Читать книгу Hercules the Bear - A Gentle Giant in the Family - Maggie Robin - Страница 6
ОглавлениеHercules lay sleeping as I wrote part of this with his head on my feet. Earlier he had been playing with the cushion which was peeping out from under his enormous bottom, occasionally tossing it into the air and catching it in his paws. I told him, ‘Uh-uh, not the cushion,’ and he looked at me as if to say, ‘Come on, Mum, what do you take me for?’, tucked it under his tummy and settled down to watch television.
It was a raw afternoon in November when I first started to write my book. The icy rain was coming down the Glen in great swaths of grey, battering against the old house. Andy had gone out to chop wood for the fire. He cut his logs a metre long and we put them straight into the enormous hearth blazing beside me. On days like that, when the fire was stacked high, it was useful to have someone like Hercules around to help me lift them.
The room, our sitting room, was probably very like your sitting room, with armchairs and sofa, TV and photos on the walls – an ordinary-sized room with ordinary objects. The house it was in, our home at that time, was the Sheriffmuir Inn, off a narrow back road that led to the A9, the main road to the north of Scotland. The Parish of Sheriffmuir – there isn’t really a village – is between Stirling and Dunblane.
When I looked out of the window here on a fine day there was no sign of humankind. The Ochil Mountains rose around us – a vanguard of the great mountains that form the centre of Scotland. We were on the edge of the old Highland Line, and the people round here would have spoken Gaelic in the old days. Further down the Glen the land was cultivated in small fields and there were plantations of pine trees. In front of the Inn, and on the other side of the road there was a fast-flowing burn, fed from the mountains, in which Andy and Hercules loved to play in the warm weather.
The house was over three hundred years old. It was here that the famous Battle of Sheriffmuir was fought on a misty November day in 1715; indeed, the Inn was used as the headquarters of the Earl of Mar, who led the Jacobite army. Mar and his Highlanders were trying to break through to join the Jacobites who had risen in the northwest of England, when they met the Duke of Argyll at the head of a disciplined army of Hanoverian troops. They fought all day in the mist and the Clan Macrae were slaughtered to a man. In the end there was no conclusive victor. Sometimes, on dark days, one can almost imagine the kilted clansmen moving down the hillsides with gory broadswords in their hands … If stones could speak the old Inn would have some strange tales to tell, but perhaps none stranger than the story I love to tell about the battle of wits between a man and a grizzly bear.
As I relaxed in front of the fire my thoughts drifted back to the day a young man, a stranger to us, came to the Inn to see for himself this bear called ‘Hercules’ that he had heard so much about. He had spent many years in the north of Canada and in the Arctic, and had seen bears in the wild – both grizzlies and their near cousin the polar bear.
Andy noted his enthusiastic interest and took him to meet Herc in his den, which he refused to come into and instead stood at the door incredulously repeating, ‘I don’t believe it; this can’t be real; I must be dreaming,’ while Herc kissed and cuddled his dad.
Years ago, he told us, when he was working in the north of Canada, he had joined the search party for a friend who had gone off alone on a fishing expedition. They found his tent and there were bears’ footprints in the snow all round it. In an instant they knew that their worst fears had been confirmed and he prayed that his friend had been knocked senseless by the first blow from the huge hungry creature that had found the camp. He refused to go to the actual spot where his friend had obviously ended his days. All that was found of him was some shreds of clothing, a belt buckle and his false teeth.
On another occasion, further north, he had watched a polar bear sitting over a hole in the ice, patiently waiting for a seal to pop up. After a while a large seal weighing about 200 pounds duly appeared and slithered into the frozen air. With one movement the bear was on it, and with another he had delivered a massive swipe with his front paw that lifted the broken seal into the air and flung it like a toy over the ice. When the bear had moved off, he crept down and measured just how far the seal had been flung by that one blow: it was 66 feet.
I could well believe it. When Hercules was younger there was a tree trunk in his den. It was about 4 feet long and about 4 feet in diameter. It was oak, and so heavy that even Andy couldn’t lift it and had to rock it from side to side to move it about the den. Hercules would pat it from paw to paw, sliding it easily across the floor, like a child with a toy. Once, when he was in a particularly mischievous mood, he picked up the log and used it as a battering ram to knock down a wall.
In Yellowstone |National Park, in the USA, a grizzly once killed a large black bear with a single swipe. The punch was so strong that it knocked the black bear against a tree 16 feet away.
At my feet Hercules stirred in his sleep and stretched out a front paw. My old Chambers’s Encyclopaedia solemnly says of the great cuddly heap at my feet, ‘No animal in the New World is more formidable.’ Native Americans believed that he was created to be more powerful and more clever than all other creatures: once he was created, runs the legend, even the god who made him, Manitou, had to flee to the top of a mountain to escape him. He would have had to flee fast, what is more, for over a distance of up to 150 metres a grizzly bear can run as fast as a good horse.
In spite of their fearful reputation – ‘more fierce and carnivorous than any other bear except the polar bear’, says the encyclopedia – and in spite of the numerous exaggerated stories of the Old West in which bands of grizzlies attack homesteads during hard winters, bears are in fact timid creatures.
One experienced bear hunter of a hundred years ago remarked in his memoirs, ‘I have pursued a great many bears and every one of them fled before me; not a single one showed any intention of defending itself.’ Only when they are surprised are they likely to attack, particularly when there are cubs or if they are disturbed when hibernating, and this they do by rearing on their hind legs, swinging their front paws and growling. Most experts agree that this posture is basically a display, meant only to intimidate the foe, and certainly a bear usually knocks its opponent down with a swipe and then moves away.
If they are attacked, of course, bears will attempt to defend themselves, and there are numerous stories – again from the Old West – of bear hunters being chased. In 1805, the great American explorer Meriwether Lewis was chased for 100 metres by a badly wounded bear and, two days later, this unfortunate animal was shot eight times with a rifle and still kept coming at them.
Today, in parts of Canada and the United States where there are still plenty of bears, they are viewed with awe and respect, and not a little fear. I spoke to someone recently who had asked an old-timer backwoodsman what he should do if he met a bear. The old fellow sucked on his pipe and said with deliberation that the first thing to do was to climb a tree, then it depended on whether the bear was a black bear or a grizzly. ‘How will I be able to tell?’ asked my friend. The old timer replied, ‘Wal, if it’s one of them there black beyers he’ll jist come up th’ tree after you; but, if it’s a grizzly, why, he’ll jist knock that ole tree down!’
People walking in the national parks where bears are to be found wear ‘bear bells’ round their necks to warn of their approach and avoid the possibility of surprising any bears. But accidents occur. Funnily enough, bears who live close to humans, and rely on scraps and garbage left behind by picnickers for the main part of their diet, become even more dangerous, and there are always stories of picnickers being eaten up by a bear, though it happens very rarely.
Andy and I were always conscious of the risk attached even to the great big softie snoring away in front of the fire. But we knew him very, very well now, and we believed it would take a brain injury or something equally serious to make him run amok.
Mind you, every time I heard horrendous bear stories, it did make me pause for thought, but not for long – like the story early in our relationship of a black bear called Smokey. That bear was normally chained up and muzzled and used to wrestle his owner. The wrestler’s girlfriend never had any contact with that bear and was never allowed to touch him. She was blonde, like me, and the same age …
Usually after an ‘accident’ like that the bear is shot, though in this case the Canadian Government took the bear into care – thankfully. Andy and I made sure that we left a document with our lawyers stating that, should anything happen to us, no matter what, Hercules was not to be blamed or harmed.
Herc growled in his sleep, probably dreaming about his terrible ordeal in the wild when he was lost in the Outer Hebrides. I will tell you all about this in its place. First of all, I must tell you how a man won the love and trust of a grizzly bear, something the whole world said was impossible, and, in order to do that I must introduce you to my husband, ‘Grizzly’ Andy Robin.
