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Illustration from John McPhee's "A Textbook Place for Bears" |
Edward Hoagland, John McPhee, and Ian Frazier are three of
my favorite writers. Each has written at least one bear piece: Hoagland’s
“Bears, Bears, Bears” (Sports Illustrated,
March 26, 1973; included in his Red
Wolves and Black Bears, 1976); McPhee’s “A Textbook Place for Bears” (The New Yorker, December 27, 1982;
included in his Table of Contents,
1985); and Frazier’s “Bear News” (The New
Yorker, September 9, 1985; included in his Nobody Better, Better Than Nobody, 1987). It’s interesting to
compare them.
Hoagland’s “Bears, Bears, Bears” profiles Lynn Rogers, a
graduate student in wildlife biology at the University of Minnesota, who is, in
Hoagland’s words, “probably the most ardent investigator of black bears right
now.” Rogers works in Isabella, a logging village in the Arrowhead region of
northern Minnesota, now the Superior National Forest. Hoagland says of Rogers,
“In the woods he moves at a silent trot, as only the rarest woodsmen do. His
thoughts, insofar as they could be elicited in the week I lived with him, seemed
almost exclusively concerned with bears – catching them, amassing more data on
them.”
Hoagland tells about going on bear searches with Rogers:
On September twenty-second we spent a red-letter day
together, starting at a dump where gulls and ravens whirled above us and Rogers
scanned the line of trees for any fat rear end that might be beating a retreat.
He flew for four hours, locating all the bears whose radios were functioning;
then back on the ground, as a check on his methods he went to three of the
fixes to confirm that the bears were where he’d marked them. He inspected seven
denning places, showing me how he discovers the hole itself by the raking that
bears do as they collect insulation. This is while the ground is clear of snow,
so he memorizes how to find it later by lining up the nearby trees. Number
414’s chamber last winter was under a clump of boulders, fifteen feet back
through a passage. Number 320’s was under a bulldozed pile of birch that the
loggers had left. A few miles away we watched a female preparing a small
basket-shaped sanctum under the upturned roots of a white pine, from which she
sneaked, like a hurrying, portly child, circling downwind to identify us before
clearing out. Another bear, a hundred-pound male, was hollowing a den under a
crosshatch of windfalls just above a patch of swamp. He too scrambled silently
away downward ahead of us like a gentleman disturbed in a spot where he’s
afraid perhaps he shouldn’t be.
McPhee’s “A Textbook Place for Bears” profiles Patricia
McConnell, a biologist who works for the State of New Jersey trapping bears. “She
is scarcely five feet tall,” McPhee writes. “Her jeans were too long and were
rolled at the tops of her shoes. Her hair is dark, rich brown with strands of
gray. She has a quick, infectious smile that somehow seems to break inward,
concentrating its brightness.”
The piece is set in the Kittatinny Mountain region of
northwestern New Jersey where McConnell has a trap line. McPhee reports his
experience accompanying McConnell as she checks the traps for bears:
She had set snares – a pair of them, about thirty feet
apart. And now, making rounds, at a few minutes to six in the morning, June 19,
we went down into the woods to see what sort of mischief might have happened
near the snares. The site was some distance from the road, and the mountainside
fell steeply away. The only sound we heard was the tread of our feet. “There’s
no bear here or we’d have heard it by now,” she was saying, but then she drew
in her breath and stopped. She stared through the trees in excited disbelief.
“This could only happen once,” she said. “We have hit the daily double. A bear
in each snare.”
Frazier’s “Bear News” is about bears and newspaper stories
about them, principally in the Glacier National Park region of western Montana
where, at the time Frazier wrote it, he lived:
The road I lived on is called Bear Creek Road. Not far from
my house I have found pyramidal piles of bear scat filled with chokecherry
pits, and honeysuckle vines torn down like old prom decorations and trodden
into bear tracks in the mud of spring seeps, and rocks the size of truck tires
rolled out of the ground, and rotten deadfalls torn to powder.
In the piece, Frazier tells about tracking bears and about
his encounters with them:
The day after I saw my first bear in the wild, I saw my
second, third, and fourth bears. I was out fishing again, trying to get to an
oxbow lake near my house. I was mostly surrounded by fences and “Posted” signs.
On the one unfenced side of the lake, a pine and fir forest descended to a
marsh, with little trickling creeks, and hip-deep black muck holes with oily
films on top, and stands of yellow skunk cabbage, and downed trees with their
roots full of dried mud sticking high in the air. I was coming through a thick
willow grove when I heard a single woof, as distinct as a word. I thought it
might be a deer snorting, but then through the leaves I saw two brown shapes
climbing a cottonwood tree. I pushed the willows aside just in time to see a
big black bear go right up the trunk. The bear did not climb putting one foot
here and one foot there; she shot up with her belly flat to the trunk, her four
legs rowing in a blur and throwing of bark chips. She went up in a second, as
if on rails. When she reached a fork in the tree, she leaned her back against
one branch and put her feet on the other branch. I took a step closer, and she
woofed again, at the cubs invisible above her, and I could hear them climb some
more. She was by far the biggest thing I’d ever seen in a tree. I looked and
blinked and looked and blinked. Her fur had whorls, and tufts, and smooth
places, and it seemed to be wrist-deep. Mule deer are the color of pine trunks
in winter light; elk have on their necks the dark brown of wet bark and on
their sides the golden tint of sun on a bare hill. This bear’s fur was the
smoky blue-black of night when it starts to fill a pine forest. Her snout moved
back and forth in short arcs, and she watched me out of the corner of her eye.
That “I was coming through a thick willow grove when I heard
a single woof, as distinct as a word” is terrific. The whole passage is
inspired!
All three pieces are written in the first person, a point of
view I relish immensely. All three are accounts of the writers’ personal
experiences with bears. But Hoagland’s and McPhee’s pieces have a dimension
that Frazier’s doesn’t; they each vividly portray a protagonist – Lynn Rogers
in “Bears, Bears, Bears,” and Patricia McConnell in “A Text Book Place for
Bears.” Many of Hoagland’s best paragraphs are descriptions of Rogers. For
example:
As he sits in a brooding posture at the kitchen table, his
body doesn’t move for long periods and he thinks aloud, not so much in actual
words as with a slow series of ums and ahs that seem to convey the pacing of
his thoughts. But he lectures nicely, full of his subject, and in the woods
whatever is lummoxy drops away in that quickness, the dozen errands he’s
running at once – searching for a plant whose leaves will match the unknown
leaves he has been finding in a given bear’s scats, examining a local
bear-rubbing tree for hairs left on the bark since his last check. If he’s lost
in his jeep in the tangle of old logging roads, he gets a fix on the closest
radio-collared bear and from that figures out where he is. If he’s near one of
them and wants a glimpse, he lifts a handful of duff from the ground and lets
it stream lightly down to test the wind before beginning his stalk. When he’s
radio-tracking from the plane he rents, he watches his bears hunt frogs, or
sees one surprise a wolf and pounce at it. If a bear in a thicket hasn’t moved
since his previous fix and is close to a road or a house, he may ask the pilot
to land, if they can, to see whether it has been shot. Then, on the ground
again, suddenly he’ll climb an oak tree to taste the acorns on top, spurting up
the branchless trunk without any spikes, his hands on one side pulling against
his feet on the other. Lost in the yellow fall colors, munching bear food, he
shouts happily from the tree, “What a job this is, huh?”
And:
At first, in my time with him, it had seemed sadly chancy to
me that he had been afforded so little official support for a project I knew to
be first-rate. But soon such a sense evaporated; rather, how lucky it was that
this late-blooming man, who creeps through the brush so consummately that he
can eavesdrop on the grunting of bears as they breed, had discovered at last,
after seven long years as a letter carrier in his hometown, what it was that he
wanted to do! In his blue wool cap, with Santa Claus wrinkles around his eyes
because of the polar weather he’s known, shambling, blundering, abstracted at
times, he is an affecting figure, a big Viking first mate proud of the fact
that the can heft a 240-pound bear alone. He kisses his wife as he starts out,
one pocket full of his luncheon sandwiches, the other with hay-scented packets
of scat he forgot to remove after yesterday’s trip (they smell pleasant enough,
and he likes carrying them as boys like carrying snakes).
Of the many wonderful details in these three great pieces,
that pocketful of “hay-scented packets of scat” is one of my favorites.
Which of these pieces has the most compelling storyline?
That’s easy – McPhee’s “A Textbook Place for Bears.” Basically, it’s the story
of a morning in the life of bear biologist Patricia McConnell. And what a
morning! It begins at dawn, in the Great Valley of the Appalachians, when
McConnell picks up McPhee in her truck and drives up Kittatinny Mountain to
check on two bear snares she’d set. They find two black bears in them, one of
them, as it turns out, is female – “the first female bear ever caught by the
State of New Jersey.” McConnell decides she needs help. They head back down the
mountain to the nearest telephone. At this point, McPhee introduces an
additional narrative thread: “She mentioned en route that her eleven-year-old
daughter was to appear in a gymnastics show later that morning and she was
meant to be there.” Suddenly, time is of the essence. McConnell makes a number
of calls, recruits some assistants, including her boss, Robert Lund. Then she
and McPhee head back up the mountain. With Lund’s help, she anesthetizes the
bears (“Within sixty seconds, the bear sat down. It breathed heavily, began to nod
like a dinner guest, and in five or ten minutes was stretched out on its side
in slumber”). The bears’ statistics are taken. They’re tagged, tattooed, and
weighed. She wants to put a radio collar on the female bear, but she doesn’t
have one with her. She departs the site to see if she can find one, leaving the
bears in the care of Lund and several others. McPhee stays with the bears (“We
sat quietly watching the two before us while the gentle patter of gypsy-moth
caterpillars sounded like rain in the leaves above”). The female bear stirs,
lifts her head, and sets it down again. Then she lifts her head again, and is
suddenly up on her feet, moving away. McPhee writes,
The cuffs were still around her legs, and they hobbled her.
She had them off before she had travelled thirty feet. She was wobbly,
unsteady, clumsy, and fast. Fear had burned through the drug. She had got up
and gone before Lund had time to inject her. She crashed down the mountain
through the woods, he running after her with his hypodermic needle held forward
like a baton.
The bear moves into the swamp, where she lays down, head out
of the water. Then the male bear begins to move. In fear, two of the onlookers
climb trees. McConnell returns with a radio collar. “What the hell is going on
here?” she says. The male bear gets up and “weavingly, drunkenly” runs and
falls downhill out of sight. McConnell fills a jab-stick syringe and carries it
down the mountainside to Lund. The swamp is dense (“The vegetation seemed less
woven than solid. A person six feet away could be invisible, let alone a
bear”). McConnell, Lund, and another man, named Joe Garris, close in on the
bear (“Lund advanced the jabstick, in the manner of a knitting needle, through
the rhododendron”). Lund sticks the needle into the bear. Soon the bear is
asleep. McConnell and Garris haul the bear to dry ground. “Garris leaned over,
sank his fingers into the fur at the shoulder and the rump, and lifted the bear
above his head like pressed weight. He lowered her to his shoulders, fireman’s
carry, and walked up the mountain.” He puts the bear in the back of his pickup.
McPhee watches all this unfold. He’s there when the bears
wake up and run away. He’s there in the swamp when the female bear is
recaptured. He’s in the back of Garris’s truck with McConnell and the female
bear as they make their way to the barrel-trap site. He’s there when the sleeping
bear is put in the barrel trap, which will serve temporarily as a cage. Again,
he’s with McConnell and the bear in the back of Garris’s pickup when it’s
returned, with radio collar attached, to the place where it was snared. And, in one of my favorite passages, he
accompanies McConnell to her daughter’s gymnastics show:
From a town parking lot, we ran down the main street of
Washington, up a long flight of wooden stairs, and into a loft above a shoe
store, where an eleven-year-old girl in a black-and-ivory leotard was
performing on a trampoline. Her mother’s jeans were still wet to the thighs and
caked with swamp muck. She tried, impossibly, to conceal her appearance and to
make herself evident, too. When the girl finished, her mother waved from the
doorway and was acknowledged with a shy smile. Seated close to the walls were
grandmothers and grandfathers, parents and siblings, under paper butterflies
and fluorescent lights. For various gymnastic achievements, Dee Dee McConnell
was awarded four stars.
Frazier’s “Bear News” doesn’t have as strong a narrative arc
as McPhee’s “A Textbook Place for Bears.” Frazier is more an observer than a
dramatist. The action of his piece is in the looking. He’s a superb noticer.
Here, for example, is his description of his first bear encounter:
The first time I ever saw a bear in the wild, I was on my
way back from fishing in a beaver meadow on state land next to the Flathead
National Forest, about ten miles from the town of Bigfork, Montana. I was
coming around a bend on an overgrown logging road when I saw up ahead a large
black animal see me and duck into some thimbleberry bushes. I knew it was a
bear. I didn’t move and he didn’t move for maybe three minutes. There was no
likely tree nearby for me to climb. Then the bear hopped out of the bushes,
took a look at me over his shoulder, and galloped like crazy down the trail. As
he ran, his hind feet seemed to reach higher than his head. He splashed water
up and made the rocks clack as he crossed a little creek, and then he went into
the brush on the other side with a racket that sounded like a car crashing
through there.
That “As he ran, his hind feet seemed to reach higher than
his head” is very fine. The whole passage is a model of how prose is made vivid
by the use of words that evoke images and sensations.
Hoagland is rougher, blunter, more instinctual than Frazier
and McPhee. He’s like a Henry Miller of nature writing. With him, you don’t get the
feeling that everything has been pre-planned and structured the way it is in,
say, McPhee’s work. He’s also deeper than McPhee and Frazier. He’s the only one
of the three that wonders why he’s so infatuated with bears. He writes,
“Rooting around on riverbanks and mountain slopes, we may be looking for that
missing piece, or love, religion and the rest of it – whatever is missing in us
– just as we so often are doing in the digging and rooting of sex.”
All three pieces brim with interesting bear facts. For
example:
When a bear goes at a wooden beehive, it places the hive
between its legs and cracks it open like a coconut. [“A Textbook Place for
Bears”]
Grizzlies have dish-shaped faces, and humps on their
shoulders; blacks have longer faces, and no humps. [“Bear News”]
Bears don’t mature sexually until they are four, which,
combined with the circumstance that the sows only breed every other year, and
plenty of eligible sows not even then, gives them one of the lowest reproductive
capabilities of any animal. [“Bears, Bears, Bears”]
A bear track has an ovoid, palm-shaped print at the center
and, above that, five toe prints, with a pointy hole made by the claw above
each toe. [“Bear News”]
When a bear stops eating and its intestines are empty, a
seal of licked fur, pine needles and congealed digestive juices forms across
the anus, putting a period to the year. [“Bears, Bears, Bears”]
Which of these three magnificent bear pieces is my favorite?
Ah, that’s an agonizing question! After long consideration, I confess I can’t
choose. Each, in its own way, is a perfect evocation of bearness – real as that
“single woof, as distinct as a word.”
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