This Montana Life: Living with bears has changed

Nights were the worst when it was bear season.

Since my bedroom was at the rear of our house in Smallville, Mont., I was most exposed to the goings-on after dark by the local bears.

One Friday night, the rattling of the garbage cans behind our house got to be too much for this 10-year old, so I crept into the living room, where my parents and friends were watching television. But that was even worse. “Night Stalker” was showing, and I watched in a fair amount of horror, unseen and unheard, from behind a couch.

That form of terror on black and white television being too much for my young brain, I slinked back into my bedroom. I fell asleep thinking that the bears were literally going to paw through the screen door, and my screams would not be heard over the TV.

The following weekend was Thanksgiving. I had not reached that stage of manhood that causes men to huddle around a TV and watch football, so after dinner I adjourned to the nearby woods.

I spent a few hours rummaging around the hills, and made a good inspection of my brothers’ tree fort. Then I saw him. The bear stood on its hind legs, scratching at a tall Ponderosa pine tree just uphill from our house.

I ran through the brambles back to our house and alerted my family to the bear.

Ever the wise one, my dad knew what to do.

“I’ll call Lee,” he said. “He’s got a bear tag.”

Now, this being back in the day before back in the day was even “the day,” I think bear tags were probably easy to come by. Regardless, “Lee” showed up with his mom, Mabel, about 45 minutes later. I knew where the bear was, so I hopped in their pickup and we bounced up an old road above our house to where I figured the bear would be.

Sure enough, the bear had climbed the Ponderosa and was lounging on a thick limb high above the ground.

Lee settled in over the hood of the truck with his .30-.30.

“Hit him right betwixt the lookers, Lee,” his wizened mom Mabel said.

That saying has stayed with me some 40 years and it sometimes surfaces when one of my sons or a hunting buddy is attempting some act that requires accurate precision.

“Get ‘im right betwixt the lookers, Bill!”

The bear dropped about 80 feet out of the tree and I ran up to it, wanting to see it up close and personal. It was still moving, so I retreated to the pickup.

Wasn’t much of a bear, and probably not much of a threat to our community. Maybe to our garbage cans, though.

Remember, this was 1971, and bears were considered nuisances when they came into town. Back then, bear-proof containers were called “cars.”

It saddens me though, that three grizzly bears were killed recently near Bigfork — three two-year old cubs. I wonder if everything had been done to help relocate the bears, and did the local homeowners do their best — knowing they live among grizzlies — to keep their garbage and chicken food “bear proof?”

We didn’t know better in the 1970s, when it came to bears. “Night of the Grizzly” was only a few years old.

On Saturday nights I had the job of lighting the furnace in the small Catholic church that perched on a hill above town. This meant a walk down a narrow, dark path behind our house. (It also meant getting to play with that big organ in the empty church.) After lighting the furnace, so the congregants would be warm in the morning, I shut the big double doors of the church behind me.

I turned my flashlight into the woods nearby.

Two bright reflections caught my eyes and my brain said “Bear.”

And then it said “Run.”

Like in some B movie, I ran screaming and hollering through the woods and down the trail back to our house, tripping on an exposed root. My flashlight fell into the woods, shattered.

I made it the last few yards to our back porch where my mother was waiting. That was a busy fall for bears at our house.

Maybe there’s more to the Ferndale bear story than we know.

Right now, though, the investigators aren’t saying much. But who knows, those three dead bears might have been some young kid’s worst nightmare.