Bear Paw Meanderings

There is a lot of wildlife to view in our area but not everyone sees it. I had to laugh when I was driving a bus in Glacier National Park. People used to ask if they would see wildlife and I would say probably not in my bus as I had bad luck in the wildlife viewing department.

That is not to say that I have not seen plenty of wildlife in my life. I have seen two mountain lions in the Bear Paws. Both of them at the end of June and both by the school house coulee that runs west from the Faber School. It was light so long that the lions nocturnal clocks were off and hence I saw them. There was about five years apart for both sightings but both were close together in that coulee.

As a boy when my cousins and I went fishing in Henderson Creek we used to watch bobcats playing in some large rocks close to that creek. They were having fun and paid no attention to us being nearby.

Once I saw a Canadian Lynx at the Little Gray Chalet, close to Howard’s Hill between Clear Creek and Little Box Elder Creek. I was sitting on a balcony reading a book and the lynx walked right below me and did not even know I was right above him. Neat.

Then there was the time I upset the balance of nature. Some coyotes had run down a deer, looking to exhaust it and eat it. The deer stopped right in front of my cabin and the coyote laid down to wait for the deer to fall to the ground exhausted. I ran out in my bathrobe with a large broom in my hands and chased off the coyote. The deer stayed all day long in a patch of grass surrounded by snow eating some of the green grass. Next morning he was gone and I felt good that I had upset nature.

On two occasions I was not able to do that when I would see, in the wintertime, golden eagles riding the backs of deer, tearing their hides off trying to get at the back meat of the deer. I never knew what happened in those occasions to the deer but I imagine it was not pleasant.

The one time I did see a large grizzly bear while driving a red bus in Glacier I was hoping I would not see anything. I was taking a load of guests from Lake McDonald Lodge to Many Glacier for lunch and I was running late so I put the pedal to the medal in the Swift Current Valley. I had only ten minutes to get the bus load of people into the dining room before it closed, I thought to myself that if I ever was to see wild life it would be now when I had no time to view anything. Sure enough before you know it there was a grizzly bear running next to the bus trying to outrun it and my guests were screaming and taking pictures. You know what happened next. I slowed down, the grizzly crossed the road right in front of the bus, we stopped for pictures and those guests never did get any lunch that day. However, they were quite happy that they had seen a grizzly up close and personal trying to outrun a red bus.

I was not all that happy and my bosses were not either as they missed all that dining room revenue from my bus that day!