Living with Grizzlies

By Polly Mahoney

I lived amongst grizzlies for many years and have a very healthy respect for them!

The first ones I was around was when I worked at big game trophy hunting camps. I used to see them commonly when I was alone in the wee hours of the morning either on foot with my bridle or riding bareback on some unlucky horse I had caught while herding up the others we would hunt with that day. I always found the grizzlies to leave me alone, foraging for food or moving along their journey ignoring me. The most nerve wracking part of this is I often had one or two sled dogs running free with me. I would always hope the bear wouldn’t see the dogs or the dogs wouldn’t see the bear and I get caught in the middle of a chase. The things you do in your twenties are remarkable sometimes!

Everyone who came on a hunt would of course love to shoot a grizzly. There were many around and the best way to hunt them was to leave the meat after a kill of a moose or caribou and go back a couple days later and they would have made a cache with the meat, covering it with debris, moss, whatever they could find and be sitting on the top of it, very proud of their find! We had some intense days in camp once when a grizzly had been injured by a poor shot and it took a couple days to find it, dead of course, but we were nervous it would come into camp where we had lots of meat!

Horses n Bears

Horses don’t like bears and we only had one that we could pack out a bear hide on. His name was Roannie. He was a big red roan, sure footed and nothing phased him. We would wrap the hide in a canvas tarp away from him and then bring it over and put it on his back, tie a diamond hitch and away he would go being led by someone on a horse that could tolerate being that close to him. There were no other horses we could pack a bear on.

Where I lived for the last few years of my life in the Yukon was outside of Haines Junction. I used to pick berries a lot for our subsistence lifestyle, canning them, making jams, juice, etc. I was picking berries once by a beautiful meadow 3 miles off the Haines Road and came across rangers from Kluane National Park pulling a cage with a grizzly in it. This grizzly was getting a bit too friendly in the campground so they were going to release it in this meadow far from people. Luckily when we started living there they stopped releasing grizzlies but there were lots around already. I always carried a gun just in case I came across one and would often see three at a time from the window of my truck driving along the three miles of dirt road out to the pavement. They were not afraid of people!

Our cabin, unfortunately, did not have a window on the door side of it. The grizzlies would often come close by to rummage around the dog poop pile produced from our sled dogs to see what was interesting they could find. Or in the fall they would come and eat off the rotting spawned salmon we would collect for our dog food for the winter. The dogs would go wild barking so I knew something was around. Sometimes I would need to open the cabin door with my gun drawn just in case there was one outside the door. Luckily there never was! Wouldn’t you think we would have put a window on that side of the cabin?

Charged

One time I was charged by a grizzly by the Tatshenshini River in northern BC. There were a few of us lined along the river bank fishing for salmon when a grizzly appeared out of nowhere and charged us. I did what I was always told to do retreat slowly facing the bear. You can imagine the adrenaline running through you with a large angry bear running straight at you! Lucky for me it was a bluff charge as when he got about 30 feet from me he stopped. My friend ran which totally surprised me but you never know what you would do in a situation like this. I am glad it was a good ending!

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