A Joint Adventure

The Cub Twins

I used to ride a lot with my brothers and my cousins, we did a lot of crazy things together. This time I was not alone. But that did not matter, it was no exception, whenever the Salmond boys were out, they were out to have fun, no matter what they were doing. Well this particular day they were out checking fence and making sure we had no sick cattle at the lease land we used for pasture. When they just happened upon a mother bear and two cubs.

Bears were a pretty big problem to cattlemen those days, so cousin Henry took out his rifle took a bead on the old girl and let her have it. I’m sure he never got her with the first shot, but none the less, when the air cleared she was dead, and her babies were up a tree or two. Two little black bear cubs up a tree without a mother. What were they going to do? Number one, what were the cubs going to do, and number two, what where the boys going to do? They had gone and gotten themselves into a pickle. We may have been a trigger happy bunch, but no one wanted to shoot the baby bear cubs.

Their final decision was to shoot one, and take the other one as a captive, and just see what they could do with a wild black bear cub. Smart, maybe not, but it was a cool idea. So, they roped him, and pulled him down out of the tree, on the end of the rope, and tied all four of his feet together so he couldn't scratch anyone, and throw him onto a saddle in front of one of the guys. Then they all headed for home with cub package. Well, Cubby had a bumpy ride home, and he was about to start a whole new life on the Sampson Ranch. He had a small chain put around his neck at first, and then as he grew, a little bigger chain was put on, just to keep him from breaking loose.

I didn't have to much of a hand in raising him, other than, when my cousins were gone away to the rodeos in the summer I would be asked to do chores, and a part of those chores was, you guessed it, I had to feed the bear. By this time, Cubby was much bigger, and did not like being a captive in the least.

So here was the way I had to feed him. He was tied to a tree on a chain that was about twenty feet long, so his life consisted of about a forty foot radius around the base of that tree. At times his feeding pail would be about ten feet or better inside that radius, and whenever a human came inside that radius, Cubby would attack them. So I had to play a little cat and mouse game with him in order to get him fed and watered every day, whenever I was doing the chores. I would give him just a little bit of food on the side farthest away from the dish, which would keep his attention while I ran around the circle, snuck in up to the dish, pick it up and then run as fast as I could to get out of the way before he finished his snack and wanted to add me to it as well. Once that circus was out of the way, then I could give him his water at leisure as he was busy eating his lunch I had just given him.

Well, now he was getting too big and to hard to handle so what were they to do. He could not be just set free, for he did not have a clue what to do on his own out in the wild, so some hair brain idea had to be thought of. Did I say hair brain, well here is what they decided, put him into an empty truck and nail him into a corner with a piece of plywood, put a load of horses in the rest of the truck and take him to the rodeo and find a new owner for him. But would it work, yeah, someone, given the right deal, would take him off their hands.

So it was, that a group of First Nation guys did just that. They paid a small amount of money for the bear, bought 2 cases of 24 beer and gave the bear all he wanted to drink, got him good and drunk. Then, loaded him into the back seat of their car and took him home. I hope he (the bear) slept all the way home because if not, I would think those guys had their hands full of drunk angry bear.