Culture clash in bear country

This is probably the best book about living alone in the woods.

Watching "Alone in the Wilderness" on public TV tonight there was film of Dick Proenneke crawling into an empty bear den in the spring.  It reminded me of another time when a fellow named Jimmy Huntington described in his book "On the Edge of Nowhere" how he did that once and three bears came out of it. He dispatched them all.

And that reminded me of a day during the Exxon Valdez oil spill when I was required to take an eight-hour training course, mostly on health and safety before we could go to work.  In the course of the day a cute little industrial hygienist from California gave a talk on bear safety.  Now what this little sweetie from warm country knew about bear safety we had to question, but she soldiered on.  At one point she held up a can of bear spray and that brought a few snickers in the audience.  She stopped and said, "no, really, it works."  That brought more snickers of disagreement.

"OK," she challenged, "has anybody here ever encountered a bear?"

A few of us raised our hands tentatively, not really wanting to join the argument.

But a young fellow from a Yukon River village took up the challenge and answered her question.

"I was going through some thick brush," he said, "and came to this little clearing. Just as I did, a bear came out of the brush on the other side of the clearing."

"What did it do?" she asked.

"It charged me," he said.

Now she was showing some realistic amazement.  "What did you do?"

After all, the fact that he was in the class was irrefutable proof he had survived the encounter.

He paused for just a moment,  looked around at his buddies, all of whom had probably had a similar experience, and said very calmly, "I shot the son of a bitch."

She looked dumbfounded, had no response,  put her can of bear mace away and went on to another subject without mentioning bears again.

There is one other sort of corollary to the story.  Later in the oil spill when most work was being done on beaches, the industry hired bear guards.  Many of them were not Alaskans or outdoors people in general and inexperienced around bears except what training they received before they were posted. One problem was they were not allowed to carry guns.  One day one of the guards with his can of bear repellant saw a bear about a quarter of a mile off. Apparently thinking bear repellant worked the same way insect repellant worked, he sprayed himself thoroughly with the stuff.  This immediately incapacitated him and he had to be medevaced to a hospital.  This sounds like one of those wilderness style urban legends, but almost a year later I was able to confirm the story with a nurse at the hospital where he was treated.  People who have heard the story mostly allow as how it was probably fortunate this guy was not given a gun to deal with bears.  Who knows what he would have shot?