A DAY OF EPIPHANIES:
I SIT ON STEEP MOUNTAINSLOPES,
WATCHING FOURTEEN BROWN BEARS, CATCHING SALMON, "COMBINING" BLUEBERRIES,
AND A SOW WITH CUBS CHASING AWAY A BIG BOAR BEAR THROUGH THE RIVER-
AS I WRITE MY SERIAL LETTERS ABOUT THE PROFLIGATE ABUNDANCE OF THE
FEAST/FAMINE WASTE OF THIS PRISTINE WILDERNESS-
AS I AM CONSERVING BOTH SALMON AND BEARS TO DIE OF
"NATURAL CAUSES" UNOBSERVED;RETREAT TO SPIKE CAMP TENT IN HEAVY RAIN
AND WIND-WHICH WE LATER FIND OUT HAS DESTROYED THE BASE CAMP AT "TENT" ON TUMRAK MOUNTAIN
August 27, 2001
MY DAY OF EPIPHANIES
AS AN ARMED NATURALIST:
THE PARTICIPANT/OBSERVER ON THE STORAGE RIVER

August 27, 2001

Today is a day in which Victor would be helping pack up the base camp up on the mountain and calling for a helicopter pickup first at base camp, then down at the spike camp when that would be called down to arrange the timing. Sergei would be further dressing the bear hides and clearing out the paws and skulls, and fixing up our camp for pickup, as Alan read further in the book he carried. That left me, with gun and camera, and a few extra sheets of stationery that I had carefully protected for the continuation of my Serial Letter, to which I had intended to append the bear hunt stories. Where better to do this but over on the hillside from which I had first spotted the large black phase brown bear? I clumped over to the lupine-laced hillside, and backed up to the juniper bushes, which were growing near the summit. I had to dig in and hold on to the junipers since the slope was so steep that I kept sliding down the hill on the lubrication of rain slick vegetation

It had been cold in camp because of the wind funnel that the valley made into a wind test chamber for our tent site, so I had worn my warmer clothes such as the fleece jacket, covered by the Gore-Tex rain jacket as a wind breaker. When I hunkered into the leeward side of the hill, the wind was absent so that I could take off several outer layers and still leave a hand and heels free to hang into the mountain pitch. I brought out the postcards I had not yet filled out and made them up with the leaves of stationery supported by the Zeiss binoculars in their case as I wrote. Intermittently I would switch the supporting roles, and use the binoculars to scan the sandbars on the river and the blueberry loaded hillsides. I began seeing bears in multiple locations spreading out from the river bar where I washed a rambunctious young bear romping through the river shallows and pouncing on a random salmon which happened by. This is where the pretty part may end, as I describe what happened next to this big slab-sided salmon in the bear paws.

WATCHING AN EFECTIVE BUT INEFFICIENT SALMON FISHERMAN

The bear would run back and forth in the shallows in the leeward side of the sandbar and pounce like a cat when it saw an exposed dorsal fin, then toss the salmon in the air with its forepaws and catch it in its mouth. As it dragged one of the salmon to the sand bar, I could tell the size of it by seeing that it was struggling with its head in the bear's jaws with the tail dragging on the sand -so it was longer than the bear's foreleg. The big salmon was quivering and flopping as the bear put on forepaw on the tail and ripped upward with its jaws until a large pink fillet was dripping from its mouth. It turned and wolfed this fresh salmon fillet, as the split salmon was still quivering and flapping -only half there. The half a salmon was dropped on the sandbar as two gulls and a raven circled overhead. The bear reared up and swiped a threatening paw in the direction of the raven which had landed and was quite cheeky, advancing on the half fish which was still trying to flip to the water-one side silver and the other side pink. The bear seemed to forget about its unfinished dinner, and now spent its time bullying the annoying birds. It would do a head fake toward the rather patient waiting gulls, then a mock charge toward the raven, which would bounce back in the air, and come right back a little closer, worrying his way toward the irritated bear. This little contest between the quick and the strong was won by the raven, which pecked at the still quivering salmon, as the bear's head was turned toward something that had distracted it in the river shallows. It abruptly abandoned its half-finished dinner and made a high kicking leap into the water, splashing nearly comically into a crouch on all fours with its head under water. It stayed that way for a while and then emerged with a new salmon, this one heavy enough or awkwardly enough held that the bear had to put it down twice to establish a new grip.

The bear wheeled around and made a feinting charge at the birds, but they did not even flare. The bear was delivering another feast to the bar, and it was in the repeat process of ripping up the salmon, when it dropped it and stared at the river. Abruptly, it charged across the shallows, spraying water, and belly-flopped, this time apparently missing. It stood there confused for a time, apparently forgetting its most recent catches, until it walked back and spotted the birds squabbling over the original salmon, lying like a special lox on a side table. It charged at the birds, mainly for the sake of shooing off the birds less than for the retrieval of the fish, and as they wheeled into the air, it kept looking up, ignoring the fish fillet at its feet. It turned, yet rather than going after the other salmon on the sandbar it had recently retrieved, it pounced again in the water, and tossed a salmon in the air, batting it over to the sandbar. As I watched its table manners, I could see clearly that it was "playing with its food," and starting on several salmon, finished none of them. This was a situation of feast, rather than famine, and the bear was in the fortunate position of being in a redundant food supply, so could sample a little from each of the big fish, as though it were a sated diner.

I next saw the same bear rear up and smash down in the shallow water, pinning a salmon to the sand. The fish was struggling, and flipping forward, and the bear batted it, holding it down. It then seemed to remember the aerial competitors for its catch, and looked back at the three birds tugging on opposite ends of the original fish in a black and white tug of war-two seagulls squared off against one raven. The bear left the fish it had pinned, which I never saw move again, and made a head swinging lope toward the birds which made only a token response to his mock charge, not even flying up, but only hopping sideways, still tussling over their own end of the fish. The bear halted, with three silver and one half pink salmon carcasses around him, and looked down river. I swung the binoculars in that direction, but spotted nothing. Cuffing one of the salmon to roll it over, the bear ambled down the sandbar and waded the shallows of the river to get to the opposite bank.

I had been watching an animal more focused on the hunt and the pursuit than the consumption of its kill. It had played the cat and mouse game, and had rather inefficiently garnered up multiple salmon which were plentiful, and had wastefully eaten only half that I saw consumed of four. The birds were fighting over a single fish when there were several lying in front of them, more fish than there were fowl. Each was operating in a "resource redundant" environment, and was responding to other urges than just hunger. I am watching a pristine wilderness environment-creation, straight from the hand of the creator-and all of it is fascinating, not all of it pretty. I am watching predators operating in profligacy. Included in that environment of abundance is one pinnacle predator-myself.

A NEW VIEW OF SOME OLD FRIENDS

I turned and swept the far bank of the river with the glasses-and there he was: my bear! I knew him well since I had stared at him for over an hour through the glasses and through the scope. The big brown bear was again combing the slope snatching blueberries in a very impolite jaw- snapping wolfing of the delicacy. "pigging out" as though it was in a hurry to finish off the inexhaustible hillside of berries. I would doubt that one could tell much difference in the number of berries behind his swath of "combining" than where he had not been, since the profligacy of nature in this brief and fecund season of abundance seems inexhaustible, no matter how big and greedy the predator may be. I was looking at the big bear, realizing as I watched how much each of us was like the other-and this was fresh from my wonderful nature "Discovery Channel" exhibition of the inefficient salmon feeding by bears and birds just downstream.

"I could still go get him" I argued, "And I could justify it on the basis of protecting blueberries and ground squirrels from rapacious extinction." None of us is endangered; each of us threatened. He is a redundant bear feeding on abundant blueberries near a wasted bear carcass, overlooking a salmon-choked river. I am a hunter who has filled his expensive single tag for a CITES protected species (Council on International Traffic in Endangered Species.)

I swung the binoculars around as large a sweep as I could to see if I could do a "bear inventory" in the area within range of my optics in this prime bear habitat. I looked a long time and counted a total of 12 bears, with two not visible as I located each of the others, so there may have been 14 visible bears but only twelve were seen simultaneously to be sure that they were different individuals. One of the last animals I spotted was also distinctive-there he was, the handsome-coated black phase bear that was the first one I had stalked and the one that was centered in the cross-hairs when I declined to shoot so magnificent a creature in the inglorious backside. I am glad that this "catch/release" was followed so that I could go back and see them today. But, then, maybe the trophy brown bear and the black would struggle as I had just seen the bear threatening the birds and would kill each other off in competition over the ownership of these redundant resources-now that would be a "waste!" Squabbling over redundant riches makes for great sport even if it does not make good sense.

These thoughts did not come to a glorious conclusion. While letting go of the juniper with one hand to swat an annoying cloud of mosquitoes, I slid down the steep slippery slope of the lupines, and resolved to return to camp for breakfast and to change out of the clumsy hip boots.

I got to camp and found Alan sitting by the cook fire "doing nothing" as he reported it, bundled up against the wind, as Sergei was completing work on bear paws and skulls. I fulfilled my long-awaited plan of going down to our small frigid stream and immersing my head into it for a mind-numbing minute, and shampooing and cleaning what I could reach without exposing more that necessary to the rapacious mosquitoes who were hanging out in the relative wind shelter of the stream bed Sergei had taken down his tent, and as reported through Alan, there was a successful exchange between Sergei at our spike camp and Victor at the base camp that included the fact that the helicopter pilot Vasili had been contacted by INMARSAT, and it looked likely that we would be going out tomorrow, weather permitting. In that case, there would be time for me to get back into the hillsides overlooking the Storage River, the pristine wilderness environment I had come to love, rather than prolonging the domestic arrangements of our departure, so with my bag packed, I scrambled back into hip boots and waded across the marshy river bywaters to get to the lava pinnacle on which Alan and Victor had sat as a lookout the prior day. I went without a rifle, since I considered that I would be in a watchtower situation with enough other implements swinging from me in the very high winds that had picked up to the point that I would have trouble clinging to the mountain.

RETURN TO MY OBSERVER STATUS IN A NEW
OBSERVATION POST

I watched a very muddy bear that was sitting in mid sandbar and aging its head at nearby ravens and sea gulls, which were mobbing it. So much for being "king of the mountain" as a pinnacle predator, if these gnats and mosquitoes and other airborne nuisances are allowed to make your life miserable! The muddy bear seemed to succumb to his misery, and put his head down on his paws and cowered as the increasingly cheeky birds were mobbing him for no apparent treasure he was guarding, with dead salmon carcasses scattered along the riverbank. It was then that I realized that I was holding the Zeiss binoculars in hand, which I has reserved for looking at big game, when if I swept them across the river, I could see, and count, just how many large salmon were holding in the current or in the eddies behind river bends. At first I had thought of them as logs, until I realized that I had seen no logs in the river, only those swept up high on the banks, presumably during the much higher water of spring run off. I then watched them until they moved, now convinced that they were large fish and not sunken logs, and counted over fifty salmon. Some were already mottled in white with fins that were scalloped and looking rather moth-eaten. A few had floated belly up, still oriented upstream to keep the aerated water passing over their gills, but clearly not likely to survive the day. There were salmon carcasses washed up at the backside of sand bars. It did not seem that any of these were the fish the bears were after, since they had fished for the actively kicking and swimming fish, disdaining even to finish these "purpose-killed" fish, let alone scavenge the carcasses of those they had not killed. During the lean times, the big bears are not quite so haughty, but are general carrion feeders, that would be very happy to take advantage of some other predator's kill, even if it had transpired some several days ago.

A drama was unfolding downstream before my eyes. I saw a big brown male bear standing at the shallows of the river bend peering into the water, but, so far motionless. Far down the river, a sow bear and two cubs were wandering on the sandy margin of the river on the same side as the big male bear, but still over a kilometer distant. The cubs were being kids. They were splashing each other, and would play or bat each other, until they realized that they were too far from Mama Bear who was steadily ambling u; the riverbank. They then had to break away form their own contests and scramble to catch up, running through the shallows in a rollicking good time. When they arrived at her heels, they would again go back to cuffing each other and generally doing what they could to harass each other. Mama Bear did not look back, but kept going forward on a mission, with a direction up the river that would eventually have her drifting into the range of my telephoto lens. There was only this one obstruction and that was the male bear, the boar, which she was closing in on but had not apparently seen, since he was on the bight side of a bend in the river.

The moment came quite soon, since I was surprised at how much ground the three bears were covering in their steady walk. As Mama Bear rounded the bend, she encountered the boar bear, still standing on all fours staring into the water, yet not having moved. Each of the bears is in a frantic food-gathering phase of summer-time activity to gather the necessary fat stores for winter, so they would not ordinarily seek out energy-consuming activity that would not get them to their goal of positive energy balance. But here comes a special dessert course. The sow had two cubs with her, which are prime targets for big boar bears. After all, the smaller bears are fair game, easy to overwhelm, and consuming cubs also fulfills the sociobiology imperative of eliminating all genes not one's own The big bear reared up on its hind legs and, no longer interested in the river water it had been staring into, it looked over the short range of riverbank sand at the suddenly stopped sow and the two cubs still trying to catch up.

Mama Bear swiveled to look behind where the cubs were gaining on her, and with a deceptively easy rolling gait, she charged right at the much bigger bear! Water was splashing as she bounded toward him, and he dropped to all fours and hesitated a moment "What? She can't be serious!" and then turned tail and ran!

The sow hit the breaks, but the impetuous kids had caught the spirit of the game and passed her, charging in the direction that the big boar had retreated. Here were two little tasty morsels, which were strutting their way, back to Mama Bear, flaunting their triumph-"Look what we did! We ran off this big brute-we sure did show him!" I do not know how Mama Bear would have to offer a remedial lesson in trying to break the hens from pursuing the fox, but this lesson they were just gloating over, I would have considered to be maladaptive!

A LESSON FROM SALMON, BEARS AND BERRIES
IN SUSTAINABLE REDUNDANCY

I looked back from the three bears, which were on their way again upstream, toward a "raft" of dark forms swinging out into the current. I recognized that this was an unusually dense school of the big salmon, the "successful ones," being among the few who had succeeded in the single-minded destiny that had all started out with. They were the ones who had fulfilled the goal of spawning in their river of origin, and having made the one-way trip, they were in the exhausting process of dying-spent carriers of their genes. The life cycle of this large mass of protein was now at an end, and this was just a large mass of decomposing organic material now, even though it was still finning its way downstream, too weak to hold its place in the current and sure never to reach the Pacific from which it had come. They were on their way to the "recycling bin." Part of that recycling apparatus were the bears who would pick off a substantial, but still small, fraction of this mass-estimated at 3 or 4 salmon per day, or 100 pounds per bear per day. It is for this reason that "coastal brown bears" as compared with their "interior grizzly" genetic brothers are so much larger, and have such a high fertility rate, triplet cubs being a not unusual norm. But, these bears, as I had just witnessed, are very wasteful at this recycling business. That may be good news for the ravens, eagles and gulls, but seems quite a waste of a high order protein to have the majority of it fall to carrion feeders in the food chain. Human predators might well regulate this process, controlling it for far greater efficiency, tidying up this profligacy of the natural cycle to get a much higher yield, allocated much higher on the food chain. Yet this wasteful natural process turns out to be sustainable, whereas the far greater efficiency of human resource exploitation depletes and then exhausts the complex system that gave rise to this abundance in the first place.

I have taken (through a very complex and expensive process of permits and licenses) one fine redundant snow sheep ram, and one typical male brown bear, "harvested" from among an abundant stock (twelve snow sheep, fourteen bears) that might otherwise be "wasted" in the mortality of other forces culling the excess-winterkill, predation, reduction in habitat carrying capacity. But, because of the efficient tools I have at my disposal (everything from the highly effective .300 Win. Mag. BAR to the GPS, photo apparatuses to a helicopter) I may pose a greater threat to unbalancing this wealth of riches than the wasteful bears. Had I then "wasted another redundant bear" I might cause far more disturbance at a higher multiplier in this delicate ecosystem than the bears themselves are capable of, "brutishly dispatching" already dying salmon. I am glad that I have not further exploited this wild and wonderful resource, and have extracted from it mainly these observations and lessons and two single-shot trophies that will serve principally to remind me of this experience in a place that still resembles unmodified creation, straight from the hand of the Creator.

CHANGE IN PLANS-
ONCE AGAIN INDUCED BY A CHANGE IN THE WEATHER

I was blown off my mountain observation post by a howling wind. I looked back at camp and saw Sergei advancing toward me across the marsh, so I met him half way. He looked at me "Glenn! Where carabine? Medved see Glenn, say 'Lunch!' "Num, Num!' Need carabine!" OK, I got the point-always pack mosquito repellant and devices a bit more authoritative when moving around on the home turf of the principle predators in residence. He explained in a somewhat confusing story that he would be hiking back up to the cache where he would retrieve the items still left in the tree for an estimated round trip time of nine hours. Meanwhile, two bits of news had been radioed from the base campsite. They were in the middle of a nasty snowstorm, and would try to hold the camp together until tomorrow when the helicopter would arrive, whenever weather permitted, but presumably around 2:00 PM. So, I should make myself as comfortable in this habitat as I so apparently had already, being prepared to move across the river with the spike camp gear about noon tomorrow.

I went back to the hillside to try to find a shelter from the wind, but a glowering sky was blown up quickly after I had spotted only one familiar creature on the river's far side-the big black-coated bear-my "first trophy." This was my farewell to the bears of Kamchatka, as I scurried back to the tent to take cover from a drenching rain. I wrote the last of my post cards while hunkered down in the tent. I heard a rustling outside around 7:00 PM to find Sergei, returned two hours ahead of his own schedule, trying to put up his tent in the rain, under a sky-wide rainbow. I helped pitch the tent, and then went back inside, where I had stored all his gear at the outset of the rain, which continued another couple of hours. When I poked my head out, I saw the sow bear and her two cubs in the same place I had seen them upon my arrival at this site three days earlier. We retreated to our sleeping bags after the same dinner of hash and couscous we had had three times, while planning a leisurely packing out tomorrow

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