for grizzlies but even the cubs, at 150 to 200 pounds, were big enough to be
Dangerous.  Hanuse used a 12-gauge shotgun with slug-loaded shells. He had to get within 15 feet of the animals before shooting them. In most instances, he was able to drop the animal with one shot. 

Bears' odd behavior sparks fear
By the end of September, four bears had been killed, and the tribe hoped the episode was over. But October proved even worse. At one point in the middle of the month, nine grizzlies wandered the village looking for food.

Villagers, realizing that something extraordinary was taking place, began documenting the invasion with video cameras. School children drew pictures of the bears while watching them outside classroom windows.

The villagers tried in vain to scare or lure them away. They loosed their dogs on them, but the grizzlies barely acknowledged their undersized attackers.  The bears didn't respond or retreat. They were passive, Hanuse speculates, because they were too weak.

Residents killed harbor seals and used them as bait to lure the bears out of town. Some emptied the contents of their freezers into the woods. Many decided simply to wait and hope the grizzlies would leave.

The bears remained, sleeping on porches  and under houses, and rooting through
gardens. After a while, the dogs got used to their presence and stopped barking at
them. One resident recalls coming home to find two bears sleeping on one side of
her porch and her dogs sleeping on the other.

The villagers had never seen such behavior in bears. It frightened them. It got so that people were afraid to walk the village. "We had to drive everywhere or run from house to house," Hanuse said.

The tribe appealed to the province for help, hoping that game wardens could relocate the animals. The province responded on Oct. 21 by sending out several conservation officers who shot six of the bears and relocated three.

A spokesman for the Ministry of Environment said the six bears were killed because "they didn't have the fat reserves, and it wasn't likely they were going to survive."

The Suzuki Foundation condemned the shootings, and blamed the federal government for allowing the salmon run to collapse. Fulton, the foundation director, said the government did not do enough to restrict logging and fishing in the area. The tribe decided on its own to forgo sustenance fishing this year, yet federal fisheries officials allowed a 75-day sport fishery in the inlet during the summer that took an estimated 2,000 salmon. (emphasis added)

Fulton also condemned the provincial government for being ruthless in its dealings with the bears. He said all the animals should have been relocated and given the chance to survive. The tribe, Fulton said, did what it had to do in shooting the bears, and in some ways was as victimized as the starving animals.

'It was getting dangerous'
The village, meanwhile, decided it could do the shooting on its own. There was no
formal decision-making process; the village was small enough that if two or three households decided an animal was becoming too aggressive, a decision was made on the spot, and a call would be put out for "Fugg."

The adults of the village were saddened by the situation. "I get choked up when I
think about it," said Chartrand Smith. But most traumatized were the children. Drawings of bears being shot or trapped began appearing in artwork. Some children wept over the killings.

"The kids were starting to think of them as pets, or as Yogi Bear, and they were trying
to pet them," Hanuse said. "It was getting dangerous. All it would have taken was
one swipe from a bear and we'd have a tragedy."

The last grizzly was shot in mid-November. After that, it was quiet for a while, presumably because the grizzlies of the region had gone into hibernation. Villagers, once again, hoped the ordeal was over, but then the black bears began showing up.

Grizzlies and black bears don't mix. The former is known to eat the latter. So it was
only when the grizzlies faded from the scene that black bears, which also were
starving, began wandering into town in search of food.

The last two bears killed in the village, in December and January, were black bears
that normally would have been in hibernation. But like the grizzlies before
them, they didn't have enough fat to survive the winter.

By mid-January, 14 grizzlies and two black bears had been killed in the village, and one more has recently been seen flitting from yard to yard. Villagers fear it may become victim No. 17.

Hanuse, who has lived in the region for more than 40 years, speculates that many other bears starved to death in the woods, and that more would die in late winter. Most vulnerable would be infant cubs, which are born in January or February while the mother is still hibernating.

Bears have one of the slowest reproduction rates of any land mammal in North America. Female grizzlies, for example, become sexually mature after their fifth year, and give birth to two or three cubs every three or four years. Of the 14 grizzlies killed, three were mothers and six were cubs under 2 years old.

"You won't find a bear biologist in the world who'd disagree that killing three sows and six cubs would have a destabilizing effect on the overall bear population in the area," said Fulton of the Suzuki Foundation. "What's going on there is a biological tragedy."

Herbicide use adds to problem
Among the causes of the salmon collapse are the familiar suspects: overfishing, overlogging, warming ocean temperatures, and toxins - from herbicides and pesticides - in rivers and streams.

The bears of the region, besides being deprived of their main protein source, may also have been deprived of their favorite plants. According to tree-planters and villagers, local logging companies used herbicides that destroyed vast stretches of salmonberries, elderberries and blackberries on which bears depend for sustenance before the salmon return.

With no plants or salmon to eat, the bears were desperate, and their desperation led to their demise, which, according to biologists, will affect the entire ecosystem.  Bears bring salmon carcasses into the woods, which feed nutrients into the forest floor, and also feed insects and scavengers. The usual scavengers of the area this year have been noticeably absent.

Bald eagles, also a key figure in the tribe's culture, normally flock to Rivers Inlet by
the hundreds when the salmon return.  Hanuse said he once counted 80 eagles on
a single tree by the river.

"It looked like a Christmas tree," he said. "The white heads were like ornaments."

But this year, few eagles returned, and those that showed up had nothing to eat but garbage. "It's a sad day," Hanuse said, "when the only eagles you see are at the dump."

The future seems full of foreboding for the Oweekeno. Great changes are upon them and many fear that little can be done. Five months ago, telephone lines reached the village in time to welcome the 21st century. But so far, the creeping of the outside world into this little patch of forest and sea has brought mixed blessings.

From the east, logging operations close in on the forests of the Coastal Mountain Range. From the west, resorts and boaters pour pollutants into the ocean. At Rivers
Inlet, the skies are quiet, the great Wanuk River is empty, and the town dump is littered with the bones of grizzlies and black bears that were once the tribe's distant friends.

In response to questions about the future, Hanuse in slow, deliberate words evokes
the past. "We've been here 10,000 years," he said simply and with no elaboration, as
if sheer longevity by itself were a shield against things to come.

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