Last autumn, outside McPhail's convenience store at Fort Irwin, the last outpost before the vast primeval back-country of North Ontario, you could see the muddy paw prints left behind overnight by an adult bear reaching up towards a side window. I did my best but came nowhere near the highest prints. No wonder, I thought, that bear fantasies have got so out of hand in North America, that people are afraid in their beds at night and that they even have a romantic novel about a woman falling in love with a bear.
"It's a big bear, right enough, standing about eight feet tall," confirmed Bart Hilhorst, whose job it is to protect the community around Haliburton County. He was examining further claw marks around the screen doors, trying to put the owners of this last chance coffee stop at ease about their home-made butter tarts and rhubarb pies. No amount of cayenne pepper on the window-sills, bleach, ammonia, firecrackers or pot-banging was going to keep away a creature that hibernates all winter and has only six months to double its weight again.
"I don't want to have to shoot him," the owner, Jim McPhail, warned manfully, while his wife Tammy ragged him about his Cork ancestry and said, "Blarney! He couldn't shoot a fish in a barrel". But then Hilhorst kindly reminded her that a bear would have no trouble in ripping down the doors and making off with every last one of her butter tarts.
A mother bear and her cubs raided a similar shop some distance south and ate an entire freezer full of ice cream in broad daylight. Two bears had already been shot last summer at a local camp for coming too close to children, and a woman nearby had walked into her kitchen to find a bear leaning in the window, reversing the Goldilocks saga and reaching in for packet of Oreo cookies, with his hind legs and rump left balancing outside.
"This is no nursery rhyme," says Hilhorst.
"They've got beady little eyes, and they stink. Their eyesight might be poor, but they can smell the inside of an unopened can. They're pretty neat animals, but if they start breaking in like this, I want them trapped and relocated up north. Unless it's a bear with a predacious nature. That's a bear I don't touch. Some bears I just want shot."
With his long, red beard and pony-tail, Hilhorst has become a legendary figure in these parts, driving around in his pick-up truck and a bear cage hitched to the back. Known by the nickname "ZZ Top" for his enduring attachment to the Harley Davidson, and for his part-time place in a local rock band called the "Rabid Dogs", he is even more famous for his official role at the Ministry of Natural Resources, taking the frantic calls from Haliburton residents and removing a bear which had already silently prowled the porches and quietly entered into the terrified psyche of sleeping cottagers.
Ever since a black bear killed a female Olympic athlete north of Quebec City earlier last summer, stalking her from behind and delivering a fatal bite to the neck while she was jogging, the fragile co-existence between human beings and their most feared rival in the woods has become more strained than ever. The shortage of berries last autumn brought these opportunists - the Ursus Americanus (black bear) and the larger, and even more fearsome, Ursus Arctos (grizzly bear) - up to the doorstep and right inside cottages, looking for anything from dog food to doughnuts.
BLACK bears are normally very tolerant but have been known to attack and go for the contents of the human stomach. All bears were once solely carnivorous, Hilhorst reminds us, and only later slowly adapted to a more omnivorous diet of berries and roots. Some blame all the trouble on the cancellation of the annual spring bear hunt, while conservationists point to corruption of bears through a casual attitude towards rubbish. Hilhorst points to the local dump on the map and says he'd rather re-educate humans than bears, and the recent decision to transport 50 million tons of domestic waste from the city of Toronto up north to a disused open mine near Sudbury is no help.
The fact remains that encounters have dramatically increased in the last two years in Canada and the US.
Last summer the celebrated author, Hunter S. Thompson, injured a neighbour while trying to scare off a bear outside his home in Colorado with a shotgun. Then there was the alarming discovery of a camper whose partially-eaten body was recovered near Banff in British Columbia. No one can forget the bear who killed three teenage boys on a fishing trip in Algonquin National park some years ago. Or the father and son who were killed at a rubbish dump one night. Or the Irishwoman on her holidays in Canada who rescued her three-year-old child from the jaws of a black bear by fighting it off with a stiletto.
Patricia van Tighen, who had half her face torn away and lost one eye, tells in her book, The Bear's Embrace, how she felt no pain and how she was vividly alert throughout her ordeal. As she was being mauled, she recalls thinking that this was probably the worst death of all.
However, with the bear's face huffing and snorting only inches from hers, she plucked up the courage to tweak its nose. The creature miraculously turned away and left.
Despite tales that go right back to the time man first set foot on the North American continent, Hilhorst is quick to point out that the actual statistics show a very low number of fatalities, one a year on average in Canada. He assures you that it's far easier to die by lightning, starvation or hypothermia in the wilderness.
On the way to set the trap close to a group of holiday homes, Hilhorst decided to stop at the dump. Sure enough, there was a coy and slightly emaciated black bear nosing around in the open pit. Hilhorst then told me about his own first encounter in the woods while moose hunting. He describes how he saw a bear standing on the path in front of him, huffing and swatting the ground. His instinct was to bark like a dog, but then the bear made a charge.
"My heart was out to here," he said, holding his hand out. "The bear came running at me until he was two feet away. Then he just stopped and left again - a classic false attack."
Hilhorst is a man who stands his ground, culturally as much as anything else. He remains loyal to the music of his own era. He speaks in the calm, unhurried vernacular of the laid-back 1960s, and describes places that require a long walk through the impenetrable bush to reach as "a case of beer away".
At the holiday village, people in swimming trunks and bathrobes crowd around, and Hilhorst quietly gives everyone a chance to tell their own story. It was a massive cinnamon coloured bear, said one. It was a black bear with a stomach hanging two feet down, according to another, while the young teenage girl who lay asleep on the couch said she heard nothing at all as the bear came right inside to eat the dog food.
Hilhorst sets his trap here. He covers some bagels with honey and marmalade before tying them up in a burlap sack. The idea is that the bear enters the cage, tries to make off with the sack thereby slamming the door behind him. On the way back in the truck, Hilhorst casually asks if there were any bears in Ireland, and I try to impress him with stories about magpies, cat plagues and an ant infestation in the kitchen. We speculate about the chances of a man and a bear in hand to hand combat with each other.
What about a heavyweight boxer, I ask? Hilhorst thinks a bear would have a much faster arm. But then when you think of Mike Tyson, he was pretty good with his teeth as well, wasn't he?
I didn't have to wait long for the phone call. The following day, at 8 a.m., Hilhorst was on the line saying: "We got ourselves a bear".
In the trap at the back of the pick-up truck, Hilhorst had a fully-grown adult male black bear pacing up and down. The burlap sack was torn to shreds and there was a strong but rather sweet smell and the bear occasionally huffed and swatted at anyone coming too close.
We drove 50 kilometres further into the deep bush, along sandy roads surrounded by swarms of deer-fly that gouged lumps of flesh out of my arm.
"They can get pretty mad in that trap," Hilhorst said. The safest place when the bear was being released was on top of the trap. With the bear thrashing around inside, clawing at us and occasionally trying to ram the door with his hind legs, Hilhorst gets ready for the release.
Within seconds, the bear bolted out towards the nearest cover. Then it suddenly stopped and turned around to take a look, casually studying the trap and us standing on top, before disappearing back into the bush.
Hilhorst remained motionless for a moment and listened. "Funny," he said. "You'd think a bear would make a hell of a lot more noise getting away."
But there wasn't a sound. I had the feeling that bear was there behind the trees still looking at us as we got back into the truck.