Black Bear

You wouldn't think "bear country," looking across the dry desert of Southern New Mexico.

Here on the main highway, not far from Arizona, there's little but sage, thistle, and poverty threeawn - all greys, tans, and yellows under a striking sun. The bright clarity of the sky is difficult for the eyes, even to an old desert rat. The air doesn't stick, but blows through the windows dry and hot. The bleached thread of highway, straight and blue, connects itself to infinity.

The shoulder of a faded mountain rises in the distance looking in need of vegetation. Distance is deceptive in the desert. On that mountain there are trees:  ponderosa pine, piñon, alligator juniper, and live oak in the canyon bottoms. Along the hillsides are bushes of manzanita, agerita, skunkbrush sumac, mahogany, and winterfat. Prickly pear cacti are in the foothills among the granite, lava, and sandstone, as are jumping cholla, daggering yucca, and bunched agave.

But, from far away along the highway the yawning mountain looks bleak.

You learn not to associate the blue of desert distances with the blue of the sea - you would thirst in some manner. There are no lakes or streams on the mountain you see, only a few stock watering holes (bulldozed indentations gouged in shallow header canyons or along the roll of the flats), and a few natural seeps and hidden springs, seemingly in no hurry to venture out into the world. Water in this country is water caught unawares, you could say - dumped from the sky or squeezed from the ground and left to fend for itself, like some lost dog not knowing which way to go, but knowing it doesn't belong where it is. And if you find water somewhere, down in a shadowed canyon maybe, you almost expect it to be happy just to see someone.

Yet, with all this dryness, there can be sensible fear of too much water in the desert - a black anvilled cumulonimbus towering and rumbling in the distance can be threatening. On the wind you can catch the scent of rain mixed with sage and pinyon gum. The growling cloud may soon find a place to bleed its heart-water in torrents, turning vicious and unforgiving as it reaches the ground, searching the lowest terrain, sniffing and snuffing its way like a hungry coyote on the hunt, but with the force of a downhill locomotive someone lost control of. Rolling away the unrollable, the water in its gaining power smothers the dry washes in wakes of white foam, brown liquid sand, and slithering debris. The sliding, shallow water that precedes the deep, roaring gully-washer, whispers as it rounds a bend, like the hushing rustle of a quiet surf.

This mountain you can see isn't peaked and towering, it is somewhat prostrate - a mounded mesa of igneous rock and rims of limestone contouring, sometimes blending, into the earth at the steep heads of canyons allowing an escape, or cropping out in other canyon heads to bluff you in, box you up (usually with the sun gone behind the ridges, and when you are far afield from camp or rig, or your horse is staked over there somewhere).

Bear country.

And down in the flats of wolftail and sparse grama are American pronghorns and blacktailed jackrabbits, and scattered through the hills are mule deer, elk, Merriam's wild turkey, and tassel-eared squirrels in shades of silver and black. Rushes of bandtailed pigeons come through from the north in the early fall. Dusky grouse and the mountain Mearns quail dust in the roads and trails, and the leónes del sierra pass through making scrapes in the pine needles to mark their boundaries. Coyotes raise ruckus and bobcats remain composed.

Along with the Mexican grey wolf, no grizzly has ranged in these canyons, or anywhere in New Mexico, since the early 1930s (a good enough reason alone to call it the Depression Era). The bear here are the blacks (Ursus americanus), with additional color phases of cinnamon, brown, and custard.

The mountain is forest land blended with range country, divided between federal jurisdictions, and leased to citizens addicted to cutting timber and growing livestock. Those citizens think of the bear as an interloper. The bear doesn't realize he isn't a property owner himself.

If you worked around the mountain - the one you see from the highway - if you were a game warden, say, it would be your job to provide protection for the animals. But only if the wildlife didn't interfere with the activities or business interests of the entrepreneurial residents. The law spells all that out. The land isn't what you would call multiple-use land for that reason, at least beyond the multiple uses established by humans.

Bears like acorns and skunk berries, grubs and carpenter ants in rotten logs, and those beatles and bugs that reside under rocks; and bears rummage around looking for currents and prickly pears and wild canyon grapes and bee trees. Omnivorous garbage eaters, like us.

And occasionally a bear finds a bit of rotten carrion or maybe he eats a live range cow just for the hell of it.

So, if you are working in the mountain country, and a veal- or mutton-eating bruin is brought to your attention, you will probably end up killing that bear for his beastly act.

You find the bear at daybreak among the rocks and ponderosas and he has almost stripped the large-jawed trap off his foot from running and jerking and bounding back and forth against the chain. The foot is peeled forward over the toes like a glove half-removed from a naked hand. The bear is unlike the bear you once killed in the oak tree in the Burro Mountains for committing a similar capital crime (the one who looked at you in a benign, resigned, almost trusting way, and barely groaned a deep sigh when shot through the lungs with your .30-.30 carbine); unlike that bear, this big cinnamon bear is much incensed and has a frantic look in his eyes - as though the sound at dawn of the old jeep whining its way up the mountain toward him and the sight of you with a rifle in your hands as you step out, suddenly paints a picture for him of what it all means - and he reads his loss of freedom in your eyes. Freedom is scant. You recall the look before - old coyotes you've killed in traps, reading your thoughts, querying your intent through careful study of your eyes, looking for something familiar there. But the coyotes seldom acted frantic, were only resigned to something inevitable, but with a flicker of recognition the moment they interpreted your intent.

For you and the bear and the coyote, it's like growing up too fast.

From here along the highway, the mountain doesn't look like bear country - you think it's cow country.

So it is.