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Bear Man — Page 3
Allen completes his 16-hour day with a presentation
in the rich surroundings of the Macdonald ballroom at
the Whistler Fairmont. In the room are 29 Australian
travel agents, all women, who’ve brought drinks
in from the hallway bar. Allen stands before them in
the same flannel shirt and hiking pants. There’s
dried mud on his boots. His PowerPoint slides and colour
commentary (“It’s a bear soap opera: everyone
cheats on each other, and the divorce rate is 100 percent”)
keep the room enthralled through the science, and through
Allen’s underlying message: Whistler needs to
clean up its garbage problem or bears will continue
to die.
He leads 260 tours annually, meaning some 1,700 people
make the journey up the mountain with him each year.
He’s guided tours and school groups for nine years,
taught in classrooms for 11. Over the years Allen has
spoken face-to-face with over 40,000 people. You might
say that the once highly reticent Allen has become habituated
to people.
Not to bureaucrats and academics, though. He walked
away from the Whistler Bear Working Group, the multi-agency
body that seeks a single bear-management approach. “It
got very political,” he explains. He saw government
research teams using approaches that he viewed as treating
the symptom rather than the problem. We’ll never
be able to stop bears from coming into the valley, he
believes; we just need to make sure there’s nothing
for them to find. Garbage is the problem. Secure it
and you’ll sever the cycle. Humans create the
garbage, after all, and only humans can control it.
Allen tried Selkirk College and the BCIT fish and wildlife
programs, but just couldn’t get into it. (To picture
him in a classroom is to imagine a bear jammed into
a lecture-hall seat.) If he feels his work is not properly
recognized, he attributes this to his lack of formal
credentials—his self-perceived Achilles’
heel. Tony Hamilton, large-carnivore specialist for
the B.C. Ministry of Environment, and the province’s
top bear expert, says, “He does have a bit of
a chip on his shoulder about his qualifications. He
doesn’t need to, because he’s a perfectly
qualified naturalist.” The only problem with Allen’s
research, says Hamilton, “is that it resides mainly
in his head.” So writing is what Allen planned
to spend much of the winter months doing.
To educate himself Allen has attended international
bear conferences, but preers to correspond directly
with leading bear biologists; he also devours journals
and bear literature. And the community obviously has
faith in his work. Some of his research is supported
by the Whistler Blackcomb Foundation Environmental Fund,
financed from the paycheques of Whistler Blackcomb workers
and matching contributions by the Whistler Blackcomb
Foundation. The staff votes on what projects to support.
Says Allana Williams, founder and chair of the fund:
“They’re very supportive of Mike. They love
him. He’s so committed. It’s not about him.
He just does what’s best for bears. He did this
before he ever got paid for it.”
“I’m not an environmentalist, not an advocate,”
says Allen. “I just give people information.”
It’s January 2008, and the bears are tucked in
their dens. The directions Allen has given me to Paradise
Valley, near Squamish, include taking a left at a boulder,
crossing a small bridge, and rounding the barn attached
to his rented cabin by the Cheakamus River. Chief, a
full-grown Bernese mountain dog, bounds out with a loud,
friendly greeting. A diminutive white dog, Avalanche,
licks my hand before I have a chance to shake Allen’s.
The 20-odd bantam chickens in the coop by the house
are surprisingly quiet.
On the patio table by the front door is a pinkish organ
preserved in a large jar. It’s the heart of a
bear, a lanky male named Slim that was hit by a car.
Allen’s wife, Kristi, a veterinarian, conducted
a gross necropsy, and Slim’s body soaked in a
barrel behind the house until the closest neighbour,
a couple of hundred metres away, mentioned the smell.
Allen wrestled the half-decomposed carcass out and tied
it to a tree in the woods to let nature strip away the
flesh. “God, I miss Slim,” he says. “He
had a lot of character.”
Inside the cabin, Yoda, one of two cats, stretches in
a basket by the wood-burning stove. Above the crammed
bookcase there’s a painting of Jeanie emerging
from the fronds of a western hemlock. The walls feature
family photos.
Allen offers up a selection of teas. Slim’s skull
sits next to the fruit bowl on the kitchen table. His
bleached bones are in a plastic bin on the seat of a
chair. Allen plans to have one of his school groups
assemble the skeleton.
He met Kristi on a bear tour eight years ago. She’d
been visiting from Arizona with Deven when someone remarked
that as a vet, she “just had to go see the bear
man.” The tour ended with them both entranced
by a close-up sighting of Jeanie and her cub, Jake.
Allen mentioned Deven in his Pique column; Kristi, reading
the piece, was so touched by how well he related to
her daughter that she cried. They dated long-distance
for two years before getting married at mid-station
on Whistler Mountain, in front of 30 close friends and
family. Allen wore shorts and a bow tie borrowed from
a hotel bellhop. All the girls went barefoot among the
Indian paintbrush. Jeanie made an appearance but was
chased off by a male bear named Flin.
Through the winter, Allen’s been getting up at
4; while his wife and daughter sleep, he writes for
a few hours, compiling 15 years of observations: which
bear spotted when, where, doing what; relationships;
bears giving birth, eating, mating, dying. Other sheets
capture den stats. Embedded in the worksheets are pictures
of all the bears he’s named. (Jeanie is named
after his Scottish grandmother, who had the same colour
hair.) He’s also been working on a book; several
publishers have approached him after reading his bear
columns in the Pique.
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