[pct-l] cows and bears

["Joanne Lennox" <goforth@cio.net>]

The first time I heard the sound in Northern California, I stopped and
listened and tried to reach back to find the memories to match the feelings
that had flooded over me when I first heard the sound.  But there seemed to
be only the feelings and  perhaps a vague half memory of walking through
fields. I could not remember when I had  first heard the tickling sound of
cow bells, but I most certainly had sometime when very young, sometime just
beyond the cusp of things remembered.  I could remember and feel a happy,
carefree joy and almost nothing else.  And I sense that this primordial
feeling , evoked by the sound of cow bells, is also very closely aligned to
why I eventually went to walking, wildness, and wandering, why I walked the
PCT.  When I heard it at the time, I remember thinking that this sound
alone was worth all the walking.

Afterwards I remember looking down at some very old cow dung and seeing it
almost as if for the first time.  Why, it was just like a bunch of grass
had been put in a blender and  then dumped on the ground.  Cows live on
this stuff!  I reached a new height of appreciation for cows, of the day
long effort it took to just grind up all that grass, of nutrients being
returned to the soil more quickly due to the metabolic fire of a second
stomach, rather than a  forest fire or grass fire.  The smell of dung I
figured must have something to do with bacterial growth or fermentation in
that big stomach, it seemed related but different than the smell of horse
dung.

At about this time I speared one of those odious black bear dung piles with
my trekking pole and brought it to my nose for a sniff.  Nothing.  I put my
nose as close as I could to the thing without actually touching it - still
no smell.  Must not be fresh enough I thought.  In the dry Northern
California air, the bear scat dries with a sheen, and looks moist, but by
touching the surface, and poking through to the inside you get a fair idea
of how fresh it is. Fresh bear dung is moist on the surface, as moist as
the inside(at least in drier areas  and at dry times).  I took to poking
every pile I came to. Later I learned to turn the piles over (if not fresh)
and examine the center which hadn't had time to dry.  I tried dipping
various sticks and cones in the fresh piles, but the dung was not at all
sticky and not enough dung would adhere to give a sniff test.  Eventually I
just knelt and took a good whiff.  I found that these piles have almost no
smell even when fresh  - if you get any smell it is faintly "vegetational"
in nature with a undertone of  "tobacco juice".  I started to believe all
the people that say that bears are basically vegetarians.  I saw nothing to
indicate that they were anything but vegetarians  - no smell, no bones, no
hair, just lots of dark,dark green matter than was faintly fibrous and
probably plant material but was unrecognizable.  Unlike horse and cow dung,
it did not have a smell but did have all that chlorophyll in it.  And how
were bears able to digest this stuff?  

In Washington, I saw bear piles that were entirely blueberries, many of
which were whole and undigested.  You could have made blueberry jam out of
the stuff. (My husbands asks me PLEASE do not try this on him!).  These
piles smell like the best homemade blueberry pie that grandmother ever
made.  Then I came to piles that were entirely mushrooms, and others that
were entirely False Solomon Seal berries, both with lots of chunks of
undigested and unchewed material.  Well, whatever bears are, they could
sure do with a little education like the kind my mom gave me about chewing
their food better.  All that effort at getting food and most of it wasted
because they don't chew their food!  It looked like their digestion was not
a lot better than their chewing.  And my Mom would have been after them too
about not having a balanced diet  - couldn't they eat some of the green
leafy stuff with the mushrooms?

Is it a wonder that bears are looking for new and more easily digested food
sources!  They must be living on a pretty narrow energy margin - think what
a rush it must be to eat an energy bar, or anything that we consume, where
the energy is large, easily digested and doesn't take much chewing -
addicted bears, bears in trouble, bears lives permanently altered, bears
who have forsworn any reform, bears beyond the reach of any 12 step
program.  Are we standing in the way of their evolution?  It is not chance
that they now hang out at picnic tables, and campground.  It is learning
and intelligence - it is seeking a way of life that represents perhaps a
better life, more energy for themselves and their children, a different way
of life than we believe bears should have however. After all, these are
wild animals, they should act like wild animals, and not bother us with
their appreciation of the more civilized apects of life.  But animals
evolve.  We humans now eat almost NONE of the food we did as primordial
humans in Africa - all of my food has been engineered by agricultural
SELECTION over millenia.  Some of you vegetarians may still live on beans
and nuts, but on my thruhike I learned to treasure meat, fat, salted
snacks,  baked goods, and ice cream.  We also have free choice.  While I
might be a different human if I ate only beans and nuts(and few other
things), I choose not to.  This choice is not open to the bear.  But he
keeps pushing the point.

I guess we should be thankful for small favors, that cows are not knocking
us over, and running off with our food bags.  Such multiple rebellions in
the "animal kingdom" could only spell a really vicious counterattack on the
bear's attempt to preempt part of our food supply.

A few days from the border of Canada I was filtering water, and watched two
young women approaching downhill from my watersource.  That they were going
uphill gave me a while to 
ponder the use of an unusual item carried on the back of one of their
packs.  I could think of a number of scenarios for use of this item, but
many were far-fetched, some ridiculous, so I just decided to ask why they
were carrying a large roll of shiny barbed wire. Their intiguing answer
seemed as far-fetched as any that I had thought up myself: They were
planting the barbed wire, baiting it with a "smell cocktail" inside, and
then coming back later to retrieve small pieces of fur stuck on the barbed
wire, these they analyzed and identified using DNA analysis. Considering
that such a device might also ensnare a hapless night hiker bent on stealth
camping, I almost asked them if they had identified  and cataloged any
curious and hungry thruhikers as well.  But I thought better of it, after
all they were from Washington State University and seemed to be serious
about the outcome of their research.  The DNA analysis, which they assured
me had become quite sophisticated, was capable of identiying individual
species and individuals.  I was trying to get past some of the inherent
sampling errors in their methodology, past the use of a low-tech and biased
sampling system, coupled with the use of a very high-tech analysis method
to give a very low tech "result"( actually the presence or absence of an
animal, not much more), in order to ask more questions.  I caught up and
asked what their "smell cocktail" consisted of: fish extracts, cattle
blood, and skunk extract.  Later I wondered if the whole set-up was not
just another thing to prove the presence of grizzly bears in the North
Cascades Park ( Sightings of Grizzly bears are about as common as those of
Big Foot; little evidence exists that the bears are resident and not just
coming in now and than from Canada).  I thought that a bear might be
ensnared more by curiosity than hunger; afterall, if I had smelled
their"cocktail", I probably would have investigated too.  The prejudices,
the emotions are so strong when bears come up, that I truely feel 
sometimes that the bears are wiser than we are.

Goforth
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Cc:            pct-l@backcountry.net
From:          Jeffrey Olson <jjolson@uwyo.edu>
Date:          Sun, 24 Oct 1999 10:11:20 -0600
Subject:       Re: [pct-l] Plans, Realities, Consequences
Content-type:  text/plain; charset=us-ascii

Jim Ostdick wrote:
> 
> I think you thru-hikers  have caused yourselves to evolve beyond the
> safe, structured patterns of Plan A. A trail like the PCT  provided the
> wildness you needed to get your jolt and you're drawn back to it.

Jim's point is astute.  Perhaps it is by looking at the two life
patterns as somehow distinct from one another that makes one a jolt in
relation to the other.  By looking at experience to originate "out
there" the two plans and the experiences they identify are constructed
to have little overlap.  Cannot the wilderness be found in the routines
of workaday life, and routines in the wilderness?  

If the long distance hiker returns to work, family, etc., does not the
possibility exist to infuse adventure into routine, questioning into
routine?  Cannot "The Trip" be continued in a different environment?  

When I was doing a section hike from Tahoe to Tuolomne a couple years
ago, I met a group of 20 something thru-hikers  on the reaches above
Sonora Pass.  We stopped and talked and I asked if any of them intended
to hike solo.  One fellow shuddered and said it was too hard.  I got a
real sense of an "emotional us" from them that seemed founded in a
caring, supporting, "we're in this together."  If that's not a challenge
to the routine of day-to-day life, I don't know what is.  

I know my month long, solo section hikes have made me a better teacher
and social worker, a better friend, and more caring and compassionate. 
I moved to Laramie to be closer to uncrowded wilderness, to live in a
smaller town than Seattle, to work with a smaller group of people.  For
me it would be emotionally crazy-making to separate my life into even an
abstract A or B.  Of course, I always thought the "adult world" and its
expectations was false for me.  Long distance hiking has enabled me a
kind of clarity, but so has most everything I've done, relationships,
jobs, etc.  

Experience and experiences don't originate "out there."  They originate
"in here."  IMHO...

Jeffrey Olson
Laramie, Wyoming, where it's sunny most of the time...
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