and didn’t bother us. While we stayed up on the deck and and didn’t bother him. I snapped a few pictures and then fired a bear banger, to scare him away. Okay, so I tried to bother him, but although he left, he didn’t seem to bothered by the banger.
Later that year, after our summer of sailing Gwaii Hannas National Park, we had returned to The Outpost and started to clean up after the vacating crew from the summer fishing season. We had arrived to a monumental task of cleaning up after the season and winterizing the lodge.
It was clear to me that the boss’s idea was to offload the work to the caretakers, saving him from having to pay an entire crew for what normally took nearly a week. Apparently he failed to consider that there were only two of us. Person hours are person hours, and two people cannot do the same job as ten in the same time frame.
The size and scope of the mess was indeed massive for two people. There were jugs of used fryer oil left outside the back door to the lodge kitchen; was more left at the incinerator. Our bargeload of food stores had not been put away, there were heaps of laundry to do, the commercial-size kitchen needed cleaning and that wasn’t all. Besides all that, we had to prepare the docks for winter, and decommission and winterize our sailboat ahead of the winter storm season.
It was late summer/early fall on Haida Gwaii, and all the wildlife, including those large black bears, was preparing for the winter ahead. As we laboured through the first few days, the situation turned dangerous quickly.
Since our food stores had been sitting out in the open for a couple of weeks already, there was a massive mouse and squirrel infestation happening in the basement. When we realized that, we dropped what we were doing and spent that day cleaning the basement and storing our food stores.
Essentially, we were so overworked that we were running around putting out spot fires as they popped up. We were playing wack-a-mole.
That’s when the bear showed up. Suddenly, we had new problem, a BIG problem, and it was a hungry problem! Not to worry though, we just had to switch priorities… again!
So, by this time we had moved all the dry goods into a more secure location and set a gazillion mouse traps—there was nothing we could do about the squirrels; they were in the walls—and had begun to put boxes of not-so-fresh produce away.
Wendi was down at the fish-packing station. She was busy dividing bulk quantities of food for the freezers into small portions and vacuum packaging it. I was looking for, and eliminating, any and all potential food sources for a big bear, trying to fatten up for the winter, from around the lodge.
I added the fryer oil into the incinerator fuel tank-about 200 litres-and discarded several buckets of kitchen scraps into the ocean on an outgoing tide. I rinsed out the buckets and left them full of fresh water beside the boardwalk, just outside the lodge.
It was about midday, and I was on my way back to the lodge when I happened to look out back and saw the back half of a bear protruding from behind new guide shack. I didn’t have a weapon of any sort, not even a bear banger.
I went quietly to the fish packing station to tell Wendi. I told her to put the meat in the walk-in freezer and stay put. I went back to the lodge to find a weapon. On my way, I checked that he was still there and then went into the basement. Several minutes later, I emerged with a hatchet to see the bear slowly making his way toward the tree line.
A couple of days went by with no further visits from the bear. Then one dark night, as I took my nightly trip to shut the generator down, I walked past those scrap buckets I had left by the boardwalk. I shone the flashlight at them. They were still clean and full of fresh water. Coming back from the generator shack, just a few minutes later, I was strolling along the path, completely relaxed and enjoying the silence and fresh air. I took notice of the water line that pours into the creek water tank and the echoey, gulping sound the water makes as it recedes down the pipe in the absence of suction from the pump.
I stepped up onto the boardwalk and turned toward the lodge. A few steps later, looking down at the boardwalk, I saw wet footprints and thought, why were my boots wet? Then I looked closer, there were no tread designs on those tracks; those were NOT my tracks! I knew what made those tracks.
Suddenly, I realized that since I had not looked to the right as I stepped up onto the boardwalk, I had no idea what was behind me. Every hair on my body stood at attention as I slowly turned to shine the flashlight down the boardwalk in the direction from which I had come. There was nothing there. I quickly scanned all dark hiding places around me then hurried back to the safety of the lodge. Once on the deck, I went around to the front of the lodge to make sure I was alone.
Every morning, my first job of the day was to start the generator. As I emerged from the laundry room door into the brightness of the next morning, I was greeted by three over-turned garbage cans. Obviously, he had lingered a little longer.
We continued cleaning up around the lodge that day, starting with picking up and incinerating the former contents of the those garbage cans. By late that afternoon we were satisfied that there was no longer anything outside that a bear would be interested in. I sat down in a comfy chair in the lounge and fell asleep.
I slept for about an hour and a half. After I woke up, Wendi asked me if I had set the garbage cans up after cleaning up the garbage. I said, “Yes, of course”. She said, “Then he’s been back”. Yes he had.
FOR EVERY ACTION THERE IS AN EQUAL AND OPPOSITE REACTION
Now that everything was cleaned up our problem was solved, but that presented a problem for the bear. Our hope was that his solution would be to look for food elsewhere, and by “elsewhere” I mean in a forest somewhere that wasn’t right there.
I was putting my shoes on that night, to go out to shut the generator down. I said to Wendi, “Wanna come for a walk”.
“You want me to go to?, Why, because you can run faster than me?”
“Well, would you rather sit here wondering if I’ve been drug away by a bear, or know that I’ve been drug away by a bear?”.
So, with Wendi in tow–literally–we disappeared into the night.
© 2017 Ron Morrison