Bert Riggall's Greater Waterton,

Charlie Russell's Full Unedited Essay - "Bert Riggall: A Grandson's Perspective"

Awhile ago, I took a walk from Hawk’s Nest to the homestead where my grandparents made their first claim. A lot of trails wander by there, and I have walked or ridden that same path many times over. Even though most goings-on revolve around Hawk’s Nest, the old homestead is the heart of the family ranch.

            Bert Riggall arrived in the Waterton area with a survey crew in 1905. He must have been impressed with what he saw there because the following year he came back, having married by then, and he and his wife, Dora, homesteaded a quarter section with the coordinates that he had helped map. The land has not changed a lot since then. After the Canadian government pushed the Natives out and made the land available for us “civilized” European stock, things have stayed pretty much the same.

            But, my grandfather deserves credit for why the land has remained intact. It goes back to the deep connection he had with nature. He did not appreciate the land only for what it provided materially; he valued the intrinsic nature of his surroundings. This feeling, this wonderful relationship with place, was passed on to my parents who then instilled the same values in us, their children.

            The beauty of living in the same place all your life, on land that has been altered very little by humans, is that you get to watch how the natural cycles of animals, forests, creeks, grasses, flowers, shrubs, and the ever-changing climate unfold. The beavers who lived here when I was a child, dispersed, but they have returned. Abandoned decades ago, their dams are rebuilt and the aspens and willows have grown back enough so that beavers can thrive again. The cycle seems to take about 50 years.

            As I came up to the homestead, I could still see the depression in the ground where the log house stood. If you look closely, you can see the tops of the foundation stones around the edge. They are almost hidden by the century-old buildup of soil and grass, but they are still there.

            The log house was a second, more fortified effort to build shelter on the original homestead. My grandparents had learned their lesson from their first attempt—a small frame house built in the open. They were not the first to make the mistake of choosing a site during the summer when the weather is beautiful and inviting, then come to realize, when it is too late, that October winds often gust over 160 kilometres per hour. That is why, only six months later, after returning from town and finding the house upside down in Cottonwood Creek, my grandparents decided to plant their roots elsewhere. The next site was about a half a kilometre away, sheltered behind an aspen grove. That house stayed put until they decided to skid it to another location.   

            People make out homesteading as something romantic, but in those days it amounted to a $10 bet with the government that you wouldn’t starve to death living off your quarter of land in the young country of Canada. A lot of people lost the bet. They mistook the ability to make a living on the land with its overwhelming beauty. This is a very windy corner of Alberta—strong on scenery but weak on good soil and long growing seasons. It is only a periodic miracle that makes the long winters and deep snow survivable. Chinooks, the warm, west winds that sweep down from the mountains, can raise the temperature 27°C in just a few minutes. This brief exposure can melt a lot of snow in a couple of hours. But, as smart ranchers know, you can’t always rely on Chinooks when you need them, so it’s best to plan for the worst.

            Bert’s decision to homestead that particular quarter was an enigma to me because 90 per cent of it is wetlands. To make it at all useful it would have had to be drained and the bush cleared, to grow any grass at all. So it must have been his choice since Dora, my grandmother, was a farmer and would have chosen much more suitable, arable land to work. But, eventually, I understood why my grandfather selected that particular 160 acres. Although there wasn’t much food for cattle, it had all kinds of wildlife and that was what interested him personally and professionally, as a wilderness guide.

            Today, you can see an even greater array of animals—mink, water shrews, bitterns, warblers, and all kinds of ducks. There are many more moose, elk, grizzly bear, cougar, and wolves than there were in 1905. When the bison were removed, the Natives had nothing to eat and so they went after elk and deer in order to survive. Of course, the carnivores—wolves, cougars, and so on—were also killed. The whole landscape changed when settlers moved in. Then, as people became more aware of conservation, the natural order of wildlife started to return.

            When I was five, my grandfather had a heart attack. Because he was weakened physically, I missed out on the wilderness trips that so many enjoyed. Bert was well-known and loved and people were enthralled with his knowledge of natural history and stories. What I was able to experience with him, however, is unforgettable.

            During his recuperation, over the winter of 1946–47, our family moved down to the “canyon” to live with Bert and Dora. By the 1920s, they had already moved several times, but their fourth house was only a couple kilometres downstream from where their first home blew into the creek. Hawk’s Nest, where my parents, siblings, and I lived, was built about the same time, a kilometre away perched up on a hill.

            My grandfather’s home was a perfect place to witness spring. At the bottom of a grassy, south-facing hillside, the house was the first to capture the warmth when the sun’s angle slowly rose to its apex. This was a real boon when the hard winters of the 1940s hit.

            That particular winter at the canyon stands out in my memory. I was in first grade. Dick, my older brother, and I attended a one-room school about three kilometres miles away, Parkview School, built in 1915. My younger brother, John, was still pre-school age. Depending on the time of year and the weather, Dick and I would choose between a couple of routes that we would take to school. The good weather route was a shortcut downstream that followed open hillsides and meandered through the neighbour’s land where we crossed over to the main road and then took a side road up to the school. The second, deep snow weather route went along the road leading to Waterton Park. Like most all others at the time, the road was poorly graded. Between November and April, it was drifted in and impassable for automobiles.

            During those months, Dick and I had to be on snowshoes. Often, by the time we returned home, the stars would be out shining bright in the sky. It was fantastic, but, truthfully, we were more preoccupied with trying to make it home and keep our faces from freezing. Now, when I am out and about and feel the same wind, I think back to those treks to school with nostalgia.

            Occasionally, there were horse and sleigh tracks to follow. It always seemed there was a strong wind blowing from one direction or another. Winds from the north were particularly cold. It was a long way to travel for kids our age, exposed to the weather as we were, and having to deal with extreme temperatures. The main thing that we had going for us was that we were always dressed warmly and even though it was sometimes a month between trips to town for groceries, our family usually had enough to eat. We were taught to handle conditions like these, not to lose our heads when things got uncomfortable or confusing. When there was a fierce storm, my father, Andy Russell, would come to meet us. His tracks provided a nice, freshly packed trail for the rest of the way home, which was very helpful in blizzards.

            The trail down the hill passed by a windmill. Its blades swivelled on top of a short tower held down by stones piled at the base. This was one of the things that made Grandfather’s house unique in the community. It was a 32-volt electrical system, but the battery bank was not very extensive. Bert’s priority was to make sure there was enough electricity in storage to run his darkroom. Unless the wind was blowing steady and hard, there wasn’t enough voltage for general lighting, so we had to rely on candles and coal-oil lanterns for backup.

            The canyon house was too small to provide a room for every person so my bed was a camp cot tucked in one corner at the end of a lathe in my grandfather’s darkroom, which also served as a workshop. I learned the hard way to be careful not to get my heavy knitted wool socks full of the fine steel turnings left on the shop floor. They seriously affected the comfort of my long walks to and from school, which were already hard enough in rough weather.

            The lathe was self-powered by a heavy flywheel that could reach a speed of 600 revolutions per minute. The pedal driving the flywheel was geared low to get it started and could then be put into higher gear, which required about 50 pounds of pressure by one foot on the down stroke. You had to do this to maintain the chuck at a spin of several thousand rpms. 

            Grandfather’s creations were made using a combination of the lathe, a hand-powered bench drill press, vice, hacksaws, and sharp files. He was known for his craftsmanship for miles around. I watched him make everything from small, fine threaded screws to an elaborate sight for one of his many guns. And that wasn’t all. The shop could be converted into a darkroom by simply covering the windows.

On those nights, I would sit by him at the photographic end of the room and watch him process film. I loved watching him make the prints, but before he could develop it, he first had to process the negatives that he had taken the year before. This part was not very interesting for an oft-tired six year old. The processing was very technical and had to be accomplished in total darkness. You had to pay close attention to solution temperatures for the development to turn out well.

            Things got a lot more exciting when the paper printing process began. My grandfather would stand at the bench under the dull, orangey glow of the “safe light.” He would first project the image and focus the light through the negative with the enlarger onto light-sensitive paper. The paper had to be exposed in this way for a predetermined amount of time. He would then put this stiff sheet of paper into a tray of chemical developing fluid, and, all the while keeping the developer sloshing slowly over the paper surface, gently tipping the tray back and forth. Then came the fun part—watching a positive image appear as the faint grey tones gradually darkened until a vibrant black and white image emerged, fully developed. It was always a surprise what the image turned out to be. The possibilities seemed endless. While my grandfather was busy with the process, I would try to guess what the photo might be. It might be a long line of packhorses ascending a rocky pass or a large mule deer buck with velvet-covered antlers working his way through a camp site. Then again, it might be birds, flowers, or people.

            When the development process was complete, the print would be placed into a fixer solution tray for 10 minutes, followed by a thorough washing using gallons of free running water that came by gravity from the spring up the hill near the wind charger. With his usual foresight, my grandfather had buried the pipe well below frost level to prevent freezing. A constant flow of water was needed to wash out any remaining chemicals from the paper. This would ensure that the print would last indefinitely without yellowing. As a result of abundant water and careful skill, Bert’s images remain almost as crisp as the day he printed them decades before.

Most nights I was too tired to watch him for very long and I would fall asleep in my cot by the lathe, in the faint glow of the safe light, lulled by the rhythmic tapping of the tray as Bert slowly rocked the developing solution over the paper. The next morning, he would draw back the white sheets on the drying table and show us his night’s work. It was magic! The art of photography was one of many things I shared with my grandfather that shaped my life.

            My Irish-born grandmother was the real rancher in the family. While we spent that winter at the canyon house, my parents helped her feed the cattle with her team and sleigh. The main horse herd grazed on the wind-blown range. Typically, they weren’t fed unless the weather was horrid or if deep snow covered the grass in the absence of a Chinook. Dora usually fed the cattle by herself because she and Bert had agreed that he would spend his winters reading and working in his darkroom and shop. The rest of the year, he was busy guiding wilderness trips, which provided the mainstay to support the ranch. This had been their understanding from the start. There was no dispute about this arrangement or any resentment. Dora loved working outside with the cattle and keeping her chickens safe from the many predators who did their best to nab a few hens.

            When we moved in with Bert and Dora that winter, it certainly altered their routine, but there was also the important operation of turning over the outfitting business to my parents. This required working out the many details. It was a great winter. Dad and his father-in-law were good friends and my mother and her mother were very close. Our move down to the canyon provided time to socialize while still getting everything that needed to be accomplished, done. It was also a rare opportunity for me to get to understand my grandfather. Understanding something or someone has always been important to me—as opposed to just knowing—and the reason is I want to grasp not only how things are done, but why. 

            Bert spent several hours every day catching up on whatever was going on in the world. Usually, he would rest during the day and read late into the night. In addition to darkroom supplies, he made sure that he had a stack of books lined up on diverse subjects that he felt he needed to understand. He also had the latest battery-powered radio technology. While there were quite a few stations, except for a couple, like the Salt Lake City Mormon Radio and the CBC, it was hard to get a good clear signal. We didn’t have FM (frequency modulated) in those days, only AM (amplitude modulated) and shortwave.

            Bert had specific programs that he liked to listen to for 15 to 20 minutes in the evening. We had to be very quiet at news time. Probably from years of the loud blasting of high-powered rifles, Bert’s hearing was not good. I was always eager to hear about what he listened to and when the news broadcast was over, he would explain what was going on.

            That winter coincided with India’s independence. Mahatma Gandhi was one of my grandfather’s greatest heroes. He listened intently to the statesman’s struggles to keep India’s independence process peaceful as the country broke away from England’s governance. I remember clearly when, a year later, Mother, Dick, and I came down the hill from Hawk’s Nest for a visit. Afterwards, Mother told us that when she saw the look on Granny’s face as we walked into the house, she was sure that Grandfather had died. But, Bert wasn’t dead, only weeping. He had just heard of Gandhi’s assassination on 30 January 1948. We had never seen him cry before. It made a huge impression on me.

            As the days got longer and spring of ’47 progressed, mother was pregnant with my brother Gordon. Grandfather began to venture out for the first time since fall when he had his heart attack. Although weak, he was feeling quite well. Dick and I would join him on leisurely walks. We showed him the prairie crocus pushing its fuzzy head up through last year’s dead grass that we had found on our way back from school. My grandfather stared at it for a long time as though he had not expected to ever see another one again, or maybe that’s how he always looked at things.

            Bert taught us to take notes on migrating birds as they made their way north. He knew where most of them had wintered and took pains to explain these details to us. We learned that there were specific dates for the times when each of the various bird species were expected to arrive. There were also dates for when specific flowers were expected to bloom. The timing of bird arrival and flower blooming would tell us whether the year would be marked as an early or late spring. These lessons in geography were much more meaningful than those we were given in school. The lives of birds were fascinating and Bert had better maps. He also had far greater knowledge of what was going on in nature.

            One day, he took me on a tour of some of the places where he had transplanted wild flowers. He planted them as close to the house as possible so that they could be tended to maximize their chances of survival. There was the prickly pear cactus that he had found at lower elevation in the sandy clay on the banks of the Old Man River. He brought the plant to his early-to-warm sunny hillside above the house where the soil was similar, and although it was not flourishing at this higher elevation, the cactus managed to survive. My grandfather could do that—get things to grow, even bloom, in places where they normally did not grow. This was another example of his appreciation for nature, attention to detail, and the care with which he approached life.

            In early May, Bert took me to a deep grove of aspens where transplanted trilliums were proudly flourishing near a spring. He had found them on the slopes of Vimy Mountain just above Middle Waterton Lake in 1908. Bert was the first to record their existence and recognize that this was the only place in Alberta where trilliums grew.

            He had also transplanted some calypso orchids to a shady, cool environment under balsam trees, which the flowers like. Bert told Dick and I that it was probably too early for them to bloom, but we made our way anyway, walking slowly up the steep north-facing bank of Cottonwood Creek. He was right; it was too early for the orchids. Near there, he had planted the large white mountain orchid. Since they had yet to bloom as well, we would have to wait until June to check again.

            As Grandfather got stronger and the weather, calmer, he and Dad brought out the guns. The shooting range was located on the flat in front of the house. Dad set up targets at 100 yards and 200 yards out from the bench rest. The purpose wasn’t to hone shooting skills—it was to understand the load. To do this the bench to sit on and the table was built as a unit  and allowed them to shoot with near perfect comfort and support. It was a bit tricky, because you had to shoot over the chicken house.

After years of hunting coyotes for their hides (the proceeds of which were used to help feed us), my father became a good shot. But it was during these days with Bert that he learned the fine art of establishing the exact load necessary for each cartridge and specific rifle. The two would shoot a few rounds, then Dad would go to the target, come back, discuss results with Bert, reset sights, and shoot more rounds. Because Bert was recuperating, Dad did most of the legwork. When they were out of live cartridges, they would go to the loading bench, reload the empty brass shell cases, and practise shoot some more. They had many different guns, and it was a long, very exacting process to get the right combination of powder and weight of bullet for a particular cartridge and gun. We all were given our first .22 calibre rifles at a young age and taught to shoot straight and safely.

            Looking back, I have to wonder how much influence these experiences had on the way I, and my siblings, made choices in life, and how much genes played a role. People are always trying to figure who looks like who in the family and from whom they might have inherited a certain talent or behaviour. But, sometimes there doesn’t seem to be any connection at all. It’s hard for me to know where I got what I did to become the person I am today, but I do know that the time spent with my grandfather was one of the most important influences. I was a very curious child and my questions were endless. Luckily, my family was there to provide satisfying answers.

            Now, reflecting back on that time and what Grandfather was going through that spring, I have a better understanding. I am feeling vulnerable myself at 75, which was the age he died in 1959. My mother also died at 75 and my brother John passed on just this fall at 72. My only son, Anthony, to whom I had planned to leave the family land, died at 39 years of age.

            Thanks to Bert, I learned how to figure out the right questions and to pursue the things that I felt were important even if I had to travel to the other side of the world. I have done this and am satisfied that I have not wasted my time. There are still many questions that I would like answered and more things I want to see, but my main goal is to get out in the bush—be quiet and watch all the wondrous details of nature. I will do this for as long as my body lets me.

            We spent one more year, from 1951 to ’52, living with my grandfather. A couple of years earlier, he and my grandmother had moved from the ranch to the town of Pincher Creek. Then Dora suddenly died from a blood clot that had moved to her heart shortly after having a hysterectomy. Bert was devastated by this loss of his beloved partner and we moved back to his house to be with him. For me, this entailed quite an adjustment. I suddenly found myself in town at what seemed like a huge school. There were almost a hundred kids and some of them were not all that friendly. 

            Grandfather was still doing a lot of gunsmith work. His darkroom and shop were set up like before. People from all over brought him their guns with various problems that they wanted solved. I was 10 by then and was even more fascinated watching him do lathe work. I was always asking a lot of questions and all round getting in his way, but he didn’t seem to mind and I learned more and more. He taught me how to read a micrometre and showed me how to turn a few pieces of his precious brass, although I needed some help keeping the manually operated lathe turning. The most valuable lesson I learned was to pay attention to detail. You could be precise to a thousandth of an inch. I brought this shop experience out to nature and it has served me well, especially with the bears. Something else: Bert not only taught me what to see but how to see.

            As a result of his tutoring, I ended up working nine years later with an inventor in Pasadena, California, Ted Heyer. He had visited Hawk’s Nest with a friend of the family. I had just quit my struggle with high school and was looking for a way to be useful, if not academic. Something I said obviously prompted Ted to invite me to work with him. He had just “quit” his wage-earning job because he wanted to pursue an invention that he was developing. It also might have been that he was experiencing a similar feeling of vulnerability. But, right then and there, Ted hired me to help out his precarious venture. Two months later I was living in California.

            He owned a double lot in Pasadena and had rented the front house to a doctor who recognized Ted’s genius and so had asked Ted to help him with an idea. Now, with the doctor’s guidance, Ted was in the early stages of developing the very first shunt valve for hydrocephalic children. Up until then, the condition was fatal. This invention was intended to keep these children alive.

            Everything in Ted’s shop had to be done very precisely. I was put on the job of making moulds on a lathe that formed silicone rubber parts for the shunt valve that drained the excess fluid inside the skull into the kids’ aorta. I worked there for three winters and we became close friends during that time. He was a natural philosopher. We spent hours upon hours, late at night, just sitting and talking. This happened to be the time when he was humbly progressing from being a simple wage earner to a multi-millionaire. 

            Eventually, Ted asked me to become his partner, but I had a major conflict. At the same time, my father had come up with a very enticing offer. The wilderness that had been the backbone of his and Bert’s outfitting business for 55 years was becoming compromised. Tired of giving way to the powerful bulldozers of “progress,” Dad had found some funding to make a film about grizzly bears—not the usual romantic version, but what their life was really like. While Disney had just made a film about grizzlies, a lot of it was conducted in captivity. Most of the filming was staged. Bears were kept in enclosures and starved so that they would chase other animals out of desperation. Needless to say, it did not depict bears truthfully and what was filmed was abnormal, stressed behaviour. Some of the animals had their claws and teeth removed to protect photographers from inadvertent injury.

It was a tough decision, but Ted suggested that I could work for my father in the summer and with him in the winter. This was a perfect arrangement. It was 1961 and this would be the first documentary about grizzlies ever filmed in the wild. Although I might have become wealthy if I had gone full-time with Ted, I do not regret my decision to work with Dick and my father. The experience seeded my life’s work, which became the quest to understand the true nature of grizzlies. Finally, after all these years, I feel some satisfaction that the world is starting to see sense and grizzlies are being given a chance to live without humanity’s terrible prejudice.

            It was Bert’s darkroom lessons that eventually led me to New York City where I studied filmmaking, and it was his lathe teachings that gave me the confidence to build two aircrafts. One was a floatplane I flew for 19 years in the wilderness. Eleven of those years were spent in Russia with brown bears. Of all the things I have done in my life, building and flying that aircraft, unsupported in the Kamchatka wilderness, gives me the most pride—and it all started with learning skills and values nurtured by my grandfather during the first 12 years of my life.

Of course, Bert Riggall’s real legacy was passing on his horse pack train business to my mother and father after he had a heart attack in 1946. Dad came to work for Bert in 1935 and ended up marrying Bert’s daughter Kay. The product of that nuptial arrangement, the family ranch and all the horse and camping trips with Dad into the mountains for a month at a time, gave me what a lot of people would consider a near perfect childhood setting.

            I also learned a lot from Bert, indirectly, through my mother. He had schooled my mother in many things, from the necessity of paying attention to business details, to how to catch a horse who did not want to be caught. She taught us what she had learned as Bert Riggall’s child and passed on this unique perspective. We were expected to pick buckets of wild berries, feed the chickens, weed the garden, and on top of this, bring in the milk cow twice a day for milking. We spent more time with her than our father and what we learned from her was different every season.      During the spring, summer, and fall, she would tell us the names of flowers and show us how to fish Cottonwood Creek using both wet and dry flies. In the winter, Mother taught us what tracks belonged to which animal and both she and my father would show us how to read the details of those tracks. If you looked carefully, there were amazing stories told such as delicate brushes of a horned owl’s wingtip feathers at the sudden ending of a mouse’s footprints and then, as if for punctuation, a drop of blood that marked the end of that life. Above all, we were taught to be able to do things on our own.

            Because Mother had to stay home with our younger brothers, John and Gordon, she could not always accompany us on our adventures. So she would carefully describe how to make our way. We ventured out on our own into grizzly bear country along steep cliffs at a very young age. Once, when Dick and I were nine and seven, respectively, Mother told us how to ascend Horseshoe Mountain (now called Lakeview Ridge). We tried to follow her directions, but failed at first attempt. After we got back home, Mother explained the route again, this time providing some essential details about the bush full of deadfall we encountered and how to get through it. We set out again and made the whole six and a half kilometres to the top of the mountain and then back. This is one example of the kind of freedom—and confidence—that she gave us.

            Nowadays, my mother would be judged as criminally negligent to encourage such things, but she was far from careless. She was confident that we would survive because she and her sister, Babe, had been raised the same way and they both lived to tell the tales. How different they were from today’s parents who indulge and pander to their children! 

            Perhaps, I learned even more from horses. Most of my teens were spent eating dust stirred up by horses on the trot ahead of me. Because we became good at it, Dick and I were given the job of moving a herd from one place to the next. Dad had about 110 horses and Dick and I would often be the ones responsible for transferring a herd of 60 or 70, 30 kilometres away. When the destination was the northwest branch of the Oldman River, we faced more than 160 kilometres of challenges. This job would have ordinarily been undertaken by four or five adult men, but we prided ourselves on doing this job reliably and on our own.

There’s a lot to trailing a herd of horses smoothly through a maze of different terrains. For example, you have to be able to get them past open gates leading to tempting pastures and if they do go in, be able to round them up and out efficiently without disturbing the flow of the rest of the herd. In short, you have to understand the animal, think like the animal, and anticipate what they might do before they do it. Soon, I became the chief horse wrangler and packer on trips.

            For many years, I was the one who everyone called on to find cows and horses that nobody else could. You cannot carefully observe animals as much and for as long as I have without understanding a bit of how nature works. Working so closely with horses and cows and spending so much time in the bush sparked an interest in animal minds. I very quickly realized that most animals were smarter than me, and this revelation has been a huge help throughout my life.  

            All this time in the bush set my childhood experiences apart from most others. I am not sure who is to blame for my getting off course with how the majority of humans think, but it was probably my grandfather and my parents combined. Bert and Dora’s love of the land and natural curiosity put me on the path that I have taken. I insisted on forming my own questions and was unyielding when it came to getting answers. I did not want to be told by other people what questions were important to ask.

            Aside from some travels, I have remained on Bert’s land. Eventually, I bought most of it from my parents, who owned a good portion of his ranch and became partners with one of the families that Bert had outfitted and guided for generations. There were two families who were so captured by the beauty of the area that they ended up purchasing land for raising their children. Both families were involved in the construction of Hawk’s Nest in 1923. Nine years later, in 1932, Grandfather helped Russell and Miriam Bennett put the 10-section Shoderee Ranch together situated along the Waterton River, just east of Hawk’s Nest. Part of it was a section of Bert’s own holdings that he had accumulated as his horse herd grew. The second family involved was the Crosby/Tyler/Copp family. (Although the daughters’ names changed when they married, they are nonetheless part of the same family.) We became partners in 1972. Genie Copp, a third generation Crosby, had spent much of her childhood inspired by my grandfather. For this reason, it was important for her to buy that ranch and so she talked her husband Belton Copp into it. The family bought the Cloudy Ridge Ranch in 1971. For 10 years, we ran our ranches together as a unit, with me as the operating partner. With our combined land, we were the third largest ranch in the area.

            This background, plus the work with my father in the 1960s, got me interested in grizzlies. During the filming, I started to see that grizzly bears were badly misunderstood. The grizzlies in the Yukon, Alaska, British Columbia, and the few left in the Waterton area, were animals who wanted to get along with humans. Bears are intrinsically social, they need to be social, but our species has not let them do so because of our own profound fear. It is human fear, not grizzly danger, that has caused the problem.

 

Subtitle: A Contemporay Perspective

            Grizzlies in western North America have been all but eliminated from grazing lands appropriated by ranchers. The reigning belief was that bears were too dangerous to co-exist with humans and their livestock. Admittedly, Grandfather and Dad were partly responsible for perpetuating the grizzly myth, namely, that grizzlies are dangerous, unpredictable, and become even more so if they lose their fear of humans. Bert and Dad grew up in a culture where hunters were required to have had at least one fearsome animal against whom they could test their bravery and heroism. Grizzly bears were made to fit that bill and the myth fostered a culture of fear. I saw the discrepancy between what I experienced with grizzlies up close and what they were made out to be.

            When I took over the ranch, I had the opportunity to explore the possibility of sharing the land with local grizzly bears. I was reasonably sure that these animals were capable of living peacefully with us much closer than what had ever been allowed by European settlers and ranchers. So I set out to find out, and prove, that it was possible to ranch on good terms with bears. Foremost, I wanted to learn what it took to get along with bears and what kinds of relationship this entailed. But, as I began to research this subject, I was unable to find much information—even from my two biologist brothers, Dick and John. What I was told was that when you are studying animal behaviour, you are not supposed to have any relationship whatsoever. Any indication that the animal is aware of the researcher immediately invalidates the data. The observed bear behaviour was therefore considered “contaminated” and “unnatural.” In order to obtain scientifically accurate data, a researcher was required to make observations from afar to ensure that the animal’s behaviour was in no way affected by a human presence.

            I did not care about pure behaviour. Furthermore, I knew from my years of observing bears in all sorts of settings that chances are they were quite aware of researchers whether near or far. Bears and other wildlife have amazing abilities to see and scent.

            My goal was to learn how to get along with bears, just like I would want to get along with my neighbour. I actively invited bears to be my guests and share the land with my cattle. Because we ranched next to Waterton Lakes National Park, there were quite a few bears. When bears got the chance to raise their cubs on productive land, their numbers got even higher. In the past, driven from agriculturally rich land, bears had been relegated to semi-alpine elevations where nothing very succulent grows. Bears had also been denied winter-kill buffalo to scavenge. Humans had not only driven bears, but buffalo out. While neighbour ranchers occasionally had trouble with grizzlies killing their cattle, I could get along with them perfectly well if I was a good neighbour—and that included making up for the bears’ loss of historically available winter-kill buffalo.

            During 18 years of ranching, we had about 400 animals and I am not aware of losing one of them to a grizzly. One of my theories was that if grizzlies could be kept from being hungry and had access to sufficient food early in the spring, they would leave the cattle alone. Based on this proposition, I left the bears my dead stock to eat when they came out of their hibernation dens. Because our land bordered the park, I could put these dead animals close to the boundary away from cattle calving grounds and away from humans. Eventually, a neighbour saw the wisdom of this practice and gave me his dead animals to increase the bears’ spring supplement. Together, our contributions amounted to a near wall of meat at a critical time for needy bears.

            As the years passed, my theory became fact. At the same time, I realized that I was not a good rancher for the reason that I could never view my cattle as just a product to make money. I had split the partnership with the Copps, but they have continued their ranching for two more generations using the same practice with bears that I started years before.      

            This successful experiment encouraged me to try and change how more people viewed grizzlies. If I could change people’s attitudes, bears would have access to a lot more habitat and better, violence-free lives. I wanted ranchers and wildlife personnel to relax and allow bears back on their lands. To accomplish this, I needed to demonstrate these ideas more completely. I had to show in no uncertain terms that the common opinion about bears was wrong. This required finding a place where there were many bears who I could live with so that I could make sure, in my own mind, that bears could be trusted.

            I was never interested in becoming a scientist, but for this project, I knew I could conduct good and meaningful research. As far as I could see, the traditional, natural sciences’ approach was mostly about controlling nature and “managing” wildlife, and nature in general, for the sole purpose of benefitting humans. Our species has been fine-tuning these skills for thousands of years, and we have gotten really good at it, except, now, it is pretty clear that our plundering is not going to work for much longer. My work with bears has been an effort to help turn our culture toward a more constructive and ethical direction.

            It took me several years to find a suitable locale for my study, but I finally found it on the Kamchatka Peninsula in the Russian Far East. I was able to go there because the Soviet Union had just collapsed and it was the first opportunity in a very long time that westerners were allowed to visit this previously jealously guarded military zone. With the help of a Russian biologist, Igor Revenko, I obtained permission to build a cabin on the edge of Kambalnoye Lake. While it had a geographical feel of the Aleutian Islands, it was stocked with huge amounts of salmon and dwarf Siberian pine nuts, which are perfect brown bear (what grizzlies are called in Europe) food.

            It was a miracle that I was able study in such an amazing place. The lake was located at the very tip of the peninsula where virtually no one ever went. I could not have asked for a better opportunity. This particular area, about 500 square kilometres, was home for more than 400 brown bears. To top it off, I was able to control who and how many people could visit. I used my Kolb, one of the two planes that I built on my own, to survey and monitor from the air. This way I could see what was going on in the much larger vicinity, 2,000 square kilometres, comprising the South Kamchatka Sanctuary. Keeping an eye on humans was key. I did not want the bears to get one message of friendliness and trust from me, and then get the usual untrustworthy message from hunters, poachers, or even tourists.

            Over the 10 years that I lived there, I came to realize there was no limit to the number of bears with whom humans could live, providing that there were a few rules. With electric fencing, I could easily keep bears from getting into my food or wrecking my plane. We formed an agreement that I would not hurt them and they seemed to agree likewise. Another thing I learned was that bears controlled their own numbers. They do not need to be “managed.” Of course, thinking that they do is silly. After all, brown bears have been on this planet for thousands of years and did just fine without park personnel “managing” them.

            To my surprise, the bear study took on a totally different dimension with the rescue and rearing of orphaned brown bear cubs. Over the decade in Russia, I rescued 10 bears whose mothers had been killed. I bought them at a very primitive zoo and took them by air to the cabin I had built when I first arrived in Kamchatka. If I had not taken the cubs, they would have been killed.

            From there, I helped them become independent enough to live out the rest of their lives in the wild. This required me to apply all that I had observed and learned about bears. I had to become a mother bear if the cubs were to have any chance of survival. They needed to be self-sufficient enough to be able to find and craft a winter den. Remarkably, they did this, and at less than a year of age.

            Over time, word got out that if you came to visit my camp, you were liable to experience a brown bear running full speed toward you from hundreds of metres away. Some bears became so keen to see people that they would run up, skid to a stop, fall down, and then put their feet up in the air to be patted and their long claws tweaked—obviously behaviour of a very dangerous animal.

            My take-away from all these years is that if a grizzly bear trusts people, then that bear will be very safe to be around. If, however, a bear has had negative experiences with humans and been treated poorly, disrespectfully, then all bets are off. Because of all the violent things that we do to them, bears have plenty of reasons not to trust humans. So if we are going to be safe around them, we have to stop doing those things. It may take some time. Bears have suffered terribly from humans for a long time and been traumatized. But, in general, bears seem to forgive much faster than humans and are eager to be friends again.

            After my sojourn in Russia, I returned to Hawk’s Nest. I live on the land that my grandfather homesteaded. There is no more grizzly hunting in Alberta. The bears now venture far out onto the prairies like they used to and are raising many more cubs than in the past. A lot of farmers and ranchers do not like these animals roaming the land because they are not used to seeing bears, and the grizzly myth is tenacious. But there is real progress, and thanks to the Waterton Biosphere Carnivores and Communities Program, people here are learning how to manage their fear and live with their grizzly neighbours.

            For the most part, ranchers obey the law and do not kill bears. Bit by bit, seeing that nobody is getting hurt, they are becoming more comfortable. It is not easy to make the mental changeover, but they are doing it. Some are even beginning to enjoy these delightful animals. That is more than my grandfather was able to do when he looked out the door and saw a grizzly. I think it would make him proud to see this change.