There’s One, There’s Two..

Many years ago in the fall of the year, I pulled into Tinker Helseth’s lodge at Nestor Falls, Ontario, on Lake of the Woods, late at night. Choosing not to awaken anyone at that late hour, I parked near the lake, climbed over to the back seat of my pickup, into my sleeping bag and went to sleep. I had driven all day and I was tired. Rambunctious, my Labrador, slept soundly in the front seat. He was along to retrieve ducks and grouse. I had stopped in Minnesota and bought a twenty-pound bag of his favorite brand of dog food. It was in the open bed of the pickup with most of my other hunting and fishing gear.

I was awakened by old Ram’s low, ominous growl, which continued even after I told him to be quiet so I could sleep. Obviously he was upset with something. Could be some Canadian outlaw was eyeing up my gear in the bed of the pickup, so I reached down beside me and grasped the shotgun lying along the floor. It was then I felt the whole pickup lurch a little as a heavy body climbed into the bed behind me. Suddenly I was wide awake. A thief was only a few feet away, with only the back glass separating us. He was big, black and hairy… and scary in the middle of the night like that. But he came for only one thing, that bag of dog food. By the time I got over the seat and out the door, he was gone with it, heading toward the lake. He wasn’t the biggest black bear I have ever seen, but sometime that night he gained about 20 pounds by eating that whole bag of dog food.

The next morning at breakfast, Tinker, an experienced and knowledgeable outdoorsman, bush pilot and guide, told me that bear was becoming a real problem. He had learned how to get the lids off their garbage cans and break into sheds, and he wouldn’t leave. He was a young male, a threat of some proportions, as well as a nuisance. In time, he would have to be shot.

I asked Tinker if they would eat him eventually and he laughed. He said he’d just as soon eat old Rambunctious. Even local Indians wouldn’t eat bear meat, and he said he had never tasted any that didn’t ruin his appetite. He said Americans come to Canada to hunt bear for bear rugs mostly, not bear meat. Most talked about how good the meat was to justify getting a rug.

Just last year when I was fishing with Tinker, he showed me a couple of places where he and another guide were baiting for bears, where American hunters would take one in the fall. How else can you hunt a bear up there, by finding a trail and set up a tree stand? Black bears aren’t like deer. You won’t be successful without baiting them or hunting them with dogs, and if you bait them, getting one is pretty much a sure thing. Local dumps attract dozens. And there are so many of them, killing a few doesn’t hurt the population at all. Around Lake of the Woods, black bear are very abundant.

How many do we have in the Ozarks? Care to make a guess? The Missouri Department of Conservation wants to know, badly enough that they are spending about 885,000 dollars to get a close guess. According to Tim Ripperger, Assistant Director for the MDC, they feel they can figure out just about how many Missouri has by doing DNA testing on patches of hair left on barbed wire fences, and that type of thing. You can see why that would cost almost a million dollars. But the MDC only has to pay a quarter of that; the federal government is paying three-fourths of it. In this day when there is all this talk about the federal deficit of trillions of dollars, laying out a half million to try to figure out how many bears we have is no big expense! I asked Tim if I could get in on that, maybe get a few thousand for going down to the National Forestland and counting tracks or something. Because I am so skeptical, almost to a point of being amused by this, I don’t think I would qualify. They have, after all, some top flight, book-trained biologists who will come up with an accurate figure for only 885,000 dollars. Sure they will!

That figure needs to be better than 500 bears, and it will be, eventually, because the Missouri Department of Conservation badly wants to sell some bear tags and have a bear season. They have arrived at a figure of 500 to 600 bears necessary for a hunting season, and I would bet my boots that Missouri doesn’t come close to having that many, but how could you prove we don’t? I know a little bit about bears from spending so many years hunting the National Forestland in northwest and west Arkansas for more than twenty years, where I have seen several. They have a bear season in Arkansas, mostly for those hunters who would pay about anything to get a bear rug, even if they wouldn’t pay much for a freezer full of bear meat.

In those mountain forests, black bear are so elusive and wild that seeing them is unusual. Who knows how many there are! They are easier to see however if you bait them. One Jasper, Arkansas backwoodsman got friendly with one when he started taking the bear a daily offering of day-old donuts from a local bakery. Three months of that made the bear fairly tame, so he started taking pictures. One day he took pictures when he had forgotten the donuts, and the bear chewed on him a little bit. He had to have 120 stitches to atone for no donuts.

I can guarantee you that we won’t have 885,000 dollars spent counting bears without having five or six hundred counted when it is all over. In time we will have a limited bear season with some hundred dollar bear tags and some new non-resident hunters paying three times that to get a shot at a bear skin rug. But if you want one bad enough, come by and talk to Tinker Helseth at our swap meet this coming March, and he can help you get one easily, right there beside the bait bucket in northwest Ontario, with time to catch a limit of walleye during the afternoon.

Tinker will be giving away a free fishing vacation to his Lodge on Lake of the Woods, by drawing, on Saturday, March 19, during our daylong Grizzled Old Outdoorsman swap meet, held at the gymnasium of the Brighton Assembly of God Church, seventeen miles north of Springfield. He can tell you all about black bears and walleye and moose and the Canadian Wilderness. He has been guiding there since he was 11 years old, more than fifty years now. But he also is a master at chain-saw wood carving, and he will create a carving of a fish on that day, and give it away by drawing too. You can watch him give a demonstration from 1:00 to 2:00 p.m. and learn how to do it yourself.

I will be there all day too, and am thinking about giving a seminar on how to count black bears in the Ozarks. You can use that knowledge perhaps to get a federal grant.

My website has all the information on the swap meet...www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com. You still can get a table there to sell outdoor gear, and everything is free. No charge for a table, no charge to get in. Write me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo.65613 or e-mail lightninridge@windstream.net