Along Montana's Rocky Mountain Front
August Blog
This month:news; living in bear country; trailing
cattle and Andy Adams'
"The Log of a Cowboy."
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August
News:
From the 8/19/08 Canada.com: Bears captured for research more prone to injuries, death: Alta. study Marc Cattet distinctly remembers the day four years ago when biologist Gordon Stenhouse phoned to tell him he had recovered the carcass of a grizzly bear that had been captured in central Alberta just 10 days earlier. Cattet and fellow researchers used that data to analyze the bears' blood for enzymes that are released by muscle damage during extreme exertion, struggle and stress. About 70 per cent of the grizzlies captured by snares had higher than normal levels of such enzymes - in some cases up to 12 times higher. Levels were also high in nearly one in five of grizzlies darted from helicopters and in 14 per cent caught in barrel traps. Some conservationists have always said that trapping injures bears, and many biologists know that it is an issue, too. But how would agencies and biologists gather data? We can't simply say we have a gut feeling that there are too many bears or not enough bears, and that we "know" that bears are in one area and not another and travel between ecosystems. You're damned if you do and damned if you don't. This is a modern world ruled by data, and I'm sure trapping and collaring will continue, even with the risks involved. From the 8/21/08 Choteau Acantha: Racers applaud ‘grizzly’ course A large group of the half marathon runners were treated to the sight of a grizzly bear that was traveling from the west toward the Pine Butte Swamp Preserve and crossed the Pine Butte Cut Across Road as runners were both in front of and behind it. Some runners were as close as 150 feet while others saw the bear from a distance. For many, the heart-stopping glimpse of a grizzly was the highlight of the grueling run. The grizzly, equally frightened of this human stampede, ran as fast as it could for the sheltering cover of the shrubs in the Pine Butte Swamp. Every time I'm along the Teton River, in the canyon or in the river bottom lands, I find rocks flipped over and rolled to the side - basketball size, headstone size - leaving the rock's palm shaped bed open in the ground. Sometimes I see claw marks at the bottom where a bear has scooped out some insects; and sometimes there is a trail of flipped and rolled rocks. No other animal except a bear is going to roll big rocks over. If you look, you'll find big tracks in mud - some clear, some washed out - and shallow footsteps in the gravel. And scat, too: I once followed a trail of scat from the river bottom up a trail to Lonesome ridge, watching the scat change color and content, from grass and seeds and brown lower down (along with diggings for glacier lilies and a ripped up dead log) to the top of the pass, where there were diggings for ground squirrels, and the scat was darker and full of hair. But most of the time, bear sign is all you see of bears. They pass quietly in the night or in the early morning, leaving just a bit of evidence they have been around.
It's not evidence to prove we need to be afraid. This has been said by others, and after you spend enough time in bear country with your eyes open and forget about the sensational news headlines, you get the idea that it is true, after all: if bears were less secretive and shy, and any more aggressive towards people, they would be extinct. Bear attacks - which most of the time are really bears defending themselves and their cubs after being frightened - are all exceedingly rare. You're much more in danger from your own pet pitbull, driving on any highway in Montana or crossing the street in whatever town you live in. Bears are much more in danger from us - cars, trains, cases of mistaken identity by hunters, and poachers - than we are from them. It's difficult to see that the numbers prove this, when most of the time news and radio and TV and writers promote the idea that we should be overly afraid of grizzlies. But there are concerns, and legitimate ones. I don't live in bear country, but Dusty and Danelle Crary do. They are third generation ranchers on the Teton River, ten miles or so east of the Front. They run cattle on large tracts of leased and deeded hay and river bottom land. On their land, grizzlies are part of the landscape, and common sense is in order. You're careful when you go out at night alone in the spring and fall. If you're in the river bottom, you make noise. You keep dog food off the front porch and trash under control. You keep an eye on your kids when they are outside during bear season, and teach them, too, how to live in bear country. It has to do with an awareness of where they live, an eyes-open life we forget to live if we don't live in a place that is still wild. I would be just a little edgy if I lived on the Front, conscious of what is out there I rarely see, but it is something I'd appreciate: being in a landscape that is alive in a more primal sense. Grizzlies travel near houses and ranch buildings if they scent food and if they have found food - and gotten a food reward - in the past. Bears have amazing memories for locations of food, and they seem to teach their cubs, too. Grizzlies remember boneyards, the pits at the edge of ranches where dead calves and cows and livestock are dumped that were once common among ranches on the Front. The Crary's phased out their boneyard out years ago, and helped greatly reduce one of the main types of grizzly and human conflicts. Bears still travel through, down from the mountains in the spring, hungry for protein, and in the fall, feeding heavily to get ready for hibernation. Once in awhile a bear will kill a calf, but conflicts have been greatly reduced from the levels of twenty years ago. Some cow carcasses and roadkill are placed in the foothills early in the spring by Grizzly Bear Management Biologists in order to simulate the spring food sources that bears used to find, like winter killed deer and elk. That way, bears get early protein and are less likely to move down low right away in the spring and get into conflicts. Carcass relocation has been very successful in reducing conflicts, and hasn't seemed to teach grizzlies the relationship between carcasses and beef still on the hoof, as some ranchers have worried about. The dead are scattered along the Front, randomly placed with the help of GIS mapping technology and data on past wildlife wintering patterns. The bears don't know the difference, and locations are changed every year to prevent habituating bears to certain feeding areas. One spring, Danelle told me there was a female with three tiny cubs - smaller than she had ever seen - near the house. She wondered if they were going to survive, wondering if they would find a dead bull they hadn't been able to move away from the pasture where it would be an easy find for bears. Grizzlies aren't exactly the noble creatures some make them out to be, at least when they eat. They tend to start at the back end of a cow, and will crawl in a dead, very ripe carcass, cleaning it out a hundred pounds of tissue and muscle at a time. At carcass relocation sites, I've seen 1500 pound cows that have been reduced to hollow shells of ribs and stiff, weathered hides, all in short order. I first called the ranch a few years back, and since then, Dusty and Danelle Crary have been very generous with their time. They, of course, keep busy running the ranch 24/7/365, and also have their own outfitting business. I've hung around (and probably cost them time) during calving, "helped" (once again, in quotes) them move cattle on horseback one June up to summer range on the Blackleaf. That day in particular was like one of those old Marlboro cigarette commercials; that is, if you are from my generation, and remember the sweeping TV commercials of hatchet-faced cowboys herding cattle around impossibly pretty mountains and prairie, usually during a red sunrise or sunset or a dramatically clearing storm. That morning we started out at dawn in a light rain, the sun cutting in under the clouds and lighting up the Front, and it really was impossibly pretty out there on horseback. It was something I'd always wanted to do, ride horseback in a yellow slicker, trailing cows and their calves to summer range. I hadn't been on a horse in years, and the horse I was on could tell and wasn't very happy about it. A few hired hands were along, and Conner, four years old, and Charlotte, eight - two of Dusty and Danelle's three children - rode like professionals, except when they were nodding off as a result of getting up at four in the morning. We'd stop and gather the horses together and say things like head them down that draw to the gate, and one of us would ride ahead - our horse flashing over sage and early flowers and a tipi ring or two inlaid in the earth - to get the gate for the herd. But all I could think about most of the day was that I was in a damn cigarette commercial. The Marlboro marketing campaign was the most successful in history, and maybe's that's why I couldn't get it out of my mind. We spotted a grizzly early that morning, in a gulch north and west of the Crary Ranch. We were moving toward the creek in the bottom of a shallow draw, and someone yelled bear! In a flash of sun we saw the bear running, galloping down a slope from a gulch leading into the creek bottom and toward the cover of the aspens and cottonwoods. The bear was silver in the early light, and even though he or she was small, muscles rippled like water under his skin, and the fur was dark brown with a white collar ring. It was lame on its front right leg or paw, favoring it as it plunged down the open slope to the cover of trees. We all charged forward on our horses to a short bluff and stopped. The bear had slipped into the trees, but then it was out again, running west along the creek. It must have been a two or three year old, and might have been one of the eight sub-adults that were running that spring, keeping the local bear biologist busy. It ducked into more trees and that's all we saw of it. It was luck and more: I know horsemen who have ridden a thousand miles on the Front and haven't seen a grizzly. They know very well bears are around, and know better that they are tough to spot. That's the only bear I've seen on the Front, and I remember it running along, favoring that leg, muscles rippling in the early light, and gone in a flash. That must be one of the traits that separate the animals from us: a grace of movement. Anton Chekhov, the great writer and playwright, once wrote that "when someone expends the least amount of motion on a given action, that's grace." Animals move like that. Elk herds run and flow along the land and over ridges like running water. Wolves and coyotes lope along, bouncing a little on their hind legs, not wasting a movement. Towards the end of the day, I managed to forget the cigarette commercials in my mind. But from the very beginning of the morning I had been thinking of Andy Adam's "The Log of a Cowboy." It's generally accepted as one of the most accurate books about cowboy life in the late 19th century. Andy spent twelve years in the saddle, beginning in is early teens, and began writing after growing disgusted at Hollywood's portrayals of the cowboy life. He covers one of the many long cattle drives of that time through the American west, from Brownsville, on the gulf coast of the Texas-Mexico border to the Blackfeet Agency in Montana. He and thirteen other cowboys and a cook moved over three thousand head of cattle - their contract was for a million pounds of beef on the hoof delivered - that distance between April 1st and September 8th, 1882. That's over 2100 miles as the crow flies these days (on the interstate highway system), and it must have been more on hoof, meandering the trails and passes and fording rivers. Nothing like it has been done in the west since, and probably never will. On August 28th, just a week before they were to deliver their herd to the Indian Agents at the Blackfeet Agency, the cowboys crossed the Teton River. Adams wrote that they turned up Muddy Creek, a fork of the Teton as he called it. About noon, they noticed a commotion among the cattle, and investigating they found a big cinnamon bear and two cubs. The cowboys were trailing the cattle along the creek for the easy water, but the bears, eating abundant berries for their coming hibernation, had "taken the right of way along the creek bottom." Right away, he writes, there "was a hustling and borrowing of cartridges, while saddles were cinched on to horses as though human life depended on alacrity." There wasn't any thought to it: here was a grizzly bear, considered less than a varmint in those days, with two cubs that would grow up to be varmints. Any self-respecting cowboy knew what to do. "This looked like a chance for some sport," he wrote. It was almost like a military operation: "We separated into two squads, in order to gain the rear of the bears, cut them off from the creek, and force them into the open...as we came up between them and the creek, the old one reared up on her haunches and took most astonished and innocent look at us. Adams writes that on the big female, "the ropes were taught and several of them were at her throat; the horses were pulling in as many different directions, yet the strain of all the lariats failed to choke her as expected." They decide to shoot, but can't get a good aim from their flighty horses, and no one wants to dismount, as only four ropes hold the bear. They blast away without effect, and then one rope is clipped by a bullet. Finally one cowboy, called The Rebel by the rest of the gang, gets down and approaches the bear, held now by just three ropes. "He walked up to within fifteen steps of the mother bruin, and kneeling, emptied both six-shooters with telling accuracy. The old bear winced at nearly every shot, and once she made an ugly surge on the ropes....The vitality of the cinnamon almost staggers belief, for after both six-shooters had been emptied into her body, she floundered on the ropes with all her former strength, although the blood was dripping and gushing from her numerous wounds. After all that, Adams writes, she was still alive, while the cubs bawled in the trees they had climbed. The Rebel borrowed another gun. "They slacked the ropes slightly, the old bear reared, facing her antagonist. The Rebel emptied his third gun into her before she sank, choked, bleeding, and exhausted, to the ground; and even then no one dared to approach her, for she struck out wildly with all fours as she slowly succumbed to the inevitable." Then they turned their attention to the cubs. The cowboys shot the cubs and skinned them for trophies, but the female's coat was summer fur and not worth much, Adams wrote. At the dinner wagon, "the excitement was still on us, and the hunt was unanimously voted the most exciting bit of sport and powder burning we had experienced on our trip." It was worse: there are stories of cattleman planting dynamite in cattle carcasses and waiting all night for grizzlies to show up so they could push the handle of the detonator. Popular in California in the 19th century was the sport of roping and capturing grizzlies and chaining them down by a leg in a stadium, and letting them fight off longhorn cattle or even mountain lions for thousands of spectators. Times have changed. When we were moving cattle that day, one of the cowboys with us - in is early twenties, riding a pretty pale smoke gray quarterhorse - practiced throwing his lariat as we slowly moved along at the back of the herd. He could drop it right perfectly around calves neck and then let the loop slack and let the calf duck out of it. Or he could drop it right around a back leg, timing the loop for the instant the hoof was off the ground, and then let the rope slack quickly so the calf stepped right out of the rope. When we stopped for a water break right before we spotted the bear, I told him he was good at roping, and that I didn't think I'd have much luck learning. He told me what kind of rope to buy, and that I could get someone to show me how to get started at the roping demonstrations at the Augusta fair in August. He said it was good fun, a good thing to know how to do. After a pause, he added that it was even addicting. But he quickly added that roping "was better to be addicted to than anything else."
After we rode away from the bluff and the bear and trailed the cattle for another hour. I pulled up next to him, remembering Andy Adams and said cowboys used to rope grizzlies. He turned and smiled, as if he thought he could rope a bear if he had the chance. His rope was hung on his saddle horn. He pu a hand on it and said, "But I hear that's illegal." You can order Andy Adam's "The Log of a Cowboy" from The University of Nebraska Press.
July: Pine Butte ≈ August ≈ September: Black Bears in Missoula If you like what you have read, consider a tax-deductible contribution to me
for film and chemicals, so I can keep shooting photos for the book (and this website) with my old 35mm gear.
The animal had such a severe case of capture myopathy - a kind of muscle meltdown some captured animals suffer when they overexert themselves trying to escape - that its chest, bicep and pectoral muscles were pure white and as brittle as chalk.
Rare as these kinds of deaths are, Cattet understood that this was the price to be paid occasionally to get the kind of data scientists need to protect and promote the conservation of bears and other animals.
"A single 'woof' brought on the cubs to her side, and she dropped down on all fours and lumbered off, a half dozen shots hastening her pace in an effort to circle the horseman...before she had covered the distance of fifty yards, a rain of ropes came down on her, and she was thrown backward with no less than four lariats fastened over her neck and foreparts. Then ensued a lively scene, for the horses snorted and in spite of rowels refused to face the bear. Two minor circuses were meantime in progress with the two cubs....