By Maryanna Gabriel
I have had some interesting jobs in my day and dendochronology (counting tree rings) and looking for points
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| .. a black bear fell asleep (photo credit unknown) |
(arrowheads) was one of them. This was in northeastern British Columbia in a wilderness area called Bull Moose Mountain. We had been hired to determine the First Nations impact in the area from an archaeological perspective. It was quite a summer. I remember being in a trapper's cabin with an old timer discussing the Bigfoot which he had maintained he had seen. We flew by helicopter to where we needed to be with an ex-Vietnam pilot and he liked to scare the bejesus out of us by spinning the bird and cutting the engine, dropping us from the sky until our stomachs were in our mouths and we begged for mercy. One day, we were camping in a log cabin. It was my birthday. The chopper came and hovered deafeningly above the cabin. Then he lowered a bottle of champagne to the bedroom window and flew off. That was pretty fun. I digress. I wanted to tell you what happened with me and bears. We were surveying a wooded area, demarcating where we needed to excavate and at the exact point where we decided to be, a black bear nonchalantly ambled to it, lay down, curled up into a ball, and fell asleep. It was unanimous. We were leaving. But that was not what spooked me.
