(Continued from Part 2)
A few minutes after James' mac and cheese began to boil, a medium-sized man who looked a few years shy of forty entered the shelter, glanced around with contempt, then slung his heavy pack against the wall closest to the sidepath. He didn't bother to return our heys and hellos and started unpacking without a word. James nodded yes to our silent inquiry.
The man and his attitude hadn't been in the shelter five minutes before he rudely interrupted Page's reply to a question about stars initiated by James. He butted into Page's answer to inform her that she didn't know what stars were, that the night sky in Georgia was a "sucked-orange haze" compared to the brilliance overarching his Tennessee home. Page clammed up and muttered, "two bears and a boor" under her breath, just loud enough for James and I to hear and laugh.
After finishing his supper, James told Boorman about the two bears. The man was excited by the news and loudly proclaimed he had packed in a four-pound can of ham for this very occasion. Our six eyes met in quizzical, what-the-hell glances. When no one else spoke up, I asked if he intended to feed the ham to the bear. He answered obliquely by telling us a childhood story, a tale about the times his mountaineer father and uncles had marched their sons up to Spence Field during weekend camping trips. His father's favorite backcountry entertainment was bear baiting: smearing lard on rocks, pouring ham drippings on grass, leaving chunks of ham and venison in precise locations.
In the dimming softness of early dusk the men created a convoluted circuit of scent trails leading to strategically placed portions of deer and pig meat. Then they positioned the boys along the course before finding their own stations. Each boy sat alone with his thoughts and fears in the dimming dusk-the meadow bigger then, the stars brighter overhead. The men drank Jack Daniels whiskey as a bear followed one of the scent paths past their posts. The boys, minimum age twelve, imitated their bravery without the booze. As I understood it, this coming-of-age rite forced both bears and boys to overcome their mutual fear-one for a food reward, the other for a father's praise. The fetch of the scent-line reeled a bear to within a few feet of a sitting boy or man before angling away toward more meat, ham drippings, lard, or another human: a carefully rigged game of inter-species chicken. To pass the test, to become warriors, the boys had to hold still and remain silent, had to endure the upwelling, innate fear of a large and potentially predatory beast coming right at them in the night, when ancient fear calls the bets of modern boasts made during daylight.
Beyond bravery test, the underlying motive was mean-spirited sport: manipulating the bear for a night's entertainment. The game was to bend the wild bear's future to their will, to move the beast like a living chess piece-a pawn-from place to place on the meadow's meat-lure board, while all the soul-endowed kings watched the work of their cleverness and felt fear's buzz.
Concerned by his apparent desire to draw Cosby back into camp, I gave him a shorter and more pointed version of the standard park service lecture. "That's a big, aggressive bear out there. He's already habituated to human food, already a problem bear. If you feed him that ham, you'll just be another problem human making a bad situation even worse. That bear could injure somebody before the summer is over, and if he does, the rangers will kill him."
His only reply was an I-don't-give-a-shit, palms-up shrug, followed by "the bears are goners anyway." That comeback convinced me that additional attempts to reach an accord of common sense were futile. Certain we would be subjected to some sort of bizarre, one-man re-enactment, Page and I left the now uncomfortably close enclosure.
We re-entered Fort Cosby twenty minutes later. Everyone remained silent, preoccupied with their own thoughts. Page and I read our paperbacks to buffer our minds from the impending dilemma: being held culture-clash hostage by a macho jerk determined to further corrupt an already aggressive bear. A very big and aggressive bear. Too bad we couldn't tranquilize him with a dart gun and relocate him the hell away from Cosby Knob. Boorman, not the bear.
Near eight, while there was still plenty of light in the opening, the man carried a double-handled cloth sack to a spot about 10 long paces in front of the shelter. He sat down with his back toward our view, then lifted a full fifth of Jack Daniels out of the sack. He opened the bottle and tipped back two long swigs in quick succession. After a few more minutes and several more pulls of eighty proof, he took a four-pound can of ham out of the sack and placed it next to the bottle of amber sipping whiskey. Boorman slowly twisted the key to open the can. He let the ham breath like fine wine. And let its carcass-lure drift downhill into the darkening forest: a molecular come-along he knew would hook into the cords of the bear's ancient instincts.
The man from east Tennessee carried the canned ham another 10 paces further away from the shelter and placed it on the ground. He pulled two metal forks from his pants pocket, punched their tines deep into either end of the firm meat and carefully lifted the ham free of its container before lowering it back to the ground. His re-enactment game, sport anchored in assumed dominion, was afoot. And he needed people to watch, just as his father and uncles had all those years ago.
Without pausing, Boorman picked up the can and poured ham juice in a rough diamond of scent, counterclockwise. Starting from the second-base bag of meat, he angled toward third then swung toward home, which he widened considerably as he dribbled a base path of ham drippings in the dirt all the way across the front of the fence. We shouted imprecations combining his IQ and breeding as he rounded first and headed back to second with the last of the juice, carefully preventing even a single drop from coming in contact with his hands, clothes, and the bottom of his shoes.
Ignoring the umpire of public opinion, Boorman placed the two forks in the ham can, picked up the can with two fingers and stowed its scent inside a large Ziplock bag. He carried the cloth sack to the bottom of the clearing before disappearing into the trees for a minute at most. When he came back out his hands were empty. The sack was somewhere in the woods. James explained. While we were away from the shelter, Boorman had toted his white sack into the woods at the bottom of the clearing and was out of sight for maybe five minutes. When he reappeared, he was still carrying the sack. The three of us agreed that Boorman had rigged a rope up into a suitable tree so he could quickly hang his bear-baiter bag above ursine reach.
Boorman sat down cross-legged next to the whiskey bottle midway between ham and home, his back turned toward us again, his eyes searching the forest for movement darker than early dusk. He was the puppet-master pitcher orchestrating the action and reaction. And we were his unwilling catchers, our masks made of chain-link fence. We would be forced to catch his screwball behavior behind home.
Meat scent saturated the air around the shelter. When a pine needle falls in the forest, the eagle sees it, the bear smells it, and the deer hears it hit the ground, so the old woodsman's adage goes. If Cos and his hunger were still in the neighborhood, the ham scent would haul him in as reliably as a motor-driven winch, cable hooked taut from meat to mouth.
We didn't have long to wait. As darker dusk pooled beneath the canopy, he appeared in the bottom of the opening, looking larger yet in the failing light. The bear steered straight for the butchered meat and lowered his heavy head to the ham and took several appraising whiffs. Satisfied, he bolted down big chunks, his instincts ordering him to eat as much as possible before other beasts homed in on the scent of the carcass. After noisily inhaling the ham to the ground, Cosby licked and chomped the grass around and under where the chunk of meat had been. To an already very large bear that needs to gain as much weight as possible before winter, a four-pound nugget is a warm-up appetizer that tastes like more, a nearly unlimited amount of more.
Cosby began to trace the drip line in the same direction it was made. He slowly trailed the puppet-string base path to third-sniffing, chewing ham-juiced grass, making low huffing sounds. He passed in front of home and paused to look inside the fence. Now I agreed with the journal entries. The bear was an immensely heavy mound of muscle; he weighed at least 500 pounds. With the guide of strong scent strung out less than a foot in front of the fence, we didn't have to resort to imagination or cuddly anthropomorphism to guess what his bear brain might be telling him. We added a bungee cord to the rope, making sure he couldn't knock the latch up and barge in. I moved my hiking stick-hickory, stout and heavy-close to hand.
No longer wild and free, Cosby circled the bases tethered to human manipulation: one run, two runs, three, four. Millions of years of evolving instincts and knowledge told him that where there is meat and this much scent, there is a fresh carcass nearby. There are more easy calories and weight gain for winter. Locating the carcass was just a matter of sorting out the scent trail, of discovering the glut of dead flesh his species' long tenancy told him was right in front of his nose.
The bear baiter remained quiet and mostly still, his eyes forward, always away from ours. His only regular motion was the occasional reach for the Jack Daniels. Despite his mind's natural urging, he did not turn his head to follow the bear's arc behind him. That would be admitting fear and doubt. He wanted to show us that he was a man with the bark still on, not totally self-domesticated like the rest of us. He wanted to show us that he was the bear tamer, that his bravado and knowledge could reach deep down into the bear's wildness and instinct, and force the powerful beast to orbit his dominance like a leashed poodle at a dog show.
After completing a series of circuits, looping round and round like batters hitting home runs in sequence, the meat-maddened bear broke his fetters and stepped outside the scent line. The last of the day's light drained from the clearing. The green forest faded to a black wall of misshapen silhouettes against the Carolina twilight. The forest flashed with living sparks low to the ground.
Cosby stood still for a little while, his sense of smell translating the slight breeze, then widened his search pattern. He began to cut across the diamond, to scout outside its perimeter, to stand in front of the fence. Each time the alpha male bisected the lop-sided diamond, he ricocheted away from Boorman as if there were an invisible shield that both denied entry and deflected trajectory. Cosby always angled away when he came within 4 to 5 feet of walking straight into the bear-baiting Buddha. But his angle of avoidance was so shallow that he usually passed within 30 inches of the stationary man. Two and a half feet from the jaws of a huge black bear is a close shave when you are sitting down, and closer still when you are sitting down in a dark forest: a wilderness where night fear of Pleistocene predators coils around with the double helix of our DNA. Boorman never flinched outwardly. But he was not impervious to his genetic legacy, and his trust in past behavioral patterns was not absolute. He betrayed his unease by reaching for the bottle of sour mash composure more often after the bear had begun to approach him closely before veering away. You can't fool the bottle; the bottle knows nervous.
Cosby's momentum slowed even more after a half hour of diminishing returns. Now he spent more time standing in one spot, his lumpy black bulk looking like a darker chunk of night had settled to the forest floor. He lingered, still seining scent molecules for the windfall feast, unwilling or unable to abandon his chance to gorge on fresh meat. He focused on the shelter, the only place he hadn't physically searched. The bear frequently tread back and forth in front of the fence, nose casting about for what his eyes couldn't see. After dark, as he slowly rambled back and forth right in front of us, the Cos appeared too large to belong to the eastern forest Anthropocene. He looked like he had escaped from the bestiary that still roams the deepest folds and recesses of our subconscious minds, the dark crawl spaces where we still run naked across the plains of Africa, lions all around, still build fires in front of cave entrances. Good thing Cosby didn't know that he became more powerful and the fence more flimsy the closer he approached after nightfall.
About an hour after sundown, Boorman stood up stiffly and walked toward us. Our hopes rose. Maybe he was closing the curtain; maybe the interactive bear-boor after-dinner theater was finally over. He stopped in front of the fence and fished a handful of something from his jeans' pocket. Careful not to step on the ham drippings, Boorman slowly bent over and placed six of them at precise intervals in front of the lean-to a couple of inches back from the bottom of the chain-link barrier. Then he stepped back and paused a few moments to let the scene simmer.
Boorman dug something out of his other front pocket, then lit and lowered a lighter to a tea candle, one of those small metal cups filled with white wax and wick. He lit all six of the candles, the final props in his carefully choreographed exhibition. Satisfied with his showmanship and style, the interactive ham artist walked clumsily back to his center-stage post and resumed his meditative, cross-legged position beside the bottle of almost steady nerves again.
We shook our heads and laughed out loud despite our anger. The crazy bastard had brought footlights to reclaim our attention and to add comic relief. And for a short while the candles performed their function, adding a festive atmosphere and perking up the shelter's gloom. The self-appointed stage master remained where he was, impassive, back to us as always. Alpha bear Cosby alternated between standing in front of the shelter and making variously configured sorties around and through the drip-line loop. Early on, he snuffed a flame out just by lowering his huge head, grizzly-sized in the flickering light, to catch the candle's bland, burning-wax scent.
Around ten o'clock, when the silhouettes of both bear and boor were still blacker than the night-dark sky, Page came up with a plan. "This moron is obviously an exhibitionist. Sooner or later he's going to look back here to see if we're still watching. If we are already in our sleeping bags bored to snoring when he does, maybe he will end this macho nonsense." James and I agreed. We all topped off our thermarests as loudly as possible and wriggled our way into the soft warmth of our bags. At first I listened for the bear's heavy breathing and blowing, but I soon fell asleep.
The inconsiderate backpacker from the mountains of Tennessee woke us up with an aggressive yank on the doubly fastened latch and loud cursing a little after ten-thirty. He was no doubt damp with dew and cold in just T-shirt and jeans. No one lifted a finger to help him untie the latch. Boorman ate something and wriggled into his sleeping bag. James tied the latch down with rope and bungee cord again. Ham-crazed Cosby began pacing, slow and ponderous, along the scent path in front of the fence. A few minutes later the emboldened beast tried a new tactic: he stood up and curled his long-clawed front paws over the top tube of the metal-fence door without having to stretch, then shoved his weight on it, stressing the metal to near its tensile strength. The latch clanged. The fence shook with a distressingly loud quiver.
None of the journal entries had mentioned Cosby standing up and attempting to come through the door. This was new behavior, an unwelcome escalation. Page and I thought the same thing after the bear pressed upon the top of the door a second time. A variation of a well-known childhood nursery rhyme had just come to life and living color. And we were painted into the pictures on the prey side of the door. Instead of "Then I'll huff, and I'll puff, and I'll blow your house down," in the The Three Little Pigs, our version was "Then I'll shake, and I'll shove, and I'll slam your door down," in The Four Little Backpackers.
After he rattled our cage a couple more times, I propped my hiking stick against the front of the sleeping platform. I lay down on top of my bag-poised, pissed, and ready to pounce. The next time that big bully stood up and exposed his belly, I was going to leap off the platform and poke my blunt-ended staff into his greedy gut the second he draped his paws over the top of the door. I sprang as planned and thrust a two-handed jab into nothing but air on the other side of the fence. The bear had pivoted before my parry poked through the links, stunning quickness for a quarter-ton animal that normally walked like it was related to a sloth.
Later, still awake, I realized I had been trying to thrash inoffensive saplings. I had displaced my anger and aggression away from its true target: Boorman and his selfish drama.
The night dragged on and on. Every time we drifted off to sleep, Cosby rose on his powerful hind legs and pushed the top of the door, noisily clanking the slack out of the latch and shaking the fence. While the three of us couldn't buy a wink, Boorman slept the sleep of the just-the just plain drunk. He snored in maddening metronomic rhythm-in and out, in and out-oblivious to shoving bear and aching bladders.
We awoke at early dawn. Cosby and his thwarted hunger were gone. All of the metal-cupped candles were cold, burned down or blown out by the breaths of the bear. Page and I quickly left the shelter for short walks. When we returned, James, who was already cooking instant grits, told us the bear last shoved the fence hard enough to wake him up at ten minutes after five.
James crammed his Kelty backpack with gear between spoonfuls of grits. "I want to get going, hike hard enough to blow off some steam, hike long enough so I won't have to share a shelter with that twisted sonofabitch ever again," he fumed in a fast and angry voice. "Don't worry, he'll be telling his bear stories at Davenport tonight, if he makes it that far," I replied as I pointed to the whiskey bottle. We could see that he and his fear had drunk the Jack Daniels down to the smaller print "sour mash" on the famous black-and-white label.
He packed in a flurry of practiced movement-rolling, stuffing, and shoving, unzipping and zipping. James didn't wash his dishes; he just dropped his small pot, spoon, and grit-gunked bowl into a Ziplock bag and that was it. He shook our hands and wished us well. We walked around the corner of the shelter to see him off. He pointed at the scat cairns, gave us a smile and quick tug of his cap bill, then took off striding long and fast.
Like James, we packed fast and spoke as if Boorman-who lay still and silent on his side, eyes buried against the far wall-weren't there. We made no effort to alter the volume of our voices, either louder or softer. We too were in a hurry, but for a different reason. Late the afternoon before, while we were closing in on Cosby, a ranger on horseback had stopped to ask us a few questions. Our old pickup had been broken into two nights in a row. We didn't bother with breakfast. We wished Boorman one hell of a retributory hangover and started walking into a beautiful morning.
Notes
One of the last living icons of the Southern Appalachians, the black bear (Ursus americanus) is the only species of bear inhabiting the eastern United States. Male black bears stand significantly higher at the shoulder and weigh more than twice as much as their female counterparts. In one study conducted in the park, researchers found that mature male bears averaged 250 pounds and the females only 104 pounds. The largest male in that study weighed 510 pounds, the largest female 200 pounds. Donald W. Linzey, the author of Mammals of Great Smoky Mountains National Park, did not mention the time of year the bears were weighed.
Black bears killed and partially consumed a fifty-year-old woman along the Little River Trail in May of 2000. This attack was the first, and thus far only, instance of a bear killing a human in the history of the GSMNP. Park Law Enforcement Rangers shot and killed the two bears found at the woman's body, an adult female and a yearling female. Both bears had little body fat.
The pleasant and highly evocative scent of balsam is a fragrant gift from the last onslaught of ice. The last in a long series of glaciations, known as the Wisconsin Ice Age, began grinding southward some 75,000 years ago and continued, with occasional thaws, until roughly 16,000 years ago. In the East, these Pleistocene ice sheets reached their southernmost thrust into present-day Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. The interglacial period that had somewhat stabilized the Earth's climate reached full stride about 10,000 years ago.
Even though the hill-scalping and lake-gouging glaciers never bulldozed the South, the climate was rock-cracking cold (severe freeze-and-thaw wedging) in the mountains of today's Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Then, as now, the park's highest mountains dramatically compressed latitude, creating an ecological island in the sky: tundra, a land without trees. Twenty-thousand years ago, an alpine zone of tundra clenched the land above 4,500 feet in permafrost. Downslope and to the south of the wide, sub-alpine bands circling the Smokies, Highland Dixie wore a long skirt of boreal forest that flowed into middle Georgia.
Trees are not the sticks-in-the-mud you might imagine, not over time. Some Northcountry species made multi-generational marches ahead of the advancing walls of ice, a slow-moving migration to the south. As the ultimate earth movers retreated and the land's prison melted to long flood, the cold-adapted conifers abandoned their base camps and began another slow seed-shuffle, this time higher upslope and to the north. As the weather continued to warm two Northcountry conifers-red spruce and balsam fir-followed their genetic imperatives further north and up toward the highest summits in the South, which, as everyone should know, are the tallest in eastern North America south of the Canadian territory of Nunavut. Today, the Southern Highland spruce-fir forest and its attendant plant community are stranded in sky islands of Canadian refugia.
Botanists believe the Fraser fir evolved quite recently, since the major climatic warming following the end of the most recent ice age, a tenancy of only the last five- to eight-thousand years. After the glacial high tide, the warming Earth sent the red spruce and wonderfully fragrant balsam fir-which still perfumes the northwoods-packing again on another march, this time back home to the north. Continued warming eliminated the balsam fir from long stretches of the relatively low-elevation Central Appalachians, and left the southern race of balsams isolated up high in the clouds. As often happens, genetic isolation led to speciation. Today the Fraser fir, former outlander turned Mountain South endemic, is the signature Southern Appalachian tree above 6,200 feet.
The Fraser fir is confined to the most cramped living quarters of any conifer rooted in the Appalachian cordillera. Its range is usually represented as eight dots-eight disjunct sanctums, six smaller and two larger-from southwestern Virginia to the North Carolina-Tennessee border in the eastern half of the GSMNP. Although this fledgling species recently covered more territory within the park, the pocket of Frasers in the Smokies remains its largest island in the sky.
* The GSMNP preserves over a half million acres (approximately 522,427) of incredibly diverse Southern Highland forests, three-season wildflower displays, high mountains, green meadows, and cold, clear, fast-moving streams. I wish the park was significantly larger. I wish our country supported national park sprawl to help buffer population sprawl and park-demand sprawl.
* Unfortunately, shelter fences did not provide two-way protection: they failed to protect the bears from the backpackers. The park service has removed nearly all of the fences from the Smoky's AT shelters and installed cables so backpackers can easily hang their food well out of ursine reach. Cosby Knob's fence came down when the shelter was renovated in 2006.
