Читать книгу That Wasn’t the Plan - Reg Sherren - Страница 15

Lots of stories were waiting to be told, great stories, all over Southern Alberta. Outside the city rose those beautiful Rocky Mountains, and whether it was ghosts at the Banff Springs Hotel or cougars in Kananaskis Country, there was a rarely a dull moment.

I had been talking with a good-natured big-game biologist, a fellow named Orval Pall, about a capture program he was running for the provincial wildlife department. He agreed that showing a capture would be a great way to help explain the pressure cougars were under because of urban sprawl. People were concerned about increased sightings. (Although we were the ones invading their territory, not the other way around.) Orval would capture the big cats and put radio collars on them to assess their movements. But in order to place a radio collar on a cougar, first you had to catch one—no small feat. I wanted to capture it all on camera. That proved to be much more difficult than I thought.

First we tried filming from the air as Orval attempted to pick up a radio-collar signal. Camera operator Morris Cruise, a Brit with a dry sense of humour, agreed to go up in the small Cessna. It had no room for me, which turned out to be a good thing. The wind was rough as they dipped and doodled in the hills, pitching the little plane nearly upside down as they tried to pick up the radio signal. It was far too rough for Morris to get a shot. When they landed, he did not look well. When I asked him how things went, with his dry wit he replied, “Well, I threw up twice, but I managed to swallow it.” We moved on to Plan B.

Cougars are fast, elusive animals. You could spend months in the back country and never see one, much less catch one. But where there’s a will, there’s a way. Orval had hired a group of fellows who called themselves the Houndsmen. Their hounds would be released in an area where Orval had seen scat, a kill or a bedding place—something to indicate cougar activity—and the hounds would soon pick up the scent.

Cougars are also short-winded. Once hounds flush out a cat, it takes off. It sprints for about a kilometre before becoming winded, then it climbs a tree. The hounds hold it there until everyone else catches up. It’s no trouble finding them because the dogs will not shut up. The howling and barking never stops.

No problem, I figured. This time I went with cameraman Mike Hunchak, a big bull of a guy with a great eye for television. We would just follow Orval and the huntsmen, and bingo! We’d have a great cougar capture story.

Our first attempt to record a big cat was up the side of Wind Mountain, not far from Mount Lougheed. It was early April 1986. We drove as close to the site as we could, but after that it was all legwork. We had a heavy Betacam camera, batteries, a tripod and other gear. We had stripped the kit down as much as we could, but we still had a good thirty kilograms of gear to carry.

The hounds picked up the scent down in the valley and soon the cat was on the run. But it decided to bolt straight up the side of the mountain. Its path was steeper than a forty-five-degree angle, and within moments our legs had turned to rubber. By the time we reached the top, where the hounds had pinned the big cat, it was too dark to film. Unfortunately we had left the camera light and its heavy battery belt behind. It was a magnificent male, easily eighty kilos, but we didn’t have a shot. My first attempt at becoming Canada’s Marlin Perkins was a dismal failure.

A week later we tried again. Spring was starting in the Kananaskis, with green growth sprouting forth. But the night before, it had snowed—a lot. That morning a good fifteen centimetres of wet, fluffy mush was lying atop slippery new growth as we picked our way along narrow mountain trails with drop-offs of a hundred metres or more to the valley below.

Fearless Mike, who again had drawn the short straw to go with me, didn’t flinch; he even got an incredible shot of a bald eagle screaming down at some bighorn sheep far below. We carried on. Soon the hounds were on the scent and had a cat trapped far up in a pine tree. Orval waited until we arrived and prepared to tranquilize the animal. He was using a new drug that basically immobilized the cat but left it partially awake, eyes open.

The cougar we trapped was quite young. Mike got great shots of the dart going in, the cougar being lowered and Orval working out measurements and putting the radio collar on. I knew these were pictures few had seen before, certainly not on the nightly news. Our story would be from a much different perspective than news stories about people having their dogs taken by cougars or cougars challenging people on walking trails.

Orval Pall examines a young male cougar captured in Alberta’s Kananaskis Country. I was feeling pretty cool about the whole thing, until I saw the claw marks nearby, made by a grizzly. Then I felt a little scared.

To protect the cat, Orval and his team planned to wait until it had fully regained its senses. Mike and I had to hike out on our own. “Just follow the creek bed down to the road,” Orval said. Easy enough. A kilometre down the hill we came upon a tree where a grizzly had marked its territory. Huge fresh claw marks three or four metres up scarred the side of the tree. Deep, angry claw marks. We were not long in getting the heck out of there and back to the relative safety of our van. I had never seen a grizzly in the wild and I really didn’t want to see one that day.

It all led to my first feature on a network newscast—Saturday Report, hosted by George McLean. The half-hour news show gave me almost four minutes of airtime to show Orval and the cougar to viewers across Canada. George smiled after the piece ended. I beamed.

Two months later Orval was dead.

It was June 6, 1986. Orval and pilot Kenneth Wolff were again up in the Cessna, trying to pick up another radio signal, when they disappeared. Later that evening, another small plane went up looking for them, and it also crashed. Three people died in that tragedy.

A sad, tense week of searching dragged on. In the middle of it all, I decided we needed to do a story about the dangers of flying in the mountains in small planes. The idea was to use two cameras in different small planes, shooting between the two. There were no GoPro action cameras in those days, so we had to break our camera in two, separating the recorder from the lens so we could interview the pilot from the cockpit as he was flying.

The gentleman who would be taking me up was one of the most experienced pilots around, with decades of successful time flying in the mountains. As we were taxiing down the runway, he said, “It feels good to be back behind the controls. I had a heart attack a while back and I’ve just been cleared to fly again.”

I thought about this revelation as we lifted into the air. After a few minutes I replied, “Nothing personal, but after we level off, maybe you can give me some pointers on how to land this thing—just in case?” He laughed. I laughed too, but I was nervous. The impact those mountain winds could quickly have on a small plane was dramatic; still, we recorded it all and we survived. But a week later, a military Twin Otter trying to spot the first two planes also crashed. Now thirteen people were dead. Ground crews eventually got to all three crash sites.

I have often thought the crash that killed Orval and his pilot could easily have happened when the other cameraman who worked with me on this story, Morris Cruise, was flying with them trying to spot cougars. But dwelling on “what ifs” can drive you a little crazy. Orval was a professional. He had the opportunity to tell the whole country about Alberta’s magnificent cougars and what he was trying to accomplish as a wildlife biologist. An unfortunate accident ended his life and the lives of twelve others, but at least he died doing what he loved best.

The more stories I got under my belt, the more I learned which ones had a real impact on audiences. And although that wasn’t the plan, I started to search them out: wildlife or human-interest stories, stories driven by emotion and stories driven by controversy. By the time I had finished telling this story, Orval Pall and his cougars, sadly, had delivered all three.