Chuck Hassler

I dreamed last night that a polar bear was in the pasture behind my house menacing my neighbor’s cows. Even in my dream it seemed a little weird but I couldn’t sit idly by while the largest land predator on earth ripped through a bunch of hapless cows. Knowing you’re not supposed to take the law into your own hands, I dialed 911, but it didn’t work, and I couldn’t find the sheriff’s number in the phone book. Being a man of action, I determined it was up to me. I jumped into a pickup truck, drove through some fences, and started hazing the bear away from the cattle.

Soon we were in a sugar beet field, and I noticed it was a terrific stand of young beets and clean too! I remember thinking Tom (farmer friend) is going to be p—d as I drove across the rows, but I had ursus arcticus on the run and I couldn’t stop. I was saving the cows.

Then I woke up. It took a few moments for the fog to rise and me to realize it wasn’t real. I hadn’t saved any cows, I hadn’t messed up any beets, there wasn’t any polar bear. That came as quite a relief.

I’m sure there are all kinds of Freudian implications but I’m not into that.

I am into the notion that polar bears, unlike our grizzly bears, see you and I as on the menu. They actively stalk us and eat us when given the opportunity. 

Grizzlies may stalk you or follow you, but they don’t really think of us as a school lunch. They’re much more like the schoolyard bully. They want what you got. The gut pile. Your hard-earned meat. Your lunch. Your pack. If you set yourself up to be a victim, that’s how it’s going to work out for you.

If you don’t keep a clean camp, you’re inviting an unwanted visitor.

If you don’t get your meat out of the woods or hanging high, you’re going to be really bummed or horrified at the results of one night’s handiwork.

If you surprise a sow with cubs, you’re going to see the nastiest helicopter mom you’ve ever seen spring into action. 

If you think you’re going to Wyatt Earp a charging grizzly because you’ve run a few mags through your sidearm at the gun range, you’re sorely mistaken, too, buckaroo.

I know this to be true because I have been bluff-charged more than once, the scariest on Jones Creek when a mama with triplets put the bum rush on my late dad and me in a tangle of downed timber. She simply flowed through 50 yards of stuff in an instant that would have taken me five minutes to climb through. She stopped 10 yards away. We were horseback that day and were fortunate the horses didn’t go berserk. And that she decided clacking her jaws was enough.

Most of my backwoods encounters have resulted in the bear running the other way amazingly fast.

I have reluctantly concluded that my best bet for a close encounter of the really unpleasant kind is pepper spray. Maybe everybody gets to walk away. If you’re going to use lethal means, a 45-70 or a 12 gauge with amped up slugs is your best bet, pilgrim. But it’s going to be messy and you’re going to count it as one if your worst days on the planet.  And you’re going to contribute to the taming of the wilderness.

And that’s self defeating. Unless you want to pave paradise and put up a parking lot, that is.