"There's no point in worrying at all"

Alan Booth's take on the predictability of Hokkaido's brown bears.

The man who told me about bears had lived on the shore of the lake for thirty years. He had been a prisoner of the Russians on Sakhalin, and the Russians had told him that he would never go home again. In the end they had released him after two years, and he had gone back to Sapporo where he had found no one he knew, he said, and no way of making a living. So he had settled here on the shore of Lake Shikotsu, a wiry brown-faced hermit, and an amiable one…

Bears, he said, are the most predictable of animals – far more predictable than human beings, whom he confessed he had not much interest in and whom he thought overrated as a species.

“There are dozens of bears in the hills around the lake. They come down almost daily to the road over there."

He pointed at the road I had just walked along, and I said "Oh really?" with a great deal of nonchalance.

"You want to whistle or sing when you walk," he said, "or have a bell and ring it from time to time, or bang a stick. They won't come near you unless they’re really hungry, and then it's only your food they'll want.”

I nodded pleasantly, having no food.

“If you turn a corner and you see a bear and it’s thirty metres away, you’ve no need to worry. The bear will run away. It’ll be far more frightened than you are.”

“Well, well!”, I said, and sipped my tea.

“If you turn a corner and you see a bear, say, twenty metres away, there’s still a good chance it won’t bother you. It’ll roar a bit just to let you know it’s there, but if you stand quite still, it’ll probably get bored and go back into the forest.”

“Mm”, I said, giving the forest a very uncursory glance. 

“And then, of course, if you turn a corner and you see a bear and it’s five or ten metres away from you…”

“Then, presumably, I should start to worry,” I said, chuckling my most British chuckle.

“Not really,” he said. “You’ve no need to worry. Bears are the most predictable of animals. If it’s five metres away it’ll certainly kill you. There’s no point in worrying at all.”

References

From Alan Booth, The Roads to Sata: A 2,000-mile Walk through Japan, Penguin Travel Library, 1987. Image courtesy of ChatGPT.

See also Beyond the bear bell on this blog.