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Bear Man — Page 2
On this overcast October morning we’re sitting
in his office, a burgundy, seven-passenger Suburban
leased for him by the ski area. On the rear doors are
black decals that read “Whistler Blackcomb Bear
& Wildlife Tours.” Allen now makes his living
giving bear tours and presentations. This one’s
for a Grade 5 class from Myrtle Philip Community School
in Whistler. From the rows of seats behind us comes
the babble of 10- and 11-year-olds.
As we grind up a rutted service road at 5,000 feet,
cutting across the north side of Whistler Mountain,
Allen juggles the tasks of steering, ducking down to
scan the grassy slopes, and lobbing bear-related questions
at his charges. Then we see them: two jet-black masses,
a couple of hundred metres away, clearly defined against
the green of the ski run, chomping grass and clover,
fattening up for winter. They look weirdly like cows
grazing; their pasture just happens to be a 20-degree
slope on one of the world’s premier ski and mountain
bike destinations.
One bear pops its head up to give us a casual look.
Our convoy stops; parents, students, and the teacher
pile out of the minivans behind us. Allen pulls a red
toque over his close-cut greying hair. He wears no jacket,
just a plaid flannel work shirt over blue nylon hiking
pants and tan boots. He’s like a bear the way
he moves; perhaps it’s no surprise that someone
able to interpret 71 forms of bear communication would
internalize the body language. We have little to fear,
Allen tells us—these animals are largely vegetarian
(grass and clover, berries, carpenter ants). There’s
never been a predatory attack on a human by a Whistler
black bear. Indeed, given the scorecard in bear-human
relations, it’s the bears that should be scared.
“Why aren’t they running away?” Allen
asks the group. A little boy responds immediately. “That’s
right,” says Allen. “Because they know me.
They’re probably sick of me by now. We call that
habituated; these bears are habituated to people.”
“Has a bear ever attacked you?” asks a young
girl.
“No, generally haven’t had too much problem
with them,” says Allen, who sometimes carries
bear spray but has never had to use it in his defense.
Bears, he explains, are more afraid of larger, more
dominant bears than of humans. Despite the “aversive
conditioning trials” in the valley, which discourage
garbage-seeking bears with rubber bullets and bangers,
the bears will return if they have to compete with dominant
bears for food. That said, females need fear—male
bears will kill cubs in order to force the mothers back
into estrus or, as Allen explains it to his young listeners,
“so they can have the mom for a girlfriend. The
harsh reality of their world,” he says. “Just
like our world.”
Others, of course, have been fascinated by this harsh
and mythical world. Troy Hurtubise became obsessed with
developing a grizzly-proof suit after surviving an encounter
with a bear. Timothy Treadwell was killed by the grizzly
bears he was living among in Alaska. “He had a
lot of problems,” says Allen. “He used bears
as a crutch.” Of Charlie Russell, the Bear Man
of Kamchatka, he says: “I don’t believe
we’re here to be mothers for the bears. We’re
not meant to be buddy-buddy.”
That said, our relationship with bears is primal. The
human ecologist Joseph Meeker claims that “the
lore of bears is the oldest evidence on earth for human
spirituality.” Our relationship with bears today
is a barometer of how we treat our environment. In his
book Shadow of the Bear, Vancouver writer Brian Payton
documents human relations with the eight remaining species
of bear (six of which are considered to be threatened).
“The bear has something supernatural,” a
72-year-old Italian shepherd tells Payton. “It
is beautiful and gives you a sense of what man is and
what nature is. I want to preserve bears, but something
in the environment has changed. Something is broken.”
Born in Trail, B.C., in 1964, Allen is the second child
and only son of a “tough, fiery” Italian
mother and an old-school deer hunter who felt more comfortable
in the bush if he had a rifle. Allen found himself spending
more and more time alone, away from school and home,
wandering the woods. “I was different. I didn’t
fall into any school clique.” Though he was always
big and athletic, he had to fight often. It was during
his time in the woods, encountering bears, that fear
turned into fascination. “I just recognized bears—I’m
not understood, and bears aren’t either.”
He never quite felt at home, he says, until he got to
the mountains of Whistler, where he’s lived ever
since.
“Mr. Allen, is there such a thing as gay bears?”
“No, I haven’t seen that yet.” He
shrugs. “I get that question every year.”
Like many deeply shy people, he appears friendly and
interested but rarely smiles. When he talks about bears,
though, there’s nothing shy about him. To the
kids he speaks authoritatively, with a quiet, deep-seated
enthusiasm. On his second tour that afternoon, he speaks
exactly the same way to a group of four Brits and a
Dutchman. Their reaction, when we stop about five metres
from a sow named Ellie and her three cubs, is considerably
more animated than the kids’—women burst
into tears at the sight of cubs nursing.
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