I sneak out onto the Lower Loop Trail in this coveted season when the tourists have left, most locals to warmer climes, and the world seems to slowly, sweetly pause. Catkins fur the tips of aspen branches. A high-pitched trill arrows through the quiet, a telltale sign of the first hummingbird of the season. It is time. Clad in rubber boots and my saunter satchel, I hopscotch between granulated snow drifts and boggy soil, saturated with melt. As soon as the icy edge retreats, something green begins growing. Yellow pen-points of glacier lily buds push up through the slush.
Everything is running, flowing, seeping, and soggy. I find high ground on top of a crumbling cliff overlooking the massive wetland of the Slate River Valley. The great blue herons returned about a month ago. I spied them fishing on the western edge of Peanut Lake, in a thawed pool where the stream tumbles down from Red Lady Mountain’s hip, and little fish begin their brief lives. I’ve brought my binoculars to check out the herons’ nests, one of my favorite spring rituals. Sitting on the dry rock, rustling through my satchel, I look toward the tree island for a first glimpse.
Then stop short. There is something dark and large digging in the marshland, in one of the muddy canals carved by beaver, just north of a wide east-arching bend in the river. It’s a bear. Black like coal.
Bears are our ancestors, first appearing on this earth over 30 million years ago, 26 million years before humans. Native American scholar Joseph Brown explains that for native people across the continent, this elderhood links them more immediately to the divine. They serve as manifestations of divine spirit and intermediaries between humans and the Creator. Their actions are read like scripture. Indeed, notes Brown, “Great Spirit comes almost exclusively involving animal or other forms.”
The Tabeguache Ute — native people of this particular enclave in the Southern Rocky Mountains — honored Bear so deeply that they took a bear paw as their tribal symbol, carving it in petroglyphs on the red rock just west of here. For them and within other Ute bands, Bear — or Kwiyagat in their language — is a powerful reservoir of puwá, the animating and fertile supernatural force, for her ability to overcome the death of hibernation with new life. She is the bold-faced, ferocious triumph of spring over winter.
Shamans were known as puwarat and were visited by these animal spirits in dreams and visions. They taught medicine songs, what to put in a medicine bundle, and how to heal. Ute curing ceremonies lasted all night, with the shaman offering prayers and smoking to send them skyward. The shaman sang his medicine songs, drawing on his spirit animal’s power to cure, summoning puwá to take part in the healing.
Among many tribes, shamanic healers empowered with Bear’s spirit were among the most potent, as puwá’s translation as “medicine” is strongest.
My own ancestors spiral backward through time to the pre-Christian Celts. For them, the animating force of puwá wafted from the Otherworld, the supernatural realm of the deities. The Otherworld weaved itself through this one, with caves, lakes, and springs becoming portals. The edge of a wetland or wood. The sudden presence of a crow. Every rock, mountain, and tree had a spirit. Here wandered Brigid, fire goddess and patron of poets; the river goddess Boand; Cailleach, goddess of the earth. A heron might be an ancestor, the crow a shape-shifted Morrigan, goddess of death and transformation. Everything was to be noted, a potential text to be decoded. To not recognize this animated reality of nature was to sever oneself from the nourishing source of life.
The bear is below me by several hundred yards and can neither see nor smell me. Besides, he’s quite busy with his digging. I am alert but unafraid. I assume he’s male because it is early spring, and there are no cubs about. Regardless, he’s shoulder-deep in the beaver’s mud canal, heaving with all his might at something entombed in the culvert.
He tugs backward on it with his whole weight, and his coat shimmers with each muscular exertion. At times, the edge of the thing pops into view — a bloody carcass. He digs at it with one paw, and then the other. He sits back on his haunches and surveys the situation.
I am breathless. I watch for the good part of an hour until, with a final lurch, he drags his prize up and out from the muddy canal and onto the grassy ground. Perhaps this is his own buried treasure. Or some poor animal mired in the mud until death, while the rest of the herd moved on. A coyote’s cache that the opportunistic omnivore happened upon? Is it the complete pelvis of an elk? Skull of a cow? Even through my binoculars, it’s hard to tell, but it is a lush find, meat and skin hanging off the bright and muddy bone. He gnaws on it a while, lying on his belly with the thing between his paws, turning it over and over to get a tooth into the best parts. He takes a nap.
The Ute also watched Bear digging. Emerging in the spring after a long winter’s fast, Bear’s diet in the newly blooming world was the green shoots of grasses, glacier lilies, and the soft inner cambium of tree bark. Later, they spied her eating raspberries, which they learned to press into juice, and serviceberries, which they pounded into a pulp and dried for pemmican.
From Bear, they learned of bearberry for the urinary tract. Bear root, or osha, to clear out the belly and lungs. Ute women — watching Bear, mimicking her gathering medicines and berries — therefore became the carriers of their tribe’s extensive knowledge of plants, and the most accomplished healers of herbal remedies. It was Bear, then, who taught the Ute what constituted both food and medicine.
Knowing the secrets and mysteries of the plants, Bear was the original herbalist, a curing animal. In Celtic mythology, Airimid, daughter of Dian Kecht, physician of the old Celtic gods, classified 365 curing herbs sprouting from her brother’s grave, each growing from the part it repaired. Generations of healers afterward listened to the whisperings of the Otherworld, gleaning information for particular cures and passing the secrets to their kin. It was an inherited profession, after all, one family specializing in bones, another blood — ancestral knowledge in an unbroken chain to the past. Each tribe carefully cultivated its own herb garden. In order to be effective, though, a plant could not be gathered without its charm or ritual. Prescriptions included both the herb and its incantation, engaging the participation of both the patient and the Otherworld.
The Celts knew nothing happened without spirit behind the efforts. Language, poetry, and song, offering praises of the plant’s strength and beauty, were essential in cajoling those hiding in the winks of sunlight, or in the periphery of a mist, to come out and contribute.
At the end of the 1800s, the time when my great-grandmother — whom I knew — was a child, Scottish folklorist Alexander Carmichael recorded some of these charms in his Carmina Gadelica: “Eala-bhi, eala-bhi, Mo niarach neach aig am bi, Buaineam thu le mo lamh dheas Teasdam thu le mo lamh chli, Ga ba co a gheabh thu ’n cro an ail, Cha bhi e gu brath gun ni.” “Saint John’s wort, Saint John’s wort, My envy whosoever has thee, I will pluck thee with my right hand, I will preserve thee with my left hand, Whoso findeth thee in the cattle fold, Shall never be without kine.”
Likewise, the Lakota sang praises to both Bear and plant: “My paw is sacred, the herbs are everywhere. My paw is sacred, all things are sacred.” Without the song, the plant’s inherent curative powers were ineffective.
After resting a bit, the bear below me stands up and begins to amble away. I wonder what digging Bear has to teach us now, what medicine and healing we might glean from him in these days. What transformation? This visitation from Bear feels like a gift. I slink off into the shadows — smiling and humming to myself, the trees, and Bear. To the hummingbirds, glacier lilies, and great blue herons — cajoling them to join our human conversation once again.