them.
This kind of directional miscarriage is not always reserved for the individual. I’ve seen whole groups get lost while portaging across a prospective shortcut. One of my regular customers while I was in the outfitting business was the Queen’s Fifth Regiment from England. This elite group of soldiers, about twenty crack militiamen, was to go on a “work” vacation — a wilderness canoe trip in Canada. I outfitted them and designed a route that would challenge their abilities. One week into their trip, they decided to make a shortcut over a swath of land that would cut short their trip by about five kilometres. The distance would be about one kilometre overland. Carrying their gear from Point A to Point B seemed to be a simple matter. Half carried packs while the others shouldered canoes, and off they went in more than one direction. After wandering for about an hour, the soldiers who were still more or less banded together dropped their gear midway across the shortcut and tried desperately to find their way back to the start point. After some time they located the remainder of their gear along with a few confounded compatriots, loaded up and trekked off in what they thought was the direction of their selected target. Another hour had lapsed but they arrived, with some difficulty, at the lake where they were supposed to be. But there was no sign of the others. Striking off in the direction of where they thought they left their first load, they got thoroughly confused and ended up back in the same place. After much shouting, the men finally began to assemble on the far shore but without most of their packs and tents which had been left somewhere midway along the shortcut. They spent a rainy night without their tents and a good deal of their personal gear, huddled under canoes at the end of their shortcut. They retrieved their lost gear the next morning. The one hour it would have originally taken to remain on their original route, took almost an entire additional day to sort out the mess they created by attempting a shorter route.
NINE
ANIMAL ATTACK
Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself.
— James A. Froude (1818–1894)
I worry about Tony. He’s a big man and shows absolutely no fear in the presence of large predators, or for that matter, any animal either above him on the food chain, or physically larger than he is. Tony Grant manages the Aspen Valley Wildlife Sanctuary in Muskoka, Ontario, a quarter of a kilometre down the road from where I live. Tony is the only one who works there that can get in the cage with the captive lioness and play with her. Sometimes she lies on top of Tony and won’t let him get up for half an hour. He hand-feeds her raw chicken and she pines when Tony is away. She could kill Tony in a flash of nail and claw anytime she felt like it. I worry about Tony because animal trainers and handlers get killed often enough, eventually, and it’s simply the immutable law of the wild. I look at animal handlers as I do mountain climbers and other extreme adventurers who live on the edge and sometimes push the limits — they invariably forget about those laws. And you only have to lift your guard once. So, I worry about Tony because he’s a good neighbour.
I live in Muskoka, or cottage country, known for its million-dollar summer homes, voguish shops, executive golf courses, and fractional ownership developments. Strangely enough, I’ve seen more wildlife out my back window at home, and had more close-up confrontations with wild animals than in any of my far-flung travels across the Canadian northland. I live on the fringe of settlement; it’s a congenial mix of forested and open land, perfect for coyote, wolf, moose, deer, bear, or any wild species you would normally find ranging around more northerly regions of the province. I can look out my window and watch deer grazing in the field, moose rutting in October, or have black bears ravaging through my compost box in the backyard. Last month two black bears killed all my chickens. I had to dispatch one of the more aggressive male bears because it was unpredictable, testy, and a threat to my children who play in the woods adjacent to the house (and compost box). And I don’t want to get rid of my compost box. My daughter’s lunch bag and schoolwork pack was hauled out of the back of my pickup truck by a bear. And bears are known to drag off rather large items, including dogs, kids, and full garbage containers. The teacher reprimanded my daughter for making up the story and not doing her homework; it wasn’t until we sent a picture of the bear to the school, standing on top of our kitchen stove in the house, that my daughter found any closure in the matter.
What do we really know about Nature?
Any wild animal is unpredictable; and we think we know more than we do about Nature, thanks to Disney and the world of anthropomorphized animated characters. A caged animal in a sanctuary that may have shown only the friendliest attitude toward humans may have some rogue primitive spark in their cerebrum that initiates an unprovoked attack. Or maybe it was just having a bad day. The case of the young handler who climbed into the wolf enclosure at the Haliburton wildlife sanctuary, unsupervised, thinking that the pack alpha female wouldn’t mind at all, was one of tragic misconception. As a result, she suffered a horrible death … and all the wolves were shot by local police in retaliation.
My brother was a cop for York Regional police back in the early 1980s. He was called to a country property, the home of a renowned bear trainer, where a woman had just been killed by a “pet” black bear. The trainer was in the habit of letting the bear out of its compound so the cage could be cleaned. The man’s girlfriend was asleep in the bedroom when the bear entered and started to maul her. She attempted to climb out the window but the bear clawed her legs so viciously, trying to drag her back in to the house that she bled to death in a matter of a few minutes. When the bear was finished, her legs looked as if they had been put through a shredding machine. It was surmised that the bear was attracted by the scent of a woman who was on her menstrual cycle. In fact, some parks agencies will not allow woman employees to go out into wild bear country during their period.
The fact that animals are more dangerous when they live in proximity to humans is not a surprise. More people obviously mean more incidents. Animals can display unusual characteristics, lose their normal fear of people, and people sometimes lose their sensibilities while experiencing an animal “event.” Heavily used parks are a good example. On a road trip through Yellowstone Park in Wyoming some years ago, there were several cars pulled over and a man was feeding a mother black bear through the window of his camper. Meanwhile, another man ran at the two cubs that accompanied the mother, attempting to snap a few pictures. The cubs bolted, crying in fear with the cameraman in hot pursuit. When the mother bear heard the cries of her two cubs she forgot about the handout and ran at the man with the camera, moving at almost twice the speed of the running man. Luckily, the man diverted an attack by climbing on top of a nearby car.
In Algonquin Provincial Park, where most animals, both large and small, have been subject to all manner of studies and surveys, one can view moose at any time of the day along the Highway 60 corridor that runs through the park. Again, with cars stopped on both sides of the road, a man was trying to photograph a moose calf while its mother, nearby, hackles raised on the back of her neck, paced nervously back and forth. Little did the man with the camera realize that a cow moose is a deadly threat. Take for example the case a few years ago in Alaska where a man was kicked to death by a cow moose protecting her calf — right in front of a public building, captured on film by an onlooker.
In March of 2005, a cow moose came into the yard and began licking the road salt off my truck that was parked in the driveway. I went outside to chase her off when she began tugging at the wiper blades with her teeth. I soon realized that it wasn’t interested in going anywhere. I did a little human-animal bonding test by inserting rice crackers I keep in the glovebox for my kids, into the side of the moose’s mouth. And that’s an interesting bit of moose trivia if you ever get the opportunity to hand-feed a moose; because of the size of their snout, they can’t
