Friday, December the 3rd, 2004

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Tiny Enid Confronts the Russian Bear

Tiny Enid put down her book and sighed. She was reading, I think, one of the later novels of Daphne Du Maurier, and it was beginning to irritate her. She decided to go and check on the gloxinia in her garden. Stepping out through the french windows, she saw that the great Russian bear was prowling around at the bottom of her garden. When it saw Tiny Enid, it let out a fierce bellow.

Tiny Enid sat down in her ugly but highly-polished stainless steel garden chair, the one she had rescued from a burning building all those years ago. She lit a cheroot, inhaled deeply, and fixed the Russian bear with a supercilious, sneering look. She wondered if this was the same Russian bear that had mauled to death Vitaly Nikolayenko, one of Russia's best-known bear researchers and a man who spent twenty-five years living with the enormous brown bears of the wild Kamchatka peninsula. He had been found dead in an apparent bear mauling. The body of Nikolayenko, sixty-six, whose lonely journeys allowed him to compile one of the most exhaustive documentaries on the giant, nine-foot cousins of the North American grizzly, was found at a lake near his remote one-room hut on the Tikhaya River. The six-and-a-half-inch pawprint of a medium-sized male bear was found next to his body, along with an empty can of pepper spray with which Nikolayenko had apparently tried to defend himself.

Just two months before, American bear researcher Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend were killed by a bear in Alaska's Katmai National Park.

The diminutive Nikolayenko, a self-educated researcher and photographer, walked more than six hundred and twenty miles a year through the remote river valleys and coastal plains of Kamchatka, whose giant brown bears were under increasing threat from foreign hunters and poachers. A senior ranger on the Kronotsky Wildlife Reserve, Nikolayenko battled illegal hunting and fishing in the reserve. His patrols kept him in the wilderness for months on end. He spent each day from dawn to dusk following bears, documenting their feeding, mating, and social habits. By night, he would return to his hut, light a kerosene lamp and fill what became hundreds of journals, a body of work that eventually became one of the most important biographical records of brown bear behaviour in existence. He documented an average of eight hundred bear contacts each year, according to Los Angeles Times reporter Kim Murphy.

“Did you maul Vitaly Nikolayenko to death?” asked Tiny Enid. The Russian bear was now lumbering across the lawn towards her, but when it heard her high-pitched voice, redolent of a terrified crow, it stopped and thwacked its mighty paws against its own head. It is not easy for a Russian bear to look shamefaced and coy, but the one in Tiny Enid's garden did so.

“Now get along with you,” she said, stubbing out her cheroot under her jet black Manolo Blahnik pump, “Go and do something useful like grubbing for worms in the muck by yonder pond.”

The Russian bear turned and fled. Tiny Enid got up and crossed the lawn to shut the garden gate. Then she went to the airport to catch her flight to Madagascar, or possibly to Plovdiv, I am not quite sure where she went that day.