10/11/99 - Article
The Heart of the Bear
Matter
By Tim Lyon
I
once dated a girl in High School who told me that the less you
understand about someone, the easier it is to dislike them.
She was cute and intelligent and apparently didn’t
understand me very well at all because she dumped me shortly after
our first date. I’ve
come to accept both her rejection and her wisdom.
Had we been discussing hunting rather than humanity, her
logic would have been just as appropriately applied to
bear-baiting.
To
make sweeping generalizations about the out-of-doors from an urban
Rhode Island perspective was unfair.
My idea of a wildlife encounter was waking up early enough
to catch the neighbor’s dog in the act of relieving himself in
our front yard. The occasional wisps of information we received about
something as remote as bear-baiting were greeted with sound,
one-dimensional condemnation. Surely this was a muted form of some
Satanic ritual practiced by less socially developed cultures than
our own. We knew little more about hunting than what Jack London
may have taught us, but his glorious adventures in the Klondike
and the base process of bear-baiting were certainly not of like
kind. Imagine,
throwing your garbage around the back yard just so you could shoot
the defenseless, starving creature that came to claim its humble
existence from the stench pile.
It’s like declaring an open season on street people!
Now
let’s turn the pages ahead about a decade to view an unhappy
hunter sitting beneath the semi-protective umbrella of a cedar
grove while a fourth consecutive drizzly, cold, bearless September
day festers around him. Having
entered the season high on East Coast arrogance, the bitter pill
of failure is even harder to swallow.
Where are the bears? I’ve
done everything just right! I’ve
scattered things my kids refused to eat around the woods and now
I’m here with a gun waiting to kill something.
Simple. Apparently
wrong.
Two
years pass and another bear lottery is won.
A little bit of humility has resulted in a large amount of
study and a small bear is actually shot.
The berry and acorn crops have been weak, tempering the
success somewhat, but a step in the right direction has been
taken, nonetheless. The learning curve is established.
Two
more years and the bear is bigger.
A lot of luck is involved in this triumph, but it has been
backed by thought and hard work.
A diligent baiting regimen, more attention to scent and
wind, increased patience in the stand, more thorough
scrutinization of the woods rather than the bait; they’ve all
increased the potential and left less of a portion to chance.
It is slowly dawning on me that baiting for bear, like
downrigging for walleyes or reasoning with children, is an art
form, which the public has dramatically underestimated.
No
bear license this year and I’m not whining too loudly.
An impressive effort from the local oaks and an
unprecedented late-Summer blueberry crop have made daylight visits
to bait stations a rarity. If
those with genuine expertise are having that tough a time, my
shallow well of newfound knowledge would certainly struggle
against such odds. I file my fellow hunters’ tales of woe into my personal
bear-hunting folder and will use the whiney advice to increase the
advantage next time I hunt. Despite
the apparent similarities in political incorrectness, it has
finally sunk in that bear hunting is a bit more difficult than
clubbing baby seals.
Yet,
even with all this apparent enlightenment, I continue to be
concerned with the power of my ignorance.
It took years of first hand exposure to alter my views of
bear-baiting. I also have opinions about spearing northerns, but I
must confess to having spent very few hours in a darkhouse.
I’ve held some reservations about predator hunting, but
plan to make an effort to either cement or dispel them by actually
pursuing it this winter. Hunting
big game with dogs has never really appealed to me, but my
criticisms will be held in check until some actual evidence has
been accumulated.
I
cringe when I think of all the non-hunting opinions I’ve formed
based on little or no experience.
I also cringe when I recall the teenage girl who gave me
such sage counsel years ago.
Her concerns about ‘judgment without experience’ ring
true on outdoor as well as interpersonal fronts.
And while I don’t think she’d be interested in gutting
out any recently slain black bear, had she followed her own
advice, I believe she’d have been less casual about the cutting
out my heart.
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