Chapter 49 Opium, Shame and Bruno’s Reproach

One hundred years ago, this cove was the home of the ABC fish cannery. Where our lodge is now moored, there were a bunch of buildings, docks and accommodations for workers. The Scottish managers lived in modest houses, the Japanese fishermen shared shacks, the Chinese girls who gutted fish all day dwelled in a cramped bunkhouse and the Indian fishing village nearby was of shantytown description. I had heard it said that some of the Asian workers were paid partly or completely in opium and that the shards and remains of opium bottles could be found at low tide. Well I finally found one last week. It is a tiny brown bottle that had at one time been filled with little sticky black balls of opium and plugged with a cork. I suppose that’s one sure way of keeping your employees around, keep them narcotized and addicted to something only you can provide for them. I wonder who had owned it and at what moment they let the empty bottle slip from their grasp. What pipe dreams did they dream beneath the clouds of poppy smoke? What hopes and fears filled their head as they looked out across the same cove I do? There is hardly any record of the lives that were lived here; only rusty old wash basins and barnacle coated machinery provide a hiccup to the amnesia here.

Back in those days, there were many languages spoken in the cove, Asian tongues, native tongues, Swedish and Norwegian and English speaking loggers. Many languages are still spoken here, but they are spoken by tourists who come to admire the wild, not to harvest it. If the sweat and blood covered loggers of years ago subsisting on meagre rations and moonshine could imagine what the future would hold, I’m sure they would have lifted a sweaty and muscular eyebrow in perplexitude; people coming from around the world, to feast and admire the uncut logs and the wild beasts roaming through them. It’s a topsy-turvy world indeed.

This year’s pink salmon run is officially a disaster. Last year at this time, the breakwaters were full of burping and farting seals, the trees were cluttered with bald eagles and I could hardly avoid steeping on salmon as I pushed a skiff full of guests upstream. Last year, we could sit at the platforms and watch hours of uninterrupted feasting, digesting and lolling about by dozens of bears. This year, I catch momentary sight of furtive bears desperately circling the spawning channel, anxiously seeking a meal that just isn’t there.  The eagles know the score, they can see that the river is mostly empty, and they have moved along. Where I saw thousands of pinks last year, now I see dozens or none at all.

Bruno is a big male bear. He has a crescent shaped scar on his right hip. Normally he doesn’t show himself, but salmon season and the promise of an easy meal draws even a big galoot like him out into plain view. The other day he came and graced us with his big hairy majestic presence. He didn’t just visit the spawning channel, he owned it. When he walked into the stream, the 500 pound female who had been sitting in the centre scurried off at a frantic lope and left the scene. Bruno strode to the centre of the stream and looked into the rushing water. Like a king on his throne, he waits for the meal to come to him. The stream should be full of fish. He knows that. So he waits, he sniffs, he watches.

Finally, he senses a pink coming up and he springs into action. Water sprays everywhere as the huge grizzly pounces at the fish, he leaps this way, that way and into the deep water, frantically and fruitlessly, he churns the water and claws at the fish that has slipped away.  After some more powerful sweeps and concentrated gazes, you can see that he goes slack and sighs a deep sigh of resignation. He sits back in the stream with a splash of defeat. He pauses for a fulsome moment of agony, fully aware of all the eyes and cameras aimed at him. Then, with the unmistakable look of shame in his eyes, he glances quickly up and catches my eye. He holds my eye for a moment. In that moment, I feel his hurt, his shame and his anger.

The baleful gaze of the grizz is a mystery to behold; it has not the sharpness and fierce wildness of the wolf, neither the wary watchfulness of the deer nor the predatory malevolence of the weasels. They observe you as if from a great distance or in a dream, there is a watery and elusive quality to their eyes, as if they are veiled from human understanding.

However at that moment, I did understand him. He was pissed off. And the shame took a bite at me, here I was, a white man, the most dreaded and sinister creature to blight the earth since the reptiles ruled.  We have scraped the forests off the mountains, choked the streams with our filth and the skies with our machines and fumes, annihilated the locals and enslaved nature. That which we could not control, we destroyed. And here we are, a dozen well fed white people, fresh from a feast of fish and chips with thousands of dollars worth of camera gear amusing ourselves by watching this beast try to catch a bite to eat. The only reason that we are so fascinated by bears is that we have driven them to the brink of extinction and now we pester the survivors as they struggle to avoid starvation. “I hope you’re proud of yourself”, he seems to say “Didn’t your mother tell you it’s not polite to stare? Maybe you should take these people on a tour of the Downtown Eastside in Vancouver and then you can watch people eke out an existence picking food out of dumpsters.”

I was seized by a radical whim of generosity, perhaps I could throw myself off this stand and into the mouths of these hungry bears to help them make it through the winter, that’s what Buddha did. Then I think, no I can’t do that I have a lovely wife and two sweet daughters who’d miss me. But who’d miss that pudgy couple from Shropshire? Hmmmm. And then the spell is snapped and Bruno moves along. I haven’t seen him since.

Last night, an English lady slipped while removing her wellies, fell and broke her wrist. It was too late for the planes to come out, so the giant search and rescue Cormorant helicopter came blamming in at night, with massive searchlights slashing through the forests and blasting gale force winds around looking for a place to land. The thing was too huge to land anywhere, so the SarTechs repelled down by rope into the spawning channel, while it hovered overhead. When the square jawed super handsome commando medic arrived in his orange jumpsuit festooned with harnesses and equipment, Miss Hewson was smitten. The heroes gathered up the aged victim and her hubby and lifted them into the night sky with a rope, then roared off to the hospital. It was an action adventure comedy romance, but that’s another story.

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