Bear Witness

by Mandy Haggith

  ‘There’s loads of decisions to make, how it should be laid out, where to bring power in to, loads of stuff like that,’ Malcolm said.

  We padded hand-in-hand, populating the space with ideas about practical things like running water and a chicken coup. We ran amok with dreams of a sauna, summerhouse and pond.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ I said.

  ‘Beans on toast?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  In the caravan, its little bed was inviting in the corner, and after lunch, I said. ‘I think I need a snooze after lunch to recover from my sleepless ferry journey.’

  ‘Why sleepless?’

  ‘I dunno. I just must have been too excited about seeing you.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’

  But he was showing no reluctance about the snooze, stepping out of his jeans. ‘Not as excited as I am about seeing you.’

  I was naked in seconds and soon pinned to the bed. He wrapped himself around me, giving me the strength of his torso and warm muscle.

  ‘You’re a lovely cuddle,’ he said. ‘I’ve missed you.’

  ‘You’re a big soft animal, aren’t you?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ he replied. ‘I’m not soft at all.’

  Next morning, I woke to my phone’s bleep. I reached for my bag and switched it off. ‘It’s Sunday and this is the West Highlands,’ I mumbled and rolled over.

  We woke again later to a beautiful clear blue sky and a breeze ruffling the tree tops. Over breakfast, we were talking about how to gradually clear the Sitka spruce from the croft, to replace it with native trees, when it came on the radio.

  ‘One of three brown bears recently released into the wild in Norway has been shot.’

  ‘What?’ I jumped up and turned the radio up, then grabbed my phone.

  ‘Sven Jorriksen, the farmer who has admitted to shooting the bear, said, “The bear had been terrorising local people since its release last week.” A spokesman for the bear release team described it as “a tragic setback”.’

  ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’ There were messages from Anja and Stig. I was joining late into a frantic debate about how to handle the crisis, and there was little I could do to help from Scotland. It was Bjorna, who did indeed have, it turned out, a passion for four-wheel drive trucks. Unfortunately, there were plenty of them at Boverdalen, within a fairly short walk, for a bear, from the release site. She had reached the nearby village on Saturday and hadn’t lasted two hours.

  I was livid. ‘She was tagged. Why the hell didn’t someone get her out of there?’ I railed at Malcolm. ‘What were the park authorities thinking of?’

  ‘Calm down,’ he said. ‘It’s not that big a deal, is it?’

  I turned my back on him, and fired a message off to Anja. One came straight back.

  It’s my fault. We didn’t have a clear line of authority for this kind of crisis. Sorn was having a day off. The deputy park manager thought he needed clearance from us to stungun one of ‘our bears’ but he only had our office number and of course there was no one in on Saturday. The local vet couldn’t be found, and turned out to be in Lom, too drunk to drive. Anyway, by the time they reached me it was too late. Jorriksen had taken his gun to her. I take responsibility. All the local park staff team should have had training to handle a situation like this. We should have had it covered. I fucked up.

  Anja

  I was gutted to see her putting her head on the block like that.

  The whole team should share the responsibility, including the park management. There’s nothing to be gained by pinning blame on one person (other than Sven Jorriksen).

  Cheers

  Callis

  He claims he acted in self-defence. And I was responsible for risk assessment. The buck stops with me. Urgent that we meet tomorrow re release of males. Anja

  Apologies. I’m in Scotland for the Parliament debate on reintroduction on Tuesday.

  Cheers

  Callis

  Bad timing. Can you video-link to us? Anja

  I’ll find some bandwidth.

  Cheers

  Callis

  I spent the afternoon making frantic enquiries about where I could get access to broadband and sufficient privacy to take part in a video conference, and the following morning I borrowed the Land Rover and drove the four miles to the Altnacaelgach Inn. I perched in the corner of the lounge. Anja and Sorn peered out at me from the screen I had borrowed to link to my phone. Sorn was slumped, head propped up with one hand, the other holding a pen, at work on an elaborate doodle. Anja smiled her benign smile and brought everyone up to date.

  It was a grim meeting. The farmers were on the front foot with the media. One of the vehicles Bjorna had taken a liking to had a child in it, whose parents were featured hourly being hysterical in front of TV cameras. The bear team was being accused of lack of planning, being too hasty and not consulting the local community. Anja was firefighting as best she could but, she admitted with resignation in her voice, ‘I am a scientist, not a politician, not a PR person.’ If anyone on the team would take a fall for this it would be Anja.

  ‘We have to postpone the release of the males, there’s no question of that,’ she said.

  ‘But what’s the point of having two females out there alone?’ I asked.

  ‘Postpone, I said. I don’t know for how long. Hopefully it will blow over in a couple of weeks.’

  ‘And Jorriksen, what’s happening there?’

  ‘He has been arrested and charged with breach of the Animal Protection Act and will be released on bail.’

  ‘And public opinion?’

  ‘Disaster,’ said Anja. ‘Not good, anyway. There’s some footage of Bjorna, well, it’s not helping…’

  Sorn cut Anja off. ‘The story of park staff panic is all over the media, we’re being made to look like fools.’

  ‘Let’s say we need to make some progress with our public relations.’

  ‘And the other two bears?’ I asked.

  ‘Both fine, living quietly in the forest,’ Sorn said. ‘They each have someone near them full-time, monitoring.’

  ‘We don’t foresee any more problems with them,’ agreed Anja. ‘Bjorna was a rogue. We are asking serious questions of the sanctuary in Slovakia, why this behaviour was not predicted. They must have known. They are a little embarrassed and our relationship with them is, shall we say, strained right now. That’s another reason to postpone the release of the males. We need much tighter checks on the individuals, their pasts. We cannot afford any more delinquent bears. I will continue working on that. Anything else?’

  ‘Just wish me luck in the Scottish Parliament tomorrow.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Do you get to speak?’ Anja asked.

  ‘I talk to the committee responsible tomorrow morning. Stig, too. Then it’s debated in the chamber in the afternoon, and I’ll just have to listen then.’

  ‘Best of luck,’ said Anja.

  ‘Thanks.’

  The session with the Environment and Rural Affairs Committee was held in a wood-panelled room around a huge rectangular table. Stig was asked to speak first about lynx and got off quite lightly. The tide seemed to have turned in his favour. There had been reports of livestock kills, lambs mostly, but he got in first with statistics and detailed the procedures for complaint-handling and compensation. He had figures from community consultations showing opposition going down. I had to admit his presentation was flawless. The politicians were clearly impressed.

  Things were not so easy for me. The presentation I had prepared played heavily on Norway; things had been going so well there. Now that had all changed, but completely reworking the presentation would have taken time I didn’t have. I wished I had more material on some successful introductions, like France and Germany, but had to make do with what I had. I decided to go for ‘Lessons Learned From Norway’, driving an argument that the original reason for the loss of the bear had been insufficient understanding of their ecological benefits, and that the shooting of Bjorna had been due
to insufficient consultation with local people and training of park staff. I argued that in Scotland these things could be done much better, and concluded on an impassioned note, suggesting that bears could become a symbol for a reawakening of the nation after a long sleep through a colonial winter of rule from London, signalling Scotland’s rebirth, embracing natural diversity, symbol of courage and perseverance.

  The atmosphere in the room was cool. There were some nodding heads and some of the Greens and radical nationalists seemed to like the idea. But there were many blank faces.

  Fergus Irvine began the attack. ‘We need much more fact and much less fancy, in my view,’ he said. ‘You brushed rather rapidly over the fact that the Norwegian people have been forced into a hurried release programme that is clearly going completely wrong. Would you elaborate on that?’

  I withered. I wished I had Anja Eldegard at my side, and tried to imagine how she would respond. ‘As I said, I believe that the process in Norway was carried out too fast, and with insufficient consultation. I think we can learn valuable lessons from there and my recommendation would be for a much more participatory and slower process in Scotland.’

  ‘Yet I understand that you were part of the team who planned this disastrous process in Norway. Why should we trust you? It seems to me that a slower process would simply mean longer and more lucrative contracts for those involved, more expense and quite frankly, for what? To introduce a dangerous animal into an already crowded landscape.’

  The Liberal Democrat MSP Stewart Lyon spoke up. ‘I agree with Fergus. We have neither the desire nor the space for bears in Scotland. There’s not been room for them for a thousand years. You’re living in cloud cuckoo land. Norway has four times the land area of Scotland and roughly the same population, and even there they don’t have room for such dangerous animals.’

  I tried to stay calm. ‘Can I point out that the distribution of population in Scotland is entirely different from Norway, and the Highlands of Scotland, in particular, have a significantly lower population density than anywhere in Europe, including all of Norway.’

  The Liberal clasped his hands. ‘Yes, but that is something we are trying to change, my dear. We don’t want to drive even more folk out of the Highlands due to fear of bear attacks. We’ve had quite enough of Highland Clearances, or hadn’t you heard?’

  ‘That risk is very low, in fact,’ I said, but I was met by jeers and calls to watch the news from Norway. I struggled to point out that in Norway, no one had been so much as injured and it was the bear that had been the victim, but the politicians had made up their minds by putting their fingers in the air and testing the direction of the wind blown up by the media. There was no way I would bring them round. I pointed out that the ecology of the Highlands was profoundly out of balance, the ongoing problem of deer numbers and their damage to vegetation, not to mention risk to car drivers, could be helped by the presence of bears, but I felt pinioned into a role of mad scientist with no grasp of the real world of public opinion.

  ‘This is putting ecology before common sense,’ was one riposte. ‘Anyone who can claim deer to be more danger to the rural public than bears has clearly misunderstood the basics of predator-prey relationships,’ was another. Even the Labour MSPs, who had been silent until that point, laughed at that.

  The chairman, Simon Miles, said, ‘It would seem to be foolhardy, given the current climate of opinion, to promote the reintroduction of bears, but that is not to say we cannot continue to look into the issue and to try to understand the ecology and economics better than we do. As Dr MacArthur has pointed out, there is significant support from the general public and a requirement from Europe to give it due consideration, as we have done for the lynx, with considerable and some might say surprising success. Perhaps we can propose continued support for the large carnivore programme, recommending greater weight to be placed on the lynx aspect of that programme, and by implication that would mean a lesser role for the bear and, though we have not discussed it directly, the wolf, wolverine or whatever else once roamed these isles.’

  There were thumps on tables and many nodding heads.

  ‘In that case, I propose we move on to the next item on the agenda. Thank you Drs MacArthur and Morrison.’

  I sat down next to Stig, feeling heavy enough to crash through the parquet floor to whatever gloomy cavern of trolls must lie beneath it.

  The debate in the afternoon was no better, except for the Green MSP from the Highlands and Islands, Eleanor Morrison, who did us proud. She talked most positively about the potential benefits of more top predators, bears included. She reminded the chamber that ‘under the European Habitats Directive’s new terms we are obliged not just to consider the reintroduction of our missing species, but actively to plan and implement reintroduction programmes.’

  Fergus Irvine was itching in his seat. ‘Will the member give way?’ he butted in. She let him speak. ‘Is the Green member completely insensitive to the risks that people will face if such animals are released? These are large, dangerous animals, as the experience in Norway has shown.’

  The Green member came straight back. ‘There is no cause for scaremongering. In fact there are fewer fatalities in Europe from bears than from rams and bulls, but I haven’t noticed anyone suggesting that cattle and sheep are too dangerous to roam about the countryside. I urge you to vote for our amendment to this bill and to extend the reach of our national ecological restoration programme not only to include lynx but also the other missing top predators, wolves and bears.’

  The voices of opposition were strong, however, and after several references to Goldilocks and Little Red Riding Hood, both bears and wolves were consigned to remain wild only in fairy tales. The amendment adding a specific mention of lynx to the motion’s otherwise anodyne wording about the Ecological Restoration Bill was passed by a substantial majority but the Green amendment to further include all top predators, was voted down. The chance of getting bears into the wild in Scotland in the next decade appeared to be zilch.

  I tried not to feel sorry for myself as Stig and I left the visitors’ gallery after decision time, but I was gutted. Stig was looking pretty chuffed with himself as we set off to the pub. I turned my phone on and a flurry of messages came in. I switched it to audio and listened to the first as we walked down the narrow wynd at the back of the Parliament building with what looked like bundles of sticks framing the windows of the MSPs’ offices. The concrete of the much-acclaimed building was water-stained and tatty.

  ‘Callis, bad news, I’m afraid.’ It was Anja. My heart sank. ‘We’ve found the third bear we released, Ra, in a snare. She’s going to be OK but we have had to have her compounded so we can tend her wounds and keep an eye on her. We have no idea yet who set the snare. Obviously it’s illegal, but it looks as if we have a campaign to harass the remaining two bears. Ono is being closely monitored. Armed guards for the released animals is hardly what we envisaged for the return of bears to the wild, but we have no other option at this stage. Anyway, I wanted you to hear this from me before anyone else gets to you. If the media ask you about this I’d be grateful if you’d make no comment. Oh, and I hope your day in Parliament went better than ours here.’ I grimaced.

  Next up was Malcolm. ‘Hi sexy. Heard the Parliament on the radio just now. Hope you’re not too gutted. Give me a call.’ A number I didn’t know was next. ‘Hello Dr MacArthur, this is Sue Lloyd from the Sunday Times. I was hoping to get your comment for a piece on the reintroduction of bears issue. Could you give me a call?’

  Anja: ‘Callis. Need to talk. Need you back here next Monday.’

  I booked the ferry and sent a text message back: ‘Bad day for bears.’

  Part Three

  I’m on the train just north of Perth. Stig has changed for Aberdeen and to be honest I’m glad he’s gone. He can’t understand how frustrating yesterday in Parliament was for me.

  It’s a filthy morning. Rain is lashing against the window and I’m finding it har
d to do anything but sit here in a dwam, staring out at the Perthshire woods, daydreaming about their natural residents lumbering through them. Just before Pitlochry, a message arrives. It’s from Tanka and Païvi.

  Sorry is not enough to say how bad we feel about yesterday. Is it time for direct action?

  Although, obviously I can’t say yes, I’m immediately caught up in imagining various crazy and illegal methods of moving bears into Scotland. I shake myself by the mental collar and get out a book. It’s something Karl recommended to me, by Derrick Jensen, but I can’t concentrate on it at all. It’s too angry and I’m furious enough already. I can’t cope with someone else’s indignation. I put it down and think how to reply to the message for a minute or two, then begin a reply. ‘Thanks.’ I peter out. I can’t seem to frame anything to answer the question, so in the end I just send the one word reply, and return to Jensen and his analysis of how most people are in denial about the destruction we are wreaking on the planet.

  The train passes Blair Atholl and heads into the hills. The landscape up here is totally denuded of trees, and I can’t help thinking the seed-dispersal services of some bears would do it a world of good.

  I change at Inverness for the train north, and at Lairg station there’s a taxi, thank goodness. I’m absolutely not in the mood for chat, but as we head west, the driver regales me with stories of the old post bus service which used to meet the morning train and deliver passengers as well as mail all the way to Lochinver. I’m sure on a good day he’s quite funny, but I’m having a sense of humour failure, big style.

  It’s 2pm by the time I get home. As I walk up the track, I try to keep my town shoes out of the mud. There’s no sign of Malcolm at the caravan. I make a cup of tea and take it down to one of the trunk-stump stools at the foot of my wooden bear. The sky is glowering with rain clouds but it holds off, just, as if gritting its teeth.