STANLEY & FRIENDS
After dragging ourselves inside one cold and wet October afternoon, I was brewing up a pot of scalding hot tea for myself and a fellow mushroom picker. He remarked that, although he had lived in Bella Coola for years, he had never seen a grizzly bear. As I was setting the steaming teapot on the table, I glanced out my glass patio doors to see an enormous light-colored grizzly meandering up the path approaching the front of my cabin. This male bear is one for the books. It was Stanley. To Dean River residents, he is legendary. We don’t see him often. Once you do, you won’t likely forget. His trophy-sized Boone and Crockett measurements are most likely due to his advanced age. He is for sure over 20 years old. The Boone and Crockett Club, founded in 1887, provides leadership in several wildlife areas, including big game record-keeping and recognition (see their website at www.boone-crockett.org). Male grizzlies’ skeletons and muscles will continue to grow all of their lives, as long as there is plenty to eat. Their greater size, it is thought, enables them to dominate their peers regarding winning the favor of mates.
A massive 800 pound bear appears anything but potentially lithe and quick. His deliberately measured gait is his natural camouflage for explosive movements that can begin and end in the duration of a hot flash. A charging grizzly is known to cover 50-100 feet in about 1½-2 seconds. Think, for a moment, about that.
Because I’m so overawed by the power and speed that grizzlies possess, I’m also struck by the seeming contradiction of their benign nature. Why, for instance, does this one (Stanley) not spring with an 800 pound thud onto my porch and menace me with a jaw-chopping staccato of his impressive incisors, just for the fun of it, or the hell of it, while he also flicks a 12 inch paw through the glass door? The answer, I figure, is very simple. I don’t have anything he wants. You can bet your life I make damn sure of that.
Casually, I asked my guest, “Really, you’ve never seen a grizzly?” “No, never have,” he replied. This fellow, who I knew only casually, was sitting relaxed with his back to the patio door, unaware of the grizzly’s approach. Stanley was now not more than 15 feet from my front porch. His gigantic size was frightening. His massive head, his most imposing feature, was swaying slowly, carried so low that it appeared to need a set of supporting wheels.
With no warning, I calmly announced, “Oh, hey, there’s one now.” The fellow, following my eyes, turned slowly in his chair to look. With an explosive gasp, he uncoiled backwards, clean out of his chair and then stumbled and fell over it trying to get further from the door. I grabbed a camera, stepped onto the porch, and took two quick shots as Stanley, seemingly unconcerned at our commotion, cruised by. I don’t recall if he even acknowledged me with a glance. My guest, slack-jawed, ran gaping from window to window.
“Son-of-a-bitch,” he remarked. “Isn’t he dangerous?” “I know for a certain fact that he could be, but we won’t encourage him,” I replied, as Stanley moseyed on through my yard and was gone. The route past my cabin was likely an old trail for Stanley and other bears as well. I strongly suspect bears have been using this path heading upriver long before my cabin was built in 1982, when Stanley was about two years old. Naturally, I let my guest think that Stanley’s appearance was an everyday occurrence. I see him rarely. Later that day, as I smugly checked my camera, I was disgusted to find that I had no film in it. There seems to be no free lunch for wanna-be photographers.
The secret to my knowing Stanley’s age goes back to 1982, when a Grizzly Bear Habitat Study, conducted by the BC Ministry of Environment’s Wildlife Branch, was getting started over on the Kimsquit River. In 1982, the first year of the study, A. N. (Tony) Hamilton, a research biologist who was in charge of the study, along with his associates, captured and collared 12 grizzly bears: five females and seven males. Stanley, at that time, determined from one of his teeth, was only two years old. He already weighed 225 pounds and was almost six feet long from nose to tail. By comparison, Caesar, who was a much older male at 17, weighed 700 pounds and was seven and a half feet long. Stanley, if still alive in 2004, would be 22 or 23 years old and, as grizzlies go, just in his prime; he could live another five to seven years.
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