Bear reality

“You here to stir up trouble?” the wildlife official asks with a grin, only half-jokingly. The truth is, I’m not. But my camera, notebook and pen are making people nervous.

I’m really here to get a better glimpse of a reality of rural living on the first day of bear-hunting season. I need to see for myself what goes on at the bear check station set up by the Pennsylvania Game Commission at Shohola Falls.

My stomach does a quick flip as I turn in at the sign, painted with a black bear. Will I be able to look at the bloodied carcasses? I park at the outermost edge of a substantial collection of vehicles, mostly trucks, leading to the check-in building.

My dog, Bu, and I enjoy hiking here. This spring, we discovered a large headless bear carcass on one of our rambles along the lake’s edge. It was fascinating to monitor the process of its gradual disappearance. But today, I’ve come to see how it goes for hunters and their quarry.

In fairness, I confess my perspective. I dislike seeing living creatures suffer. I’m the kind of person who will relocate a wasp when it drifts indoors rather than swat it. I’ve even let a spider reside for months in the holes of an unused electrical outlet, and learned interesting lessons from this coexistence. But I coexist with hunters, too, and want to see their perspective.

Though I can’t imagine bringing myself to kill a wild animal, I do eat meat, and so, I am keenly aware of my responsibility to the life forms I consume. My neighbor, an avid and successful hunter, regularly shares the bounty of his hunts. This meat seems healthier than the hormone- and antibiotic-laced meats that line our grocery coolers, the end product of animal lives filled with suffering and disease at factory farms. I’m grateful to receive this gift.

I walk to the metal shelter where people mill about, waiting for the next bear to be brought in for weighing. When one finally arrives, a sense of excitement rises as the crowd gathers near the scale. Paws are placed in straps and the bear’s body rises as onlookers lean in to see the numbers and to watch the young blond woman in overalls extract a tooth to determine the bruin’s age. Details are gathered—who shot the bear, where was it taken, when did it occur—and the bear’s body is returned to the truck, which is pulled out of the shed and parked in the lot outside.

Individuals clamor for closer inspection or to take pictures. Someone grasps a paw and reminisces about past hunts. Onlookers lean over truck beds and talk, speculate, admire and opine. A woman peeks in, draws back and gasps, “It’s the size of my dog!” An old-timer shares cooking tips.

Various perspectives commingle here. Mine is only one of them. I keep this in mind as I look and listen. Bears lie in trucks and on trailers; hunters register their harvest; game commission officials and volunteers perform their tasks; members of the public observe all of it.

I stand there, wrestling with emotion and an inescapable sense of sorrow. I try to figure out just how I feel about the magnificent bears whose emptied bellies steam in the spotlight as they are hoisted into the air, whose tongues loll as they rest on their backs, front paws flapped forward, lower legs splayed.

Images and issues collide. Twin cubs lie in the bed of a truck. Senior hunters wrap their harvest in a rubber sheet, practicing discretion, while guys with furtive eyes describe nabbing their quarry on a dumpster raid, nipping in the bud a life that could only lead to trouble, someone says. Garbage-raiding bears neglect the wild and find themselves at odds with us. Their loss is our gain, according to one official standing nearby, who notes the need to reduce increasing encounters between humans and bears as we move into habitats formerly held by bruins.

I’ve had one of those encounters—a female bear with cubs, my dog and I deep in a forest. Although intensely frightening for me, the exchange was also thrilling. In the end, the bears simply wanted to be left alone. We complied.

With recent PA harvests of more than 3,000 bears annually, we’ve gained greater grounds for humans. But we also lose more of our state’s wilder aspects. Can I accept this? Can I respect these varying perspectives? I take another step toward understanding.