Sleeping Bear in Bulldozers
Path
a mother bear and cubs lying in dangers path
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There’s a sleeping bear and her cubs lying in the path of the Arrowhead Weston transmission line. Superior Broadcast Network’s producer Nick Vander Puy walked into the woods with two other men, to view the bear.
Click here to hear the radio story. |
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SPECIAL NEWS ALERT ON MAKWA (bear) AND
MAKOONSAG (cubs) (click on this link for rally information) Rally to Protect Our Relatives Saturday noon March 11, 2006 |
 they sleep under this tree, click to enlarge |
Lying in the woods, in northern Rusk County, a bear rests in her winter den. A few miles south heavy machinery operators tear up the earth for the Arrowhead Weston electric line, slicing across northwestern Wisconsin. The bear’s den is near the path of the giant electric line.
Another week or so and the bulldozers working on the American Transmission Company’s giant electric line could knock down the bear’s winter lodge…unless something is done.
This story goes back to last deer hunting season. Gary Miller was hunting on his neighbor’s land. Poking around the woods, next to a windfall, Miller stumbled.
“And I was ready to step over a downed tree and something rubbed my leg. He was half asleep, he was moving his head back and forth, scared the you- know- what out of me. And I really didn’t know what to do. I came close to protecting myself, but when I seen his eyes were closed I backed off the bear.”
Gary Miller didn’t shoot the bear. He told his neighbor Rick Palmer about the bear. Palmer’s been looking after the bear all winter, trying not to disturb the creature.
“What are we looking at today. A bear my neighbor found during deer season, deer hunting season, maybe once a week, to me it’s an amazing thing to see something like that, and I’m an outdoorsman, I’m very enthusiastic about the outdoors, and I enjoy, and I enjoy just looking at and seeing it.”
Across northern Wisconsin bears hibernate from fall until late spring. During the winter their heart beat slows down to around eight beats a minute. The bears live on reserves from eating berries and acorns in the late summer and fall.
Bears have fascinated us for thousands and thousands of years.
Bears are still regarded in a sacred manner by some members of the Ojibwa tribe and well as ancient European tribes.
After trudging into the woods we approach the bear’s den. The animal is curled up...asleep underneath a fallen poplar tree. We’re standing about thirty yards from her. She’s the size of a small couch.
“If you get much closer than this she’ll pick up her head and look at ya.”
“It must be a female. She’s got babies I bet ya.”
“Was that? Yeah, that’s a cub, squealing like a little pig would, ya hear that? It is a female like I thought.”
“She’s big, really big, I just hope nothing happens to her. It would really upset me.”
“Gary, what did you just hear? Squealing like a little baby. I knew it had to be a female. But gotta hear that squeaking, you know at least there’s one or maybe two underneath, but I don’t want to find out.”
We walk out of the woods.
Hanging
around the truck we talk about protecting the bear.
Earlier last week Bob Ringstad from Ladysmith, a landowner and opponent of ATC’s giant transmission line contacted the DNR, both in Ladysmith and Madison for help. Ringstad wanted the local game manager and warden to accompany us seeing the bear. Instead, Ringstad says he got the run around from the DNR.
“It just shows you our system has been corrupted. Our DNR has no authority, period. You can’t get an answer, you can’t get a response, and I didn’t get the call back from Dave Siebert that I asked for. I said please call me back. He never did call me back.”
Last spring landowners and citizen groups took the DNR to court. They were concerned that the DNR was not looking closely at specific wetland and forest locations along the proposed line route. They felt the process was being “rubber stamped”.
Bob Ringstad wonders who’s speaking for the land.
“We can’t have this going on because somebody has to speak for these animals, somebody has to speak for the birds, somebody has to speak for the whole environment, and this is the issue, something has to change.”
And the guy who stumbled onto the bear last deer season…how does Gary Miller feel today.
“Happy that, that animal is still alive. Like I said before I don’t want to see that animal get hurt, by any private corporation, doing their dirty work.”
“I’d just like to see this stuff that they’re doing stopped, because I don’t know how many animals, like I said before, because you’ve animals that burrow in the ground, and hibernate, besides the bear do, I just think it’s sad.”
After we recorded this story the DNR and Public Service Commission got more involved in protecting the bears. The DNR and PSC are attempting to prevent the American Transmission Company from cutting trees near the bear and her cubs.
I’m Nick Vander Puy for the Superior Broadcast Network
To hear ATC's rude remarks about the bear as reported in a Wisconsin Public
Radio story click here. or to download as an MP3
file, click
here
This sleeping mother bear and her cubs are in the path of the Arrowhead 345,000 high voltage transmission line. She lies sleeping at the beginning of the great northern woods of Wisconsin. There are hundreds of miles yet to go and the ATC has just begun. One has to wonder just how many more bears lie sleeping in the path of the bulldozers? How many more wetlands and forests are to be crossed by this company? How will they be protected.
Ojibwa Poet Louise Erdrich wrote a poem a long time ago about men entering the woods where beings already live.....in the deep dark woods.
Jacklight
By Louise Erdrich
We came to the edge of the woods,
out of brown grass where we had slept, unseen,
out of knotted twigs, out of leaves creaked shut,
out of hiding.
At first the light wavered, glancing over us.
Then it clenched to a fist of light that pointed,
searched out, divided us.
Each took the beams like direct blows the heart answers.
Each of us moved forward alone.
We have come to the edge of the woods,
drawn out of ourselves by this night sun,
this battery of polarized acids,
that outshines the moon.
We smell them behind it
but they are faceless, invisible.
We smell the raw steel of their gun barrels,
mink oil on leather, their tongues of sour barley.
We smell their mothers buried chin-deep in wet dirt.
We smell their fathers with scoured knuckles,
teeth cracked from hot marrow.
We smell their sisters of crushed dogwood, bruised apples,
of fractured cups and concussions of burnt hooks.
We smell their breath steaming lightly behind the jacklight.
We smell the itch underneath the caked guts on their clothes.
We smell their minds like silver hammers
cocked back, held in readiness
for the first of us to step into the open.
We have come to the edge of the woods,
out of brown grass where we slept, unseen,
out of leaves creaked shut, out of our hiding.
We have come here too long.
It is their turn now,
their turn to follow us. Listen,
they put down their equipment.
It is useless in the tall brush.
And now they take the first steps, not knowing
how deep the woods are and lightless.
How deep the woods are........
To learn more about the Arrowhead high voltage line and the resistance to the line visit the web site for Save Our Unique Lands SOUL www.wakeupwisconsin.com
To contact the DNR wildlife biologist about the sleeping bear and her cubs
The following poignant poem, by the German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemoller, one of the few Protestant clergymen who dared to protest (and therefore became one of Hitler’s concentration camp victims), deserves reciting:
"First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist, so I didn't speak up;
Then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew, so I didn't speak up;
Then they came for the union members, but I wasn't a union member, so l didn't speak up;
Then they came for the Catholics, but I wasn't a Catholic, so I didn't speak up;
And then they came for me, and by then there was nobody left to speak up for me."
Who will speak up for the bears.....for the woods....for the water and the land and life?
Rally to Protect Our Relatives Saturday noon March 11, 2006
gather at McDonald's in Ladysmith on Hwy 8 and travel with us in feast and prayer ceremony near (but not too close) to where she sleeps with her young ones.
Come with a good heart. MINOBIMAADIZIIWIN
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