Excerpts From The Life Of A Logging Camp Kid

Episode Five: How to Stage A Bear Photoshoot

“Get in the crewbus kids!”

This order was barked at us in such a fashion that my intuitive sensors knew that someone's life must be in danger. That, or there was something really cool to look at within a close proximity to camp. Dad delivered this message with his left eyebrow arched in a perfect, mischievous check mark, his thumbs hooked through the belt loops of his second best pair of rigging pants.

“What's going on, Ron?” My mother queried as she dried her hands on a frayed blue dish towel.

“Buck.” He replied.

My brother Jack and I hurried to put on our boots.

Our logging camp sat right in the middle of some of the most untamed wilderness left on this planet. The Wrangell-St. Elias Mountains formed a great jutting backdrop to the east, and the Pacific Ocean stretched out to the west, unencumbered by any form of land mass for thousands of miles. To the south sat the Malaspina Glacier, 1500 square miles of ice, and to the north was what seemed to be endless wilderness. Naturally, any time something came up that was considered to have entertainment value, anyone who was in camp at that moment headed to gawk at it. A good portion of the human caused amusement came courtesy of my Uncle Buck.

As we came to the one crossroads that existed in our part of the earth, my dad whipped his steering wheel to the left, and I knew at once where we were headed; the garbage incinerator. A couple miles south of camp sat a clearing. It was probably an old log landing, or perhaps the only purpose for the clearing to exist was to dispose of our garbage. Either way, the place was a veritable bear magnet. One bear in particular had a fondness for Cajun-style garbage, Sampson. Every day the men that worked at the log yard five miles south of camp would turn their heads in a mock salute to Sampson as the shaggy black beast rooted and masticated the cooling charred remains of our garbage. Our good American comestibles had helped him attain an impressive size for a black bear, weighing in at nearly six hundred pounds by most estimates. When a vehicle approached the dump he would raise his head and shake the cindered food bits from his ruff as a sort of acknowledgment of your presence and then return to his feast as you departed.

My Uncle Buck had a fascination with Sampson and instant photos. I think he missed his calling as nature photographer or maybe a fashion photographer. His portfolio was tacked to the rough plywood walls in his room at the bunkhouse. The series could have been titled “Startled Woodland Beast In Situ.” Picture after picture of Sampson adorned the drab brown wood; his expression best described as startled yet indifferent. Some of the pictures had Uncle Buck's fingertips in them as he would push the button before getting his hand out of the way. Sampson always had his face stuffed in the charcoal food mass that puked out of the bottom of the incinerator. I knew that he didn't tend to look up for long from his blackened buffet, and one day I asked my Uncle how he got the bear to look at him for his candid shots.

“Why I hit that SOB square on the noggin, sis!” He said with enthusiasm.

As a rule I always internally questioned the wisdom that most adults governed themselves by, but this revelation seemed especially stupid, so I followed up with an additional query;

“Aren't you worried that he might, well, you know, eat you?”

“Well[1] no little sister!” He would reply, and before continuing explode into his Hyena machine gun laugh, “I blind the piece of feces[2] with the flash.”

One couldn't argue with reasoning as sound as this, and it also explained why every photo had Sampson looking like a red eyed demon that had escaped the Abyss.

As we bounced down the road, I wondered if Uncle Buck's camera batteries had failed. Were we going to view his remains, or Sampson's for that matter? I did not think my uncle would go down easy, or without a fight.

We reached the clearing, the spruces and hemlocks parting like a stage curtain to reveal that we weren't the only people there for the show. An assortment of other camp vehicles had lined up along the edge of the dump, kind of like a refuse-themed drive in movie. The first thing that I noticed was that neither my Uncle or Sampson were anywhere near the incinerator. My eyes followed the pointed fingers and and turned heads with a sense of dismay.

There was a little platform about 20 feet up in a spruce tree on the edge of the clearing. Once upon a time, a rich friend of the camp owner sought a close up bear picture, and he built the platform so he could get one. Apparently he didn't get the memo that black bears could climb trees. I never did learn about what had happened to him, if anything at all, but the platform and rope ladder had remained as a testament to that man's foolishness.

My uncle was on top of the platform, snapping pictures. After his success with smearing bacon grease on the Suburban A.K.A., The Green Flamer, he got the bright idea to descend a wheel from the platform. The wheel was covered in bacon grease, and it was being batted back and forth like a pork-flavored tether ball. The player of this game was a gigantic brown bear. This development explained Sampson's absence, as brown and black bears got along about as well as a lot of people's relatives do during the holidays. The creature was standing on it's hind legs, and at ten feet tall was yelling in bear-speak at my uncle like a candy deprived toddler in a grocery store checkout line.

Jack and I slid open the back window and slithered into the bed of the pickup. I wasn't sure how this photo shoot was going to end, as the bear was more than strong enough to grab the wheel and rip the platform right out of the tree. Most of the grownups were just laughing at my Uncle's latest antic; the catcalls and insults filled the air like a not-so-sweet soundtrack. Suddenly, it appeared that Uncle Buck had finished his photo shoot, and drew up the wheel onto the platform. The boar bear snapped his teeth and uttered a protest, dropping to the ground and slashing his front paws across the gravel as if he were drawing a line in the sand. Gauntlet thrown, my Uncle took out his skinning knife, cut the line holding the wheel, and attained a very precise discus stance on top of the platform. The platform was about five feet in diameter, and with taking into consideration his diminutive stature, I struggled to do the mental math as it dawned on me what he was about to do.

“Hutcher!"[3] He screamed and proceeded to discus throw the wheel out in the clearing. His pirouetting form had enough force to launch the wheel a good distance. Thankfully his ursine model was far more interested in the bacon greased metal doughnut, and galloped toward the projectile with impressive speed. My uncle took that few second interlude to slide down the rope ladder and high tail it toward his awaiting hickory shirt and rigging pants bedecked paparazzi line.

“I think I got some good footage!” He bubbled as we all headed toward home.

[1] The Devil's toasty abode
[2] A less eloquent four letter word for manure
[3] “Hutcher” is what is shouted by timber fallers and such folk when they send a few thousand pound tree down the side of mountain, or anywhere really. If you hear the word, something is going down, somewhere.

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