Bear Scare

When I was a young camp counselor and canoe guide, my wards and I would spend hours around the campfire weaving leather bracelets. We called them bear scares, and the idea was if you had one on your wrist or ankle, the bears wouldn’t get you. They had to be woven just right and lie flat on the wrist, and once they were finished they were on forever. Within a few months they started to smell like rotten leather, old shoes, sweat, and lake water. But we wouldn’t take them off because they symbolized our friendship. One year I went back to college after a summer full of canoe trips and campfires and dived right in to the volleyball season. At our first tournament, the referee called me over and said I couldn’t wear jewelry during the match. I was confused, because I don’t have pierced ears and I wasn’t wearing jewelry. She finally pointed at my wrist. I told her that wasn’t jewelry–it was a bear scare! and it couldn’t come off. It was part of me! She was unrelenting however and said if I wanted to play I had to cut it off. Being the good and indispensable teammate that I was, I cut it off with the athletic tape scissors but I was in tears.

These days at camp we make bear scares out of polyester rope and use a much easier design, but the meaning is still there: a bear scare symbolizes friendship, teamwork, cohesiveness, unity.

Finally I am getting to the point of this post. For the first time in my life, I really need a bear scare–one that works! My canoeing comrades and I have gone round and round about how we are going to protect not only our food and gear from bears but ourselves, too. We will be traveling through black bear country the whole time and polar bear country for the last week or so. The last time I canoed in northern Canada, we took a gun. None of us were comfortable using it, and none of us were good shots. The gun remained in its case for the whole 3 weeks except for once when we thought we saw a grizzly bear. It turned out to be a musk oxen. But this year none of us want to mess with guns, and in fact it is difficult to get a gun in and out of Canada these days. Our next choice was bear spray, which is effective on bears if they’re up close. But everyone told us that if a bear is that close to you, it’s probably too late to be looking for your bear spray. An additional problem was that you can’t take bear spray across the border, you can’t fly with it, you can’t mail it, and it isn’t available in Norway House, the town where we are starting this year. Our third choice for bear deterrent was firecrackers. I solved the problem of where to find firecrackers in the middle of winter in Iowa, but once again was thwarted by both border rules and airplane rules. At last we have settled on a solution that we all think will work: an electric fence! This is not an electric fence that uses a car battery to power it. We didn’t think we could manage that much extra weight in our canoe. Instead it uses AA batteries, and promises to pack a punch to any bear who sticks his nose onto it. I’m afraid it will be a hassle every night setting up a fence but I think it may work more dependably than our bear scares.