Just past the summit of Trout Creek Pass, I saw signs that a big truck had left the road: deep tire tracks in the roadside gravel, then some missing guardrail.
I pulled over and peered down the trail of snapped evergreens and broken aspen. At the bottom sat a tipped tanker truck. A small black bear approached. “Come on,” he said. “We want you at the fall meeting of the Colorado Ursine Liberation Front.”
I don’t argue with bears. I followed him, although I feared that the leaking 8,000-gallon tank held something hazardous. But the bears were lapping it up, and my guide explained.
“My big brother Jake learned how to drive last summer, down by Larkspur,” he said. I remembered the bear that got into the car, knocked the transmission from park to neutral, and coasted. “Jake came back up here after that, and today when he saw this load of high-fructose corn syrup idling at the top of the pass while the driver was off tending to a call of nature — well, you can figure the rest.”
When I got farther down, several dozen bears were so busy slurping up calories in preparation for winter that they didn’t even notice me.
Boo-Boo was still their leader. Something of a goof-off in his youth, he had grown into a respected elder. But he was showing his age: gaps in his fur, broken claws, missing teeth. “Okay, bruins,” he barked. “There’s enough food here for all of us, so let’s tend to business and then we can get back to stocking up for the long sleep.”
Boo-Boo then asked for reports on their progress “in dealing with the problem humans who keep building their dens in our habitat. Last year, there was something they called the ‘bear market’ that was discouraging them. Is that still a factor?”
Many bears nodded, but one husky female named Ursula said things had changed. “They’re building again,” she said, “or at least they are in East Vail. But I cornered one of the carpenters when he was away from the others and gave him s good mauling, knocked him cold for a while.”
“Why didn’t you just dispatch him?” Boo-Boo asked.
“Shock and awe,” Ursula said. “I wanted him to go tell the others what had happened, so they’d leave, too. And that way, I could just run off. If I’d dispatched him, or even bit hard — well, look at what happened to our late Cousin Sally in Durango.”
“Is she the one that got tracked down and killed after she bit the bi-ped camped near the soup kitchen?” Boo-Boo asked.
Ursula nodded. Boo-Boo finally broke the mournful silence. “And let us also remember Uncle Warren, who was shot and killed down in Bailey. Let him be a caution: Don’t go into their dens, even when they leave food out. They can’t be trusted.”
A mature female named Organia spoke. I expected her to harangue them, as usual, for gulping corn syrup rather than natural organic berries, roots and rodents. But she had something else in mind.
“Instead of trying to scare them out of our territory,” she said, “perhaps we could work in their political system.”
“But we don’t get to vote,” Boo-Boo pointed out, “so I don’t know how that would be possible.”
“I don’t, either,” Organia said. “But when I overhear them talking politics, they mention ‘mama grizzlies’ as an important new factor. Now, grizzly sows may be bigger, but they’re no smarter than us black-bear sows. So if they can be players, why can’t we?”
They began talking about it. I worked my way back up the hillside. If there’s any place I don’t want to be, it’s in a gathering of wanna-be mama grizzlies.
Ed Quillen (ekquillen@gmail.com) of Salida is a regular contributor to The Denver Post.
