Rosie mountain taken from the door. Arrow shows where female with two cubs have been for four days.



The female with one cub is where the lower arrow points and the male above her. He moved around above her and she cross the gorge and up that cliff and over the mountain.




The "Thing". Whether it is a gall bladder or a cruel joke, we won't know until the snow melts.

(Click on any Image to see a higher resolution version)

Two days of sun and warmth can do great things for the spirit when you have been alone for weeks without seeing one person. I find myself optimistic for the first time since I got here. Since I discovered someone had stayed here last fall I have been a bit glum, but the sun brightens things.

Two females with spring cubs showed up when the sun came out. One with two small cubs is high on Rosie Mountain in front of the cabin and the other with one cub is in a steep ravine on the big mountain across the lake to the south east. We call it Signal Mountain because of an old signal tower on top.

Females choose these places because the big males have a difficult time navigating these steep places. In the afternoon I watched as a male followed old tracks of the female and her cub and eventually located them across the ravine. The female watched him coming. She was on top of a hundred foot cliff across from him and she did not move.

He eventually crossed up-gorge and climbed to her side, and made a big loop above her. I thought he was going to keep going and was not really there to bug them, but she watched closely and he did turn and look down at them and started to slide down the snow toward her. This was all she needed and scrambled down the cliff and crossed the gorge and up the cliff on the other side (see photo). The cub was able to keep right with her, even though he is very small. The male followed much slower, and by the time he had cross the gorge, she and the cub had climbed up a thousand feet and had gone over the top of the mountain disappearing from both his and my sight. He gave up and came down the mountain past me. My assessment was that he was more interested in her sexually than he was after the cub. I have watched predator males and they move and act differently. Females with spring cubs treat them all with the same distrust. It was my feeling that she would also do well keeping her cubs safe from a predator male.

No sign of Biscuit or Brandy and her cubs, but I have seen very few bears come out of the dens in this valley so far. I keep checking other years' notes which tell me that it is still early, but I have reason to be unsure of things this year and I find myself worrying, which makes for long extended evenings with no one to talk to about what worries me.

In my May 13th web entry, I mentioned that I had found some things taken from our shed and put back carefully and other things not replaced, like the fuel tank. There were a few things I left out of that story that I might as well talk about here because of the seriousness they could represent.

As I said, we leave the shed unlocked, but what I did not say before was that the cabin was also broken into by taking off a shutter that needs a special tool to remove and the window too was removed. The window and shutter had been replaced so carefully that I could not detect that anyone had tampered with them.

There were a few things missing from inside, but we take all important things to the city. What was gone was some left over canned goods, scissors, an old pair of pliers and the bathroom scales we once used to weigh the cubs up until they were a year and a half old. The strange thing I found though, was something I am now convinced is some raw bear hide formed into a pouch and made to look like a bear's gall bladder. The small sac was tied off at one end with a loop of string which was then hung on a nail (see photo).

At first, I took it for what it was intended to convey and I could hardly look at it because of what it told me. I hung an old frying pan over it and tried to continue to prepare for living here. There was a lot of hard work left to do before I could be comfortable in this stormy place. The truth was that I was angry and uncomfortable for two days, but then I had a second look at the "Thing" and noticed that there were a few hairs that seem to be rooted in the sac which told me that it could not be an internal organ. The more I examined it the more it looked like a prank was being played on me. That was when I decided it was the Russian photographer/bear researcher I mentioned, who I know doesn't like Maureen and I.

I took a digital picture of the "Thing" and sent it to Tatiana Gordienko and asked her to see if she could sort it out by talking to the director of the preserve. If it was the photographer, he would know about it. Tatiana is sure they know nothing and that it was not the guy I suspected. She is convinced that it is a gall bladder. In her return e-mail she asked me to do a test by cutting into it and dissolve a small bit of the contents in water to see if it turned the water yellow. I could not find any content to dissolve and cutting into it tugging on a hair or two convinced me even more that it was a cruel joke. But was it all a joke? Maybe these people wanted to tell us what they were doing but did not want to leave behind a valuable gall bladder as a way of doing that. Only the melting snow will divulge the truth now. There is no way poachers could have hidden bear carcasses so I will not find them. If they are here other bears will probably help me find them soon, before all the snow melts, by digging up pieces of hide and bones.

So this is my waiting game. Of course Maureen and I have always dreaded the possibility that our wonderful study could end this way. That is why we decided we could not leave without first trying to help establish a group of rangers to look after the place.

By the way, I learned from Tatiana that the rangers made a big bust on some poachers shortly after I came here. The helicopter I came on was used for placing a couple rangers at a lake where the head ranger and I had discovered bear remains last fall when we landed there with my Kolb. The poaching had happened a year ago in the spring of 2002 and Timofey, the head ranger decided to go back this spring to apprehend them if and when the poachers came back. This is a difficult place to get to and with helicopters now costing US $1200 per hour, they cannot just order one up anytime they want. They used the one I paid for to come here. Anyway they got two poachers with two bears and they apprehended two other men over the hill who said they were just winter camping. The program is set up so each of the rangers involved will get a good bonus for arrests like this one.

- Charlie