Issues → January/February 2008 → Interact → 10 Things to Do →

Classic: Maine's Black Bears

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(page 4 of 5)

North of this 140-square-mile area is another, equal in size. Except for some timber roads, this area is almost devoid of human activity. Hugie is learning how bears manage with minimal interference from man. There are few places in the East where this is possible. Bears here wander half the distances of those 100 miles south. Only 3 percent will be shot. is Hugie's theory that dominant bears force yearlings from the area, and that many of the bears eventually shot in southern Maine were born here. In time he hopes to know if this is true.

One Ear is somewhere just ahead, Hugie keeps telling his companions. He is sure of it. One Ear is an irascible bear who'd survived 19 years in a state where a 10-year-old bear is long-lived. One Ear had stumbled into Hugie's trap the previous June, looking, says Hugie, "for his last free meal." His face and shoulders were a mass of scabs where claws had raked, and he was ripped across the stomach -- an obvious loser in breeding season. "I thought he would be dead within a week," Hugie says. Five times that summer One Ear was located from the air, always in remote areas. Then for three months he disappeared. No matter where Hugie flew, he could not hear One Ear's transmitter. "He was a secret even to us," Hugie said. "Finally after denning time One Ear's transmitting signal was heard coming from a wild, high corner of Baxter Park."

Three Baxter Park rangers are with Hugie. They take turns carrying the net on their backs while the others bushwack a trail through the forest; the toboggan laden with equipment snags repeatedly. Snow falls from noon onward, growing heavier with the steepness of the trail. Among his colleagues in the wildlife department, Hugie is known as an adept scrounger of equipment and people. A Massachusetts man stopping for gas late one night on his way home from Maine was pressed into duty helping Hugie with a trapped bear in the woods.

Hugie seems unaware of the growing mutiny of his companions as the day lengthens. He seems attentive to little else but the still faint pulsing in his earphones. The rangers have long ago given up hope of seeing One Ear this day. "If we don't turn back soon we're all going to be in a serious predicament," warned a ranger. Reluctantly Hugie agrees to turn back. He says he will be along shortly. As they start down the trail they see Hugie snowshoeing upwards, his antenna thrust before him, before he disappears among the trees.

"All he thinks about is getting his bear," a ranger said. Someone could have been killed if we'd kept going." Later Hugie will say he was probably chasing a dropped collar from blueberry time in August, or maybe a carcass. He took out a map. Carefully he marked where he had turned back. He wanted to be parachuted in. He wanted to see.

It is nearly midnight now. He had started this day going for One Ear 18 hours earlier. Hugie unloads his snowmobile on a deserted woods road beneath a sky of stars. There are no headlights on the snowmobile, nor a windshield. He will make the hour's snowmobile ride to his wilderness laboratory steering with one hand, holding a flashlight on the trail with the other.

He places a tape recorder carefully in his pack. The next day he will start for Rudolphene ( named for a red spot on her,nose), an eight-year-old female with three cubs. She is his only denned bear with a litter. Earlier he had pressed his ear to the den and had heard an insistent warbling, like water expanding in a heating pipe. He will drop a microphone into the den.