“I am just telling about it. It is superstition.” I waved my hand. “It is a matter of ‘sympathetic magic,’ like anthropologist James Frazer called it. I am only telling about it. After all, we are modern, enlightened people.”
“The Enlightenment seems to be crumbling,” she commented, “you yourself claim often enough that shamans of simple native peoples know more about such matters than all of the researchers put together with their reductionist distortions.”
“Well, maybe . . . but where am I supposed to find bear paraphernalia?”
“I’ll go look for something. I’ll go to Berne and visit my friend, Susanne. We can at least go to the bear pit and ask the warden for some of Bruin’s hair.”
She took a train to Berne and stayed with her friend who, like an atavistic Helvetic mountain spirit, knows about herbs, rocks, and spirits—and little else. They made some hazelnut-honey cookies—made from indigenous hazelnuts and honey.
When the Mani—this is the respectful name of the chief male bear in Berne—saw them, it came close and stood on its back legs. It ignored the carrots the other spectators were tossing and opened its mouth wide to catch the cookies. It had been fed so many carrots that even its excrement was orange. It smelled something special would come from the two women. Or was it that it read their thoughts like the hunting peoples believe? It playfully caught the cookies and then roared loudly. Primeval memories were surely awakened in the depth of the bear’s soul, memories of times when the hazelnuts ripened in the fall and whole hives of wild honey were to be found in the forest. It looked up and must have seen the bear goddess, the Dea Artio, whose sanctuary has been in the river loop of the Aare in Berne since time immemorial. Susanne decided to visit the bear pit more often. A primeval memory was surely also awakened in her soul.
Shortly afterward, the two women asked to speak to the bear warden. They were allowed to come along down a flight of stairs where they saw a man who looked “as wild and untamable” as the bears. Without a word and with a friendly but wild, mildly curious glance, he handed them the bear hair they had asked for, wrapped in cellophane and labeled “bear hair.”
“When we first saw the hair, it kind of seemed to radiate,” she told me when she brought it home. After noticing my puzzled face, she continued, “. . . with a golden glow! That was our first impression.”
And that is how it came to be that, as I sit here writing this, I have a tuft of real bear hair on my desk.
Chapter 18
Places of Bear Power
When the bear feast was over,
the sacred bear dance was danced.
I [the bear] was clothed in a wooly cloak with long down,
I was decorated with chinking silver.
When the sacred bear festival was over,
I raised up to the seven maws of the heaven bear, my father,
On the dearest end of the sounding—like the silver—iron chain.
From a song of the Siberian Khanty people at the end of a bear festival
There are certain places on earth where we can sense unknown energy. In these places, we may feel awestruck, terrified, or deeply moved—they are places that primitive people believe to be the abodes of gods and spirits. There are also bear places, not just bear habitats but places where the bear spirit takes possession of human consciousness. In these places, people can dream bear dreams, sensitive people can perceive the bear’s spirit, some native peoples can experience themselves as the bear’s relatives, and gods can appear in the form of bears.
Some of these bear places have only lived on in the form of legends and tales: the Arcadia of antiquity, the Pyrenees over the healing springs of Lourdes, the forests around Mount Shasta, and the canton Appenzell in northern Switzerland. There are other places that until only recently—or even continuing on today—have been sacred places for living bears: the forested islands of northern Japan, Yellowstone National Park, Bear Butte, the McNeil River, the Abruzzi Apennine Mountains in Italy, and the town of Berne, Switzerland.
According to the Native Americans of the prairie, magical animals taught the first human beings in caves found near Bear Butte—a butte that looks like a sleeping bear from a distance. For this reason, medicine people are still drawn to these caves. My friend Bill Tallbull also went there often to reconnect with the origins of his tribe while fasting and meditating.
Smokey Bear and Yellowstone
The Yellowstone area is uncanny. Local Native Americans avoided it until the arrival of white people who later made a national park that boasts over a thousand hot geysers shooting upward toward the azure-blue sky; lukewarm rivers; basins of hot, bubbling mud; an entire mountain of obsidian; a petrified forest; red, yellow, and black basalt formations that look like a crazy sculptor was at work; considerable wild animal herds; and a barely touched Alpine-like wilderness for guests to enjoy. One of the main attractions is—or used to be—the bears.
Since the production of the Ford Model T, the stream of visitors has not abated. The grizzlies and the black bears soon learned to expect treats from these visitors, and hundreds of them, young and old, left their fish and berry paradise to waylay the motorized guests. “Bears are wild animals. They are dangerous. Do not feed them!” One can see these signs throughout the park. But who sticks to these bureaucratic rules when there is a mother with cute cubs right near the car looking with puppy dog eyes and hoping for some treats? In no time, the brakes squeak, whole packages of cookies, chocolate, potato chips, and hamburger leftovers are dumped out the window for the bears. Like living teddy bears, rambunctious young bears sniff the car with great curiosity and play around on the hood. What does it matter if an antenna breaks off or the windshield wipers get bent . . . it is a great show! Cameras click and whir. City people who have never been near any animals other than spoiled house pets get excited and actually get out of the car to have a picture taken near the darling animals. One tries to put his four-year-old on a bear’s back, another offers a bear, buddy-like, a can of beer.
Another car stops. A poodle barks like crazy through the window that is open just a crack. The brown giants—there are more of them there in the meantime—run away from the tiny barking dog. A worried bear mother shoos her cubs up a pine tree—it could be a hungry wolf. Everyone laughs. The family will have great pictures to show at home in Baltimore or Boston. The park rangers are not pleased with this ado, but the bear fans are not impressed with tickets or reasoning. They should know that they are not doing the bears any favors by giving them white flour, white sugar, and greasy chips. With junk food (and even good human food), they cannot fatten themselves up enough to live through the long winter. If they eat too much of this kind of food, they go into hibernation in a weak and undernourished condition—and it is very well possible they will die before spring comes. When they have no more reserves to live from, they just never wake up again.
Beware of the bears.
Besides, just like humans, bears get bad teeth from such soft, refined food. A bear with a toothache is as grumpy as a human being with a toothache and is very unpredictable. But once bears get a taste for junk food, they get downright addicted. The cubs already learn from their mother what tastes good and how to beg for it. Because the bears in the park have mainly only positive experiences with their bare-skinned, two-legged fellow animals, they no longer avoid them. They sniff and paw around in the garbage bins behind hotels and do not let themselves be shooed off. They break into tents and vacation houses, steal provisions, rip up backpacks, bite tin cans—and if anyone interrupts them, they are not exactly compliant.
This is how it went on for years. With several million visitors each summer season, there were constant incidents. Despite all the warnings and security measures, bears wounded or even killed people again and again. Either a tourist wanting to have a picture taken holding a cute teddy bear was struck down dead by its angry mother, or a child gave a bear a cookie from the car window and the bear bit off his hand along with it, or another car w
reck with several cars happened because everyone was watching the bears instead of the road. There was just no cure for the bears’ cravings and the tourists’ stupidity.
Cartoon by Gary Larson, 1993
In the early 1970s, the park administration decided to remove bears that bothered tourists and were notorious garbage scavengers. They were not killed (at first), but, if the tagged bear appeared again at the same garbage pit and annoyed tourists again, it was shot without hesitation. To catch the bears, some food was placed inside a culvert, and, when the bear went in to eat it, a trap door snapped shut after the bear touched the food. The bear was then drugged and brought to a remote area some two to three hundred miles farther away. It was an ingenious plan, but it did not work. Before long, nearly all of the deported bears were soon at their usual stomping grounds. One ranger told me jokingly, when I was working in Yellowstone, “Sometimes these bastards are back here sooner than we are! Deporting them is just an empty ritual staged for the old ladies from the animal protection. We could save a lot of time and money if we would just shoot them in the first place.”
Animal behavior researchers who studied this problem discovered that bears have a distinct sense of home. They become disturbed when they are set out in a strange area and are especially afraid of other bears that are complete strangers with whom they have not yet established a relationship. They long for their home area, the bears with whom they already have friendly relations, and familiar smells even if that means the smell of junk food and garbage bins. Without even taking a break to rest, they head back to their home area with a speed of about twenty miles per hour not knowing they will be shot when they get there.
In the early 1960s, forty to fifty bears a year were shot in Yellowstone. Because a female bear needs five or six years to become sexually mature and only has one to three cubs every three to four years, and only one third of the cubs survive the first year, shooting so many bears a year is a definite guarantee for extermination. Not until 1975 was the attempt even made to protect the approximately two hundred bears that had survived, by closing down dumps and covering them with plenty of dirt. Up to fifteen years later, bears were still seen sniffing around where the dumps had been, longingly remembering all the good things they had found there to eat.
Guests in Yellowstone today will see many bison, elk, antelope, deer, and maybe a wolf but will rarely see a real bear. The only bear the guests will be sure to see is that on a Smokey Bear poster. The mascot of the park, with a shovel and a bucket and in a neat ranger uniform, warns campers to be sure to completely put out their campfires and not throw their cigarettes out of their car windows with his famous warning, “Only you can prevent wildfires!”
Smokey Bear poster
Salmon Gourmets on the McNeil River
The bears that gather once a year on the McNeil River at Alaska’s McNeil State Game Sanctuary, far away from civilization, have a much better lot. In the last week of July, hundreds of bears come to feast on fat salmon swimming upstream to spawn where they hatched. Defying the torrent and jumping over any hindrance, the ones that make it all the way back are completely exhausted and can finally spawn. For many others, the journey ends where they get jammed up in swirling pools under waterfalls. The fish take a rest in these pools, but this is also where the grizzlies wait for them. Each bear has developed its own individual expertise at fishing. Some of them plunge into the water and grab a fish with their mouth. Most of them elegantly flick the salmon out of the water with a paw. The old patriarchs have the best places. Young bears and mothers have to settle for places that are not as good, and the smaller black bears are forced to try their luck farther downstream.
Soon the grizzlies are so full that they only catch female fish and cut open their undersides with a claw to slurp the eggs like a dessert. They leave the disemboweled carcasses for the seagulls, or, if they float downstream, the black bears can have them. Only 150 select nature lovers, equipped with cameras and tripods, are allowed to be present at this feast. No culvert traps, no hunting guns, no tempting garbage smells endanger the harmony between bears and humans. The grizzlies that are otherwise so feared barely acknowledge the intruders here. All they want to do is eat their fill in peace with no disturbances. The annual event proves zoologist professor Bernhard Grzimek’s statement that “bears can very easily live peacefully with human beings.”
A Guest from Heaven
Bears that live with humans? Maybe my friend, the “garbage dump bear” Carlo, was right when he claimed that Neanderthals kept bears as guests in their caves, or more likely that primeval humans were the guests of cave bears, each living in a separate part of the cave. Behaviorists say that bears remember every human that they have ever met by that person’s smell. Presumably, the cave bears knew “their” humans and left them—in mutual agreement—in peace. Supposedly, it occasionally happens that different kinds of animals share a shelter, such as a fox and badger in a den.
Mighty kings in times of antiquity held bears in their palaces. If one can believe the reports of early Christians, some cruel Roman emperors spoiled their bears with human flesh. The poor animals were more involuntary prisoners than guests, however. The Romans imported them from the primeval forests of Germania—along with slaves, cheese wheels, soaps, furs, amber, smoked ham, and blonde female hair. The bears served mainly as replacement fighters in the arenas where they were sent to the slaughter in brutal fights against gladiators, dogs, and other predators. Emperor Caligula, for example, is said to have let four hundred bears fight against an entire company of gladiators.
Roman ivory carving from the fourth century showing Consul Areobindus, the sponsor of a circus performance with bears
Many medieval castles also held bears. But in these cases, too, they could hardly be described as contented guests. They mainly served to support the sovereign’s self-aggrandizement, symbolizing his power, prowess, and invincibility. The bears in the Abbeys of Saint Gall or Andlau were also not held as honored guests but served as examples of the lower drives and the importance of overcoming them through the almighty power of the spirit.
Even today in Thailand and other South Asian countries, sun bears, of which the supply is furnished by a black market, are kept in cloisters and in private households on chains. The Buddhists believe that they receive karmic merits by being friendly to the animals and spoiling them with food. Through the pity shown to them, these poor souls imprisoned in an animal’s fur will be shown the way of true dharma. But when the bears grow up and become a burden to their caretakers, they are usually sold to merchants who furnish the market with bear paws and gallbladders (Mills 2002, 176).
The bear guests of the Siberian aboriginals had the best lot as captives. Even into the twentieth century, the Ainu, Orogen people, Gilyaks, and other tribes that still lived as hunters, fishers, and gatherers similar to the Stone Age peoples kept bears as honored, spoiled guests in their villages. The Ainu once lived in large areas of northeastern Asia but can now only be found on the island Hokkaido, the Kurils, and southern Sakhalin in Russia. Similar to Native Americans on reservations, the times are over when they could live as free hunters. The clash with industrial society destroyed their way of life, and they fell to drink. These days, they sell bear carvings and bast fiber cloth (from which they used to make clothing) to tourists who come to their impoverished villages to see something exotic.
Anthropologists took notice of the Ainu because of their very hairy bodies, the lip tattoos of the women, and their bear feasts. Scientists assume that the Ainu were once the aboriginals of all of Japan and that many of the Shinto nature gods, called kami, go back to these aboriginals. In the Shinto religion, higher beings that humans should respect are called kami.1 Kamui is the Ainu word for bear.
In earlier times, when Ainu hunters found a lost bear cub, they brought it home with great joy. The arrival of “the divine” was an occasion for a drinking festival. A family that had nursing children adopted the cub, and it lived in their hou
se with them. If it whined in the night, it was allowed to sleep next to its adoptive parents. The children loved to play with the little fur ball, and nursing mothers suckled it as was necessary. For example, as late as the beginning of the twentieth century, an anthropologist witnessed how a bear cub was passed around in a circle of women and each suckled it. If the little bear plundered the pantry and ate the millet porridge, it was seen as very cute, like “an undisciplined, spoiled kid.” When the guest became big enough that it could unintentionally hurt its hosts, its teeth were filed down and it got its own hut. But even while penned up, it remained tame and trusting. It was still fed with delicacies, bathed, and taken for walks with a chain while its cage was kept very clean.
Eventually, though, one day in the fall, it was time to “send him back home.” Preparations began for a big festival called Iomante (Sending-Away-Festival). The entire area was incensed with mugwort, large amounts of millet beer were brewed, and mountains of millet dumplings were prepared. Now the gods were invited to come and dance, feast, and drink along with the tribe. Then one of the men went to the bear and explained to it that it would now return to its ancestors. He said, “Oh, divine bear, you came into this world to visit us. Please do not be angry with us. Tell your father and mother how we treated you well. We will make many carved sticks as offerings, and we will send lots of beer, cakes, and other delicacies with you. If you are a good bear, you will come back to us soon. We will be good hosts to you again.”
The unsuspecting animal was then tied between two large posts. Now the martyrdom of the sacred guest began. A hail of dull arrows rained down upon the bear, and it had to take countless whiplashes. The bear fought until it was exhausted. The women cried and pitied the guest that had been with them for two or three years as their son. The Ainu say the torture is necessary because it helps the soul loosen itself from the body. When the torture session was over, the sacrifice was “sent to heaven” loaded down with prayers and litanies. In the early dawn, the bear’s head was fastened between two posts, one behind the neck and one under the chin, while the bear bit into a piece of wood as it was strangled; the two wooden posts hindered it from shrieking, which would have been a bad omen. Immediately afterward, with the first ray of the sun, a specifically chosen archer shot the sacred bear with one single arrow through the heart.2 They were very careful that not one drop of blood was spilled on the ground, which would also have been taken as a bad omen. The men drank the warm blood from the heart and smeared it into their long beards.
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