Leslie Patten Books: Wild Places, Sacred Spaces

After we visited the bear cave in Yellowstone, Jim Halfpenny sat us down on a nearby log and told a story.

“When we first migrated north from Africa, ancient peoples had no idea how to live with cold, what foods to eat, how to make shelters.  The Bear was their teacher.  Native Americans had several layers in one story.  The first and simplest they might tell to the children so they would stay close and be afraid of bears.  As the child grew older, the same story would be told in greater depth revealing more teaching and wisdom.”

“This story of the woman who married a bear was told in some form all over the world where there are bears.”

Jim went on to tell this ancient story in great detail about a Chief’s daughter who married a bear, lived with the bear clan, bore him two sons and then went back to her people.  When she returned with her sons, half-bear half-human, she was now a changed woman–a wise woman with much to teach her people.

This is the story of why humans throughout time have respected and honored bears, and how it was Bear who taught Humans how to live.

I was wandering in the upper meadows this morning, watching the Clark’s nutcrackers poke their beaks in the pine cones and extract the seeds, stashing them in the pouch in their throats.  Sometimes they’d try and clean the sap off by rubbing their long beaks against the bark. Since all the cones were way high,  I looked for dropped pine nuts on the ground, possibly ones the squirrels and birds had missed.  There were lots.  But every one I opened was no good, the nut had never matured.  I tried tree after tree with the same result and I marveled at how the animals knew to let these bad ones go.  I figured that if my life depended on these seeds, I’d definitely go hungry.

When I had a big garden, I used to fight the birds for the cherries on my tree.  I tried netting, decoys, shiny objects.  But crows and jays are smart and they’d wait till the cherries were just perfectly ripe, then beat me out there.  I’d have only the leftovers.  Pine nuts seemed the same.   I began to think about the Native Americans in the Basin & Range and California traveling far and wide for the Pinyon Pine nut.  Or the Native Californians and their acorn harvests.  There were ancient tricks to this that alluded me.

I knew that when I lived in California, I used to collect Redwood cones unopened, then let them ripen by a window and all the 100’s of tiny seeds would fall out.  Perhaps…

I wandered a bit farther up the denser parts of the hillside and noticed an old middens I was familiar with.  In one of the cavities beneath the trees there was stashed 3 douglas fir pine cones, fresh this year.  And that gave me an idea.  I went back and started hunting for a middens of Limber Pine cones.  Sure enough, I found a really large one with tons and tons of fresh cones, unopened and untouched.

Limber pine middens. There's lots more than shown and much is buried

Some even had the pitch gone.  There were cones on top and cones underneath.  I tried a few nuts.  These were the good ones!  These were the ones for squirrel for the long winter ahead.

The cone collector's home looking down on us raiding his middens

Then I remembered the bear story.  Bears are smart.  They do sometimes climb the trees for their beloved nuts.  But its a whole lot easier to let squirrel do the work and just raid his larder, and that’s what they do.  Bear must have taught that to the People.  That was my lesson for today.

Look close, I took this bear scat apart & there's pine nut shells inside

Filed under: Bears | Tagged: Bears, Limber pine, Native American Culture, Scat, Whitebark pines, Yellowstone National Park |