They look cute from a distance but up close, they are like a 400-pound racoon. A momma coon may have six or eight coonlets in a year, a bear might have twins, rarely triplets and then only every two years. Cubs are born bald and blind at about a half pound during momma’s hibernation and somehow find a teat. Unlikely odds but still, Minnesota’s black bear population was increasing ten percent each year. As bears are solitary critters and enjoy each other’s company only during breeding season, a population increase translates into a range increase, into country that had not seen bears since pioneer times.
It was mostly tolerable till a drought or late frost killed off berries and wild fruit, and then there was predictable hell to pay—dog food, bird food and garbage. And once you see a bear go 60 feet up a popple tree in three jumps, you’ll pray one never gets close enough to swat you, ’cause he’ll swat you straight to Jesus.
And speaking of Jesus, how do you count bears anyway? You could guess till Jesus comes back and never get it right. But I will tell you Gospel True, though you may choose to disbelieve.
Year one, each successful bear hunter was obligated to extract a tooth, not just any tooth, mind you, but that last little incisor before the canines, and the tooth was to be mailed to St. Paul in an envelope provided, post-paid. Once in St. Paul, the tooth was sectioned and studied under a microscope for staining caused by the ingestion of antibiotics present in medicated poultry and dairy feed. And thus, a baseline was established.
The following spring, dewy-eyed graduate students fanned out across bear country, some 20,000 square miles, collecting ticks and nailing bacon-wrapped Tetracycline capsules onto trees, one per square mile, and the location of each tainted treat was recorded on GPS. In the fall, the students ventured out once again, noted and recorded the baits that had been eaten. And it did not seem to matter what ate them, be it ravens, crows, jays, squirrels, fishers, pine martens, minks or perchance a bear. And it did not seem to matter if one bear ate one or a hundred and one.
Year three, each successful hunter was required to do more dentistry and the increase in stained teeth, factored into the number of eaten baits, somehow told the experts how many bears were in the woods.
I’ve pondered this a good long time and have given up trying to figure how it works, but the process enjoyed considerable confidence among bear biologists. They pegged the population at 10,000 in those days, up to 15,000 today. Bears in the bees, bears in the barley, bears in your basement eating your bacon. Who you gonna call? Call the bear busters, me and Leon and Runty.
I was the itinerant journalist, a good tracker with a cool head in a tight spot. Leon was a stonemason, built like a double-door Frigidaire with hands like hams. Runty was a half-Indian carpenter, half deaf from bucking a skill-saw, with the perilous habit of making totally inappropriate comments about females he casually encountered in decibels he thought he alone could hear— “Great-Gawd-A-Mighty look at the hams on that heifer”—being one of his milder assessments. It’s a wonder he didn’t get us all killed.
They called us “Nuisance Bear Management Cooperators” and it worked like this: The Minnesota DNR had given up on trapping and relocating problem bears once they realized moving a bear was not removing the problem, just moving it. Meanwhile, the three of us always applied together in Zone 41, a little west of Bemidji, a name you can’t say drunk, a little south of Biwabik, a name you can’t say sober, where odds of drawing a tag were one in three. One of us would take the stand, the other two would track and drag and skin.
We were good, damned good, and by and by got on the radar down in St. Paul. They took our phone numbers and gave us little “Nuisance Bear Management Cooperator” patches to sew on our shirts. Dressed in kakis, wearing combat boots and strapped up with our choice of sidearms, we looked almost like wardens—a little too much like wardens whenever we walked Indian ground where a state warden was persona non-grata but where Runty’s genetics came in handy. An Indian can tell another Indian, even a half-Indian, at a quarter mile.
Dangers, toils and snares but scant amazing grace.
Perhaps the strangest was the Sinclair bear and Mrs. Maylon Charles. That was Sinclair Township, Clearwater County, population 8,052. Sinclair Township was 36 square miles, six miles by six, and so sparsely settled it was hard to scare up a five-person quorum to serve on the town board and the taxbase was on life-support. Thankfully, the town board’s responsibilities were few—keeping beaver from plugging ditches and culverts, blading a hundred miles of two-lane gravel, plowing snow and maintaining two dumpsters for household trash just north of Debs, population three. Mrs. Maylon Charles was contracted to clean up the site, rake up trash and whack the weeds for minimum wage, as needed.
The dumpsters were supposed to be bear-proof but like a coon-proof trash can, there ain’t no such a thing. Bear-resistant might be more appropriate, but even that required the lids being closed after depositing trash, which they seldom were. Blame it on the summer tourists and seasonal lake cottage owners, right? So when Mrs. Maylon Charles’ continuing and increasing clean-up charges threatened to throw the town board into deficit spending, they called the warden and the warden called us, the Bear Busters.
But none of us knew Mrs. Charles and the Sinclair bear were in cahoots. She was leaving the dumpsters open herself. He was feasting and she was getting paid. Leon put an end to the conspiracy with a single shot from his 308 Winchester.
But the real work starts when you pull the trigger. During hibernation, a bear’s heart rate drops to three or four beats per minute so it’s nothing for a bear to run 300 yards stone dead, generally downhill and then with a final leap, it will invariably throw itself into the most impossible cats-claw briar-patch or deadfall snarl. The Sinclair bear was no exception. He took the bullet at sundown; we did not find him until 10 p.m.
And he was a monster, pushing 500 pounds, and I am here to testify a bear drags with all the ease of an oak stump. I did my field-dressing chores which lightened the load somewhat. Bloody to my elbows, I cut a yoke-stick, rigged a drag rope and immediately found great sympathy with the Hebrew slaves who built the pyramids. Me and Leon—one, two, three grunt. We had to cut our way out of the thicket with a dull pruning saw.
One o’clock in the morning, the bear was close enough to the truck to get a 100-foot rope on the trailer hitch and snake him up onto level ground. Mosquitoes? I neglected to mention the mosquitoes. You never seen such. Somehow, we got him into the back of the pickup around 2 a.m., but our travails had only just begun.
There was a protocol even for the Bear Busters. First, no nuisance bear could be night-shot. Second, the warden who sicced you on the bear must be notified and must issue a bear possession tag, plus fill out his own paperwork for St. Paul. Few cell phones in those days and even if we had one, there would have been no service in those Sinclair Township woods. That meant the nearest pay phone was in the public park in Clearbrook, the county seat, population 462. We had a couple of quick slugs of Old Tanglefoot, the jug Leon kept under the seat, and made the required call at 2:30 a.m.
The warden roared up in his government truck, dust and gravel a’flying. He was not amused.
“It’s pretty damn shitty,” he began, “I put you boys on a bear and you sat at the bar all night and didn’t call me till it closed!”
“Bar?” Leon asked, “there ain’t no bar out there!”
“Yes there is! The Side Track Tap in Leonard!”
Leonard, population 148, was where they held the annual Hard Times Bash, as they had nothing else to celebrate. Times got tougher till they could hold the bash every other year and finally, not at all.
“Hell,” Leon said, “if we’da known that, we would have gone to the bar!”
Wrong response!
“What time you boys shoot this bear?”
“About sundown,” I said.
The warden rummaged around in his glovebox, came up with a thermometer, a little dial with a sharp probe almost like the one you use to make sure your moose meat is done. He plunged it into a bear haunch, read the numbers by flashlight.
“You boys just shot this bear.”
“I just told you we shot this bear at sundown. He’s a monster. Are you telling me a big bear cools off just as fast as a little bear?”
“Yes,” he said.
Leon let fly with a profanity. “Oh my aching ass! Did you effing sleep through school?”
The warden reached into his truck, keyed up his radio mike, called Clearwater County Sheriff’s dispatch. “Dispatch, call Maylon Charles up in Sinclair Township. Ask him if he heard a shot and what time he heard it.”
Word came back after ten long minutes. “She said about an hour ago.”
That’s when all the pieces finally fit. “She? You mean the lady who gets paid to clean up the site? You gonna tell that to the judge? If you don’t, I will.”
“Start writing,” Leon said, “either a ticket or a possession tag.”
The warden reached into his truck again, came up with a tag and turned us loose.
But not before extracting a tooth for St. Paul.
A 200-mile drive, it was broad daylight by the time we made it home.