In the Shadow of the Sabertooth. Doug Peacock
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grab it in front of the window. In a heartbeat, half the map—the half that shows the Zeva and all the country we plan on kayaking—rips off and is sucked out the window. We are now map-less and I wonder what my carelessness portends.
The boys, especially Tom, will later make me pay heavily for this blunder as the two of us vie for “worst” in kayaking skill.
Nonetheless, rivers tend to run downstream. My journal tells of the last days of our trip, when we walked up the Amba River:
“Amba” means tiger as well as “devil” in the native Udege tongue. We beach at the mouth of the Amba River and walk upstream a short way to a trapper’s cabin (which belonged to the “key witness” in the Markov incident) that Dmitri used in past years during his study of bears and tigers here. The Amba River bottom in summer is hot and humid. Dmitri leads us on a hike several miles up river. Shoulder-high cone fern and alder obstruct our vision. Moss and shelf fungus grow on logs and downfalls. During the winters of his bear study here during the late 1970s, Dmitri would ski along the river and bang on cottonwood trunks with a heavy mace, waking the Asian black bears that hibernated within the hollow trees. The Amba is also prime tiger habitat. China lemon vine grows on the smaller trees, and cow parsnip and nettles make up the under-story. Ticks hang off the low vegetation; we stop for a tick-check every fifteen minutes. This is our last day in the wilds; tonight, we paddle on down to the big Udege village where we can hire a truck to haul us and our fold-up kayaks out to the Trans-Siberian railroad.
We climb a steep hill to a ridge. There is wild boar and black bear sign everywhere. Dmitri signals for us to be quiet. Our crew is noisy, distracted, self-absorbed, talking of industrial collapse and geopolitics. Dmitri snaps at us to shut up. We can hear movement down the ridge. Up ahead we hear the breathing sounds of big animals—probably bears huffing away or boars snorting, all now running downhill.
We blew it. The world is only as big as we allow it to be. Wild places and animals pass along their secrets only if we listen. You have to pay attention. A touch of danger would help. You need to know you can die: A surprise rapids the size of Lava Falls, a bad stretch of black ice across an ice chute, a white-out on a glacier, or maybe a bear or, especially, a tiger. But it’s hard here on our last day out before the slow return home. It’s especially hard in a group; the social dynamics can drain you of vital curiosity and attentiveness.
I split off by myself for a short time. Asian black bear have ripped branches off trees everywhere. I find day beds of boar and bear; there is sign of digging around the large Korean pine trees. The big live oaks are lovely. It’s good to be off alone; I find a bear-ripped honey tree and an ancient yurt on top of the ridge—built by either an Udege trapper or Chinese ginseng hunter.
Dmitri signals for me to rejoin the group. We drop back down to the Amba bottomland, finding an old trail.
Suddenly, Dmitri freezes and motions me forward: A tiger track glistens in the mud. The track in the wallow appears to be only about a
day old, around five inches across—the print, Dmitri says, of a young but dominate (about five years old) male cat that has replaced the previous dominate male cat, who was killed by a poacher. The young tiger leaves scrape marks every few hundred meters and spray scents on territorial tree markers. We stop at such a tree. The bark has been rubbed off by Asian black bears who also are attracted to the strong scent. I get down on my knees and press my nose against the bare trunk.
The pungent fetor of tiger fills my nostrils and—for just a second—I travel with the big cat, orange and black stripes flashing barely perceptibly through the sea of green undulating cone fern, into the wild and predatory world that not so very long ago was my own.
If the huge male tiger who killed, dismembered and ate Markov in 1997 was ten years old, quite likely it was the same then-younger cat whose scent we snorted in 1992 on the Amba River. We were, at that time, less than five miles away from the Markov attack site.
Somehow, this apparent coincidence didn’t hit me as startling: The fact that we probably crossed the sign of a tiger who later tore a man to pieces and ate him, for me, many curious precedents. Deep in the Sierra Madres of Chihuahua, Mexico in 1985, a jaguar coughed and sprayed just beyond the light of my campfire. It was my first jaguar and I glibly imagined this rosette-spotted predator stalking me. The next morning I discovered the jaguar had backtracked me for 14 miles.
And I remember vitality at the edge of fear infused into my own life when my mountain campfire was besieged by a huge black grizzly—he knew me—one stormy autumn night near Glacier Park in Montana: Only a few days earlier the same bear had ripped a cache of camping gear from a tree and had chewed to bits my sleeping bag and sweaty T-shirt, everything that smelled of me, while ignoring a tent and other gear which did not (sending me an unmistakable message: “Get the hell off my mountain.” I did).
The sentience of large predators is unlike what you see gazing into the orbs of a chimp or your favorite Labrador retriever. The tiger with a vendetta or bear with a memory stirs a different set of sensory responses cached deeper down in our brainstems. I knew a grizzly in Yellowstone, one I tracked for a decade, who set up what looked like a deliberate ambush for me in the snowy woods. I had snowshoed into a remote thermal area and later found a huge male grizzly on a winterkilled bull bison. About dusk, the bear rose and followed my snowshoe tracks out onto the crusted snow into the timber. I waited ten minutes and started after him. A few feet into the darkening forest, I stopped and looked at the huge, twisted paw imprinted over my own snowshoe track. A premonition rose up my spine to the hair on my neck. I retreated rapidly and pitched a distant tent in the darkness. The next morning, I cautiously followed the skewed tracks: the big grizzly had trailed my snowshoe prints for a hundred yards, then his tracks veered off sharply in a tight circle that led to an icy depression in the snow behind a large deadfall ten feet off my trail. Had I gone any further in the darkness, he would have been right there. The icy bed spoke of a long wait.
Years later, I investigated a bear mauling: In August of 1984, a woman camper was killed and partially consumed in the backcountry of Yellowstone’s upper Pelican Valley. In late October of that year, I hiked back to the site of the fatality. I squatted to fill my canteen at a small pond. I tensed feeling a sudden tightness in my lungs, then a crushing pain in my chest: In the frozen mud I saw the distinctive track of the big grizzly who would have ambushed me eight years earlier. For a moment, I was disorientated. The tracks were old, unconnected to whatever happened here in August. He probably wasn’t the killer. But he had been right here. I hadn’t known what to make of the snowshoe ambush in 1976 either. Maybe the grizzly was just curious. I felt separated from the magic that once connected me to the grizzly with the crooked track. The authorities never found the bear who killed the young woman. I left the site of the fatal mauling bewildered, isolated from my own kind, wondering how ancient people maintained their humanity among the other nations of animals. An acting park superintendent put out an odd statement: “The last thing we want out there,” he said, “is the legend of a killer grizzly.”
The point of these recollections is that sharing the wilderness with legendary killer bears or cats dramatically shifts the psychic landscape. You think about the world differently because you have no illusions about being in control. If you traveled armed with a spear in Pleistocene North America, you definitely lived in the middle of the food pyramid, stumbling about like a minor but tempting pork chop, hunted by the big cats and bears while you pursued the mammoths and camels of your ice-age vision quests.
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The most mercurial player remains the gigantic short-faced bear who was a matchless American native. What kind of creature was Arctodus simus: Was it indeed the terror of the tundra, as suggested by a few eminent paleontologists, or a peaceful grazer of the plains?
Considerable academic debate rages about whether the giant short-faced bear was a practicing predator, scavenger or vegetarian. The more interesting question is what sort of challenge Arctodus simus presented to people by appropriating the hunters’ kills and in actually bringing down people as prey. Paleontologists are not a lot of help on this one; they tend not to directly address such human/bear issues.
The core is this: How does it feel to share the land with creatures who are aggressively