Stephen Hume

Gilbert had a part of his face ripped off by a female Grizzly bear. Yet he has spent his life devoted to undoing the demonizing of this complex, highly intelligent creature. Warning: graphic, bone-crunching description ahead. ALMOST 45 YEARS AGO, not long after sunrise dappled the remote ridge they were climbing in Montana’s Rocky Mountains near the borders of Idaho and Wyoming, a Canadian wildlife biologist and his graduate student emerged from the stunted tree line on a cold, windswept height three kilometres above sea level. This was Bighorn Pass. For sake of comparison, that’s almost twice the altitude of Mount Arrowsmith, the craggy, snow-clad peak that so dramatically dominates the skyline above the pass separating Nanaimo from Port Alberni. The two men were there to observe and study how grizzly bears responded to back country hikers and mounted outfitters with pack trains. It was part of an ambitious research project at Utah State University, where Barrie Gilbert had landed a faculty position after graduating from Queens University, taking a doctorate at Duke and then doing field research in Alberta. To get there, they’d spent a week humping their 20-kilogram packs through the foothills, fording rushing creeks and paddling 30 kilometres across deep, icy Yellowstone Lake, itself almost 2.5 kilometres in elevation. It hadn’t been an easy passage. They’d endured a series of marching cold fronts which spawned thunderstorms, hail, drenching rain and lashing squalls that repeatedly forced them ashore when the short, steep waves threatened to swamp their aluminum canoe. The canoe itself was cause for concern. There was frequent lightning. The prospect of getting fried by a strike on the lake or while huddling under the up-turned hull to shelter from pelting rain loomed large in his imagination. So did grizzlies. At night, they’d camped well off the trail and they’d dragged in snags and branches from deadfalls to create crude barriers around their tent that, if they gave no real protection, at least offered an early warning should a bear approach. Eventually they reached their destination and, to their excitement and delight, soon encountered what they’d come to observe—a grizzly bear in pristine habitat. It was a female with three cubs digging roots in an alpine meadow. They watched enthralled as she stood down a male that approached, a mortal threat to her cubs. Male grizzlies, like lions, will kill the offspring of competitors. Later the bear family ambled down the meadow they shared with a small herd of grazing elk. The next morning, Gilbert decided they should circle behind and climb the back side of the adjacent Crowfoot Ridge so they could observe the bears more closely from above. Just as they left the scrubby trees at the top, Gilbert felt a call of nature and moved ahead of his partner to find a spot. He hunched over, keeping himself low to avoid spooking the elk with his silhouette against the skyline. That was when he met the bear. It had unexpectedly come up the other side of the ridge. Gilbert realized later that the unfortunate encounter—for him at any rate—was shaped by two things. First, because of the menace of the big male to her cubs, the female grizzly was already on hair-trigger alert. Second, approaching in a hunched-over stance, the biologist must have resembled a stalking predator. There was one explosive “woof,” a blur of brown hurtling out of the scrub and in seconds he was on the ground. “Her teeth felt like a row of pick-axes scraping across my head as she tore my scalp off,” he recalled later, although strangely, he says, he felt no pain in the moment. “Her second bite came down on my face, a big canine tooth punching into my eye-socket. ‘This is how you die,’ I thought as I felt bones crunch. One bite removed my cheekbone and sinus, exposing brain membrane. “As my life drained onto the ground”—it was later determined that he was hemorrhaging almost half of his blood supply—“I went limp and the biting stopped.” The grad student, Bruce Hastings, courageously yelled and the grizzly retreated. The bear, Gilbert later realized, was simply being a bear—reacting to his presence as a threat to her cubs. She wasn’t interested in killing him for the malicious reasons humans attribute in their deep trait of anthropomorphizing other animals. She simply wanted to neutralize an unknown and unidentified threat and once it was no longer a threat, she left. A less resilient person might have surrendered to the terrible wounds and died on the mountain. But Gilbert was tough. He was also very lucky. A team of highly trained medical technicians attached to a smoke-jumping crew had just deployed from a nearby fire base. And the helicopter pilot who picked him up had just done two combat tours in Vietnam war, landing under the most difficult conditions. Finally, a team of military surgeons experienced with battlefield trauma had just been assigned to the nearest medical facility. Gilbert’s first surgery, the one that would save his life following a bear mauling in the remote Rockies, took 11 hours and exhausted the hospital’s suture supply. The lead surgeon, Earl Browne, who has since died, later showed Gilbert photographs from before they began reconstructing what remained of his face. “All my facial skin and scalp was pinned out like a rat dissection in Biology 101,” he writes in the preamble to his astonishing memoir, One of Us: A Biologist’s Walk Among Bears. Scientific curiosity and a fascination with methodology trumped squeamishness. “I wasn’t repelled,” he writes. “I asked Dr. Browne if he had seen this kind of damage before. “‘Well, yes,’’’ the surgeon replied. “‘But not all on the same guy.’” So, through a combination of luck and fortitude, Gilbert survived the extraction and a round of intensive surgeries. His maimed face was rebuilt—although the massive injuries left him blind in one eye and his face permanently disfigured. Barry Gilbert closely observing a young grizzly bear on a river at Geographic Harbour, Katmai National Park, Alaska. Photo courtesy Barrie Gilbert. IF THIS STORY SOUNDS LIKE THE MAKING OF A BOOK, IT WAS. But not the book you might expect. This gripping story—a journalist like me might have made a whole book out of it alone—occupies a mere 15 pages at the beginning of Gilbert’s recently published memoir, One of Us: A Biologist’s Walk Among Bears. Gilbert went home to convalesce, to endure his 15-minutes of fame as the media descended to pester him for lurid details—mostly, he concluded, to advance a stereotype of grizzlies as “rogue killers in the woods eager to eat your children”—and to grapple with the post traumatic stress disorder that came with the cold reality of people staring at his facial disfigurement. Some might have withdrawn. “I chose to see the staring responses of others as their problem,” Gilbert writes. “I was a handsome guy and still am (inside).” Instead, he rejoiced that his hands still worked. And his scientist’s analytical brain. It reminded him of something equally important—point of view. Which is why the following summer found him sitting beside half a tonne of black bear just stirring from anaesthesia after being darted in his new research project. With only the slightest misgivings, Gilbert stayed with the bear while it recovered consciousness—staying with bears in such a state is essential, he notes, because a handicapped one invites opportunistic attacks from other bears, another trait they share with humans. “Fear of that bear was not an issue for me, but I could only guess why,” he writes. “Maybe long experience with animals and my short dose of terror carried the day.” We should all be grateful that Gilbert didn’t succumb to the kind of risk-averse apprehension regarding bears that might have gripped the rest of us, because he went on to almost half a century in the field, exhaustively studying bears in their habitat and in the most intimate proximity, at that. He sat with them, walked with them, observed them more closely than the benighted rest of us might get in a zoo with cages. His field work took him from the American Rockies to the Alaska wilderness and deep into Canada’s Great Bear Rainforest. One of Us charts that remarkable journey, not just through the bush in search of the great predators, but also through the devil’s club thickets of contradictory political policy; the technical disagreements spawned by what he calls “conservation contrarianism” and “science friction”; and the baser economic conflicts between the imperatives of ecological integrity for a threatened species and the special interests of industry, from tourism to timber harvesting to the powerful big game hunting lobby. There’s far more than the science of observation and dry statistical analysis here. Gilbert’s memoir takes us on an extraordinary excursion through the history—and pre-history—of relations between bears and humans. First, it explores the thousands of years of bears’ coexistence with indigenous peoples, an entanglement of mutual tolerance that populates the innermost of First Nations’ sacred spaces and endures into the present. Second, it examines the fatal contact between bears and a settler culture which demonized the animals as a precursor—and rationalization—for their systematic extirpation from vast areas of their range, particularly in the United States. Explorers, fur traders, cattle ranchers and sheepherders shot them, trapped them and poisoned them in great numbers. Trophy hunters preyed on the remnants. Then loggers, farmers and urban developers set about destroying their habitats. Once abundant in California, for example, the last grizzly bear was shot there in 1922 and the species survives only on the state flag, a reminder of our propensity to make icons of what we destroy. Grizzly populations dwindled to about 1,500 in the lower 48. There are 600 in Wyoming, 800 in Montana, 400 in Alberta, maybe 70 in Idaho and 20 in Washington. In Canada, there are about 25,000 bears, of which about 15,000 are in BC. When Europeans arrived by land it was estimated there were 25,000 in BC alone. One of Us takes us back to 1805 and the first scientific expedition of discovery by land across what’s now the western United States by William Clark and Meriwether Lewis. The party shot and killed 51 grizzly bears and wounded another 18, probably mortally. From then on it just got worse for the bears. And yet humans and bears can safely coexist, Gilbert argues, and provides the evidence from deep personal experience. He disrobes the enduring myth of the demon bear and reveals a complex, highly intelligent creature with a fascinating social system and crucial roles in the natural ecosystem. As Vancouver Islanders get used to the idea that they might soon be sharing the outback with grizzlies, particularly along salmon rivers north of Campbell River, One of Us would be a good resource to put on the bookshelf. It’s $21 in paperback. Stephen Hume has spent half a century as a journalist writing about Western Canada, the Far North, BC and the Island.

AFTER HUMANS, who include in their arsenal everything from rifles that empty a 30-bullet magazine in 7 seconds to atomic bombs that obliterate entire cities faster than you can think, bears are North America’s most dangerous large predators. They can be huge—the biggest bear ever seen (in Alaska in 1960) weighed more than a tonne and exceeded 3.4 metres in height when it stood up, which made it bigger than a small car and about 1.5 metres taller than the tallest National Basketball Association player. Although an old Oblate missionary once showed me the skin of a polar bear shot a century ago on the shores of Hudson Bay that measured 5.8 metres from the tip of its nose to the tip of its tail. Maybe it had stretched over time. But maybe not: once, flying down the east coast of Baffin Island, we banked hard to look at a huge crimson splash on the snow where a bear was devouring a beluga whale it had dragged from a lead in the sea ice, killed and dismembered. These impressive, highly intelligent animals populate our collective imagination—from the sea grizzly of the Haida, a supernatural monster in whose fur the souls of the drowned form bubbles, to the giant grizzly that hurtled out of the bush to maul one of explorer Simon Fraser’s voyageurs in 1805. Yet dangerous is a relative term. Although popular media is rife with the recent report of mountain bikers followed by a curious black bear and a hiker in the Interior chased up a tree by another black bear that displayed unusually predatory behaviour, for the most part the risk of a bad bear encounter is almost infinitesimally low. Estimates vary because reporting is localized and not consistently tabulated, but since 1986 there has been, on average, a fatal bear attack every two years in British Columbia. In the two years prior to this summer, curtailed by the imperatives of the on-going pandemic, there were about 44 million day trips to provincial parks in BC. So the chances of those visitors having a really bad day with a bear on some park trail are about 0.0000045 per cent. By comparison, over the same period about 180 people in BC will be murdered by their fellow humans. Another 15,000 or so will experience violent criminal assaults. Continent-wide, about 75 people a year are killed in hunting accidents—in January, an Island man was killed on a hunting trip to Alberta; and in South Carolina a hunter and his nine-year-old daughter were killed when a fellow hunter mistook them for a deer. In BC, a trophy hunter was shot by his guide in 2014. In Canada and the US about 1,000 a year are injured by the accidental discharge of a firearm while hunting. Then there are the 4.5 million people injured by dog bites each year and the up to 50 who are killed every year in attacks by family and neighbourhood pets. So when you go into the woods, you are at much greater risk from fellow humans and their pets than from any bear you are likely to meet. On the other hand, it’s a lot more dangerous for the bears. Problem encounters between humans and bears are on the rise and are far more likely to end badly for the bear. As the interface between human and bear habitats expands, the number of human-bear conflicts in BC has risen to an average of more than 15,000 a year. The average number of black bears killed in what are euphemistically called “enforcement actions” is now up to about 500 a year. Another 3,900 or so black bears are legally shot by hunters according to provincial government statistics, We should be cautious about averages, of course, because on average most of us are nowhere near a bear. The risks for those of us who are in proximity may be slightly higher, but usually it’s not because the bears are hunting us, it’s because we accidentally surprise them while intruding into their habitat. After centuries of regional extirpations, the appearance of grizzlies in Island habitat where they haven’t been seen much before should be cause for wonder and celebration not hiker’s angst. More on that in my next post. Stephen Hume has spent half a century as a journalist writing about Western Canada, the Far North, BC and the Island.

BENEATH THE WIND-SCULPTED CORNICES crowning the massif beyond the tree line, long, purpling shadows had begun to pool. Rock faces slid from battleship grey towards steel blue. Even gleaming snow fields had begun to take on a softer, burnished hue, offset by flushes of pastel where they fell away from the slant of light. It dawned abruptly in my distracted 12-year-old brain that this signalled a problem. First, it was late enough in the day that it would soon be getting dark farther down the trail where it wound beneath the already gloomy old growth. Second, that the shouts and laughter of the other boys I’d come up with had fallen into silence. They were already on their way back down the mountain. Off in hot pursuit, I came pelting around a very tight, very steep corner and slammed full-bore into the backside of a small black bear. The bear was as shocked as I. It streaked up-slope and I ran even faster downhill and didn’t slow until I reached the bottom where my companions had just noticed my absence. We all seem to have stories about bears I have other bear stories. Polar bear stories. Grizzly bear stories. A cinnamon bear. But none quite so intimate as that one. Sometimes it seems that everyone in British Columbia who ventures beyond the limits of the cities where most of us spend most of our time has a bear story. My brother Mark recalls paddling through a rain squall on Bowron Lake to set up a soggy camp with his wife and two young daughters. They’d be sharing the beach with a young moose browsing in the willows behind. Except, the next morning Maggie quietly informed Mark: “That’s no moose.” They’d spent the night next to the biggest grizzly he’d ever seen. But it gave no trouble, just sauntered away. My wife’s bear tale is from a fishing trip to the Atnarko River up the mid-Coast. I was fussing with a rucksack. She suddenly declined to take the trail with me. “A bear just walked behind the car,” she explained. Now, Susan doesn’t scare easily. I must have raised an eyebrow. “It was bigger than the car,” she said. The car was a little Vega but a bear that big is pretty big. “You go if you want. I’m staying here.” Call me foolhardy, perhaps, but after enduring 500 kilometres of gravel road, I wasn’t about to let a bear chase me off, so down the trail I went. Before I could open my fly box, I heard a splashing. Up a side channel, shoulder to shoulder, swaggering like hockey fans on a game night pub crawl, came three young grizzlies. I went back to the car. The fish could wait for another day. And, now, with seven sightings of grizzly bears around Sayward, a black bear and cub in Beaver Lake Park, a bear in Thetis Lake Park, bear sightings in Saanich and Central Saanich, the entire Island has bear stories to share. It’s not surprising, really. There are an estimated 7,000 black bears on Vancouver Island, a small proportion of the 150,000 in BC but a dense concentration nevertheless. And, now, with maybe seven grizzlies on the North Island, the adrenaline factor for hikers and anglers will be jacked right up. Of course, maybe it’s just seven sightings of the same grizzly; bear stories do have a way of taking on a life of their own. Historically, there have been almost no resident grizzlies on Vancouver Island except for the odd adventuresome cherchez la femme specimen who returns to the mainland when he discovers that Island life means flying solo. Still, seven grizzly sightings is a lot for the Island. And, judging by the sad ending for the bachelor wolf from Victoria who was relocated only to be shot by a hunter, then the wandering grizzly from the Broughton Archipelago who was relocated at the request of First Nations elders only to later be shot by a frightened householder, things may yet go badly for the bears. Part 2 of this story is here; watch for Part 3, coming soon. Stephen Hume has spent half a century as a journalist writing about Western Canada, the Far North, BC and the Island.

ON MY UPPER LEFT ARM, faint now after more than 70 years, is the white scar of a smallpox vaccination required before my entry into Canada. I am a visitor from the time before the last big North American smallpox outbreak. It began in New York City, now lashed by the coronavirus, not long after I was born, still in the first half of the last century. That event marked a signature response to the threat of pandemic. Authorities swiftly launched the largest mass vaccination in history—more than 6.3 million people in three weeks. The looming epidemic was snuffed out after just two deaths. In 1947, American public health authorities were ready, had a plan and a vaccine. A far cry from the 2020 response in which authorities were unprepared and leaders took refuge from responsibility in magical thinking, a fascination with voodoo cures, denunciations of science, and xenophobic scapegoating while the virus marched through America. I’m old enough to remember the fear of polio, the virus that left withered limbs and condemned paralyzed victims to life in an Iron Lung that did their breathing for them. The fear stalked parents taking their kids to summer swimming pools or sending them to camp and was a national crisis in the mid-1950s. My mother put on a brave front. She never talked about her concern except to caution her kids about proper pool and playground hygiene. But the worry simmered. Her own father had been partially paralyzed by polio. She’d long lived in its gloomy shadow. So I recall the sense of relief with which parents responded to a polio vaccine, the apprehensive line-ups for our elementary school inoculation and our sense of betrayal at our parents’ jocular enthusiasm. Now I read stories that ask the question: what if we get a vaccine for coronavirus and half the population refuses vaccination? I thought about this as I bid farewell to the journalism class I taught at Vancouver Island University this spring, sending them off to complete their assignments on-line from France and India, Wellington and Campbell River. What began for them as a classroom assignment in early January—find out what you can and write about this viral outbreak in Wuhan, China—had morphed into a major upheaval of their lives. Some raced to get home before national borders closed, others scrambled to find accommodation here before a possible lockdown, yet others worried about money running out. I thought about how a world had just ended for them and how they would now have to invent a new one. The principal ending was an assumed certainty. Most of them had never experienced a world in which existential threat lurks in the breath of friends or at restaurant buffets or on washroom door handles or in the seat next to them at a concert or a Mariners basketball game. Now they are urged to maintain distance even after restrictions ease, to wear masks lest they be a silent carrier of pestilence to grandparents—or to old men like their journalism instructor. This psychological shift represents a vast lurch backward into the near-forgotten. My own childhood of polio and, beyond that, into the pre-antibiotics childhood of my father—at 96 bearing his lockdown in assisted living with aplomb. Lethal microbes took two of his brothers, a sister, a step-sister, his father’s first wife and an uncle. We live in medicine’s golden age and yet this tiny virus disrupts everything we took for granted about the economy, the power of science to protect us, our social lives, the institutions that sustain our social order, how we conduct ourselves in public and private. Those students will return—those who do return—to a reconfigured education in a few months. Most classes will be virtual except for a few—labs, studio work—in which their physical presence is deemed essential. And that may be only a small element of how the pandemic transforms the world. How will schools cope with social distancing? The guidelines, rendered as a circle, require 12.5 square metres per person but standard classrooms normally allot 2.5 square metres per student. Grade six arithmetic suggests that either classes must be radically smaller or classrooms radically larger. Then there are the teachers themselves. If the plan is to open gradually while protecting high risk segments of the population, how will the plan address the fact that 38 percent of teachers fall into the high risk group more likely to suffer serious illness because they are over 50? And how does a professional hockey team that puts 19,000 fans into a 44,000 square-metre arena deal with the fact that under social distancing rules they’ll need a 238,000 square-metre arena? In this newly apprehensive social order, can air travel return to anything resembling normal? Airlines operate on minuscule profit margins earned by jamming passengers into fuselages which recirculate particle-laden air through passengers’ lungs many times on a long flight. Decreasing density can only mean ticket prices that return air travel to its niche as a luxury service for the very wealthy. Similar problems beset public transit. Packed buses and trains are the preferred norm. They keep fares low for low income commuters. In Metro Vancouver, public transit moved about 435 million passengers annually to and from work in the city core, university, college and high school campuses and to shopping districts. How travel at that density might continue in the age of social distancing and the coronavirus is a conundrum. And yet it seems impossible for those commuters to move to private vehicles without strangling the city. As air travel and public transit go, so goes tourism. It produced $1.7 billion in provincial taxes in 2018 and contributed $8.3 billion to provincial GDP. In Victoria, tourism generated about 17,000 jobs, close to $500 million in wages and almost $700 million in GDP. Changes to this sector promise huge impacts on the city’s economic health and well-being. Work itself seems destined for enormous upheaval. How many of those forced to work from home during the closing of office buildings, whose tight floor plans and closed ventilation systems work like giant virus distributors, will continue work at home? The arithmetic of social distancing suggests many won’t be going back to the office soon. That brings its own economic fallout. If corporations aren’t simply to offload office overhead costs onto home officer workers, tax structures must be reworked. The global economy itself is in the throes of transformation. The half-century mantra of Neo-liberal fiscal austerity in service of globalization seems dead. Governments everywhere suddenly rediscover the virtues of Keynesian spending powers. And assumptions about the efficiencies of bigness and vertical integration and the inefficiencies of small, local and dispersed now implode in the face of disruptions to global supply chains. If meat processing in Canada concentrates in three plants and they are contaminated with coronavirus outbreaks, the efficiency of size suddenly transmogrifies into a horrifying inefficiency for the national food supply. The small local and travelling abattoirs that were once common now look like not such a bad idea. Yes, pandemics change everything, and the world my former university students have just inherited will be extraordinarily different from the one they knew in their December break.

SINCE WE’RE NOW ESSENTIALLY A TEXT-BASED CULTURE, there’s a strong tendency for social memory to focus on that history most easily accessed through documents. The Vietnam War seems more real than World War II which seems more real than World War I because the documentary record is richer. And there’s an equally strong tendency to assume text-based records have greater credibility and importance than that history which comes to us through other means—stories, memories, artifacts, and so on. The great coastal smallpox pandemic of 1862 looms extraordinarily large in the imagined history of the West Coast. “Imagined” because all history is mostly imagined. It’s reconstructed from fragments gleaned from the past and is frequently revised to reflect the biases inherent in those doing the reconstructing, the biases of record-keepers and the biases of those interpreting to serve present agendas. Anyone who wants a quick lesson in this would do well to read Jaroslav Pelikan’s remarkable Jesus through the Centuries, a study of how successive generations of historians reinvented the fragmentary historical evidence to serve and to shape the cultural demands of their particular time. What happened in 1862 plays a central role in British Columbia’s collective identity precisely because documents of colonial settler culture recorded it even as it ripped apart the oral histories of its victims, the once-populous First Nations sustained by the rich coastal ecosystem of estuaries, rivers, inlets and sheltering islands. And yet 1862 was only an aftershock to an earlier epidemiological cataclysm of Biblical proportions. A massive transformation of coastal demography had already occurred. That first shock depopulated entire landscapes, erased collective memory, brought demoralizing confusion and disarray to a system in which lineages and hereditary titles and ranks were central to social identity, political power and economic organization. The second episode dismantled economies as dwindling populations were separated from their traditional resource bases and eventually from the practical ability to exercise sovereignty over them. The third shock was, in effect, geo-political. As the pendulum of pandemic swung again and again through populations, it reshaped the balance of power. Before, First Nations were a powerful majority. Even up to 1862 they still felt able to assert interests with what, for want of a better word, might be characterized as military actions in Nootka Sound, in the Peace River district, the Fraser Canyon, the Chilcotin, the Gulf Islands, on Vancouver Island and elsewhere. But over the century between 1780 and 1880, recurring epidemics reduced the coastal First Nations population by 90 percent. Should a catastrophe of similar magnitude afflict today’s Canada, the surviving population would dwindle to Greater Vancouver’s numbers. Over that century, intensive seasonal rounds to harvest the resources of traditional territories collapsed, languages and the world view they contained vanished. Colonists gave themselves permission to settle lands abandoned by what they perceived as a dying race. In addition to at least five outbreaks of smallpox—one for every successive generation born without immunity—measles, malaria, influenza and other diseases identified by the few fur traders only as “the mortality” or “fever and ague” contributed to a population decline of unprecedented dimensions. The 50 percent surviving the initial outbreak were next reduced by another 10 percent, then by 14 percent, then by 22 percent, then by 50 percent and so on down a relentless ladder of dwindling. We tend to parse this awful experience into its individual outbreaks, smallpox in 1782 and 1801, “the mortality” of 1824, malaria in 1830, smallpox again in 1836, dysentery in 1844, measles in 1847, smallpox again in 1853 and then another coast-wide smallpox pandemic in 1862. The dreadful century culminated with the formation of British Columbia amid the ruins. As settlers poured into the region on the discovery of gold on the Fraser River, people already there were quickly marginalized economically and separated from their resource bases. The new overlords then set about trying to neutralize what power remained by dismantling the cultures themselves—outlawing language, religion and cultural practice, ethnically cleansing the landscape and establishing concentration camps under the euphemistic rubric “reserves,” disenfranchising ethnic groups and, the ultimate insult, seizing children for brainwashing to accept subservient roles in the new “normal.” This, of course, is the takeaway from our dolorous past, after enormous transfiguring events there is no return to “normal.” Pandemics take normality and contort it into something else, something few of us can foresee. The Black Death ended a thousand years of feudalism. The economic change it unleashed shaped the wage economy we share today and to which—like the serfs and lords of of 1345—we can’t imagine an alternative. The pandemics of the 19th Century changed the world of proto-British Columbia in ways unimaginable in the century before. So we can all be sure of one thing about our pandemic. Survivors of the medical and economic carnage will inherit something but whatever it is, it won’t be the normal we knew in 2019. The new normal around the globe: “social distancing” Stephen Hume has spent half a century as a journalist writing about Western Canada, the Far North, BC and the Island.

PANDEMICS, LIKE BIRTH AND DEATH, have always been with human populations. History is composed of pandemic layered upon pandemic as far back as written records extend. The plague of Antonine, almost certainly the smallpox virus from the description of its symptoms by the Greek doctor Galen, rode home with troops returning from a Middle Eastern war, swept through the Roman Empire, and killed an estimated one in 10 of its 75 million citizens. Victims included the Roman emperor Lucius Verus, co-ruler with Marcus Aurelius, who is perhaps better known for the Stoic philosophy that must have kept him going while plague was killing 2,000 people a day in Rome. The current daily death total in the US during the COVID-19 pandemic is now 2,000-a-day and projected to rise to 3,000 a day by June. The more things change, the more they get the same. Later, in 735 Japan, the smallpox virus killed about one-third of its population over the course of two years. When smallpox arrived here on the West Coast for the first time in 1782, travelling its perambulatory path from an outbreak in Mexico, it killed every second person, a mortality rate about double that which had afflicted ancient Rome and early medieval Japan. Viruses leap from animal to human populations when they find fertile ground and then they leap from concentration of humans to concentration of humans until they’ve either killed off enough hosts that they reduce their transmission options, or their hosts adapt their immunity, or the viruses adapt to their hosts so that they can live in a symbiotic, sometimes mutually beneficial relationship. It doesn’t make evolutionary sense to kill off the host that keeps you alive; viruses that do soon disappear along with their dwindling transmission possibilities. And so it does make sense that some viruses which reside in the mucus that lubricates human respiratory, digestive and reproductive tracts, for example, protect the medium in which they live—and thus us—by killing harmful bacteria. They are helping to keep the world in which they live intact. Our quirky, sometimes uncomfortable coexistence with microorganisms is hardly surprising considering that we live in a vast ocean of them. The math is astonishing. As part of the global biomass, humans, it’s been pointed out, amount to little more than a rounding error, about one ten-thousandths of the total. Microorganisms, by comparison, amount to 13 percent of the total. Viruses alone represent about three-and-a-half times the total biomass of 7.5 billion humans. In fact, microorganisms comprise a big part of us from the day we’re born until the day we die and they begin to dismantle and recycle us. For every cell in the human body, there are 10 microorganisms, most of them benign, many—including viruses—which are essential to our survival. Only a few are temporarily lethal to us until we eventually learn how to adapt to them or they to us. The variety of coronavirus that’s disrupting global civilization for the moment—the inconvenience of social distancing may seem interminable to us but it’s a tiny fraction of our time on Earth and a minuscule fraction of a fraction of a fraction in evolutionary time—tends to be anthropomorphized as “the enemy” and demonized as though it were following some nefarious conscious imperative. Electron microscope image of the new coronavirus SARS-COV-2 Yet, if it weren’t for viruses, we likely wouldn’t even be here to complain about them. It turns out that viruses kill 80 percent of the bacteria that inhabit the ocean deeps. This in turn releases the nutrients upon which bacteria higher in the water column feed. Those bacteria are themselves crucial nutrients for the single cell organisms upon which the entire marine food chain rests. At the top of that food chain are humans. And so, even as we curse the COVID-19 virus and its hazards and inconveniences, the tuna melts we make for lunch actually come to us courtesy of its very convenient cousins. Stephen Hume has spent half a century as a journalist writing about Western Canada, the Far North, BC and the Island.

GEORGE VANCOUVER’S LOGS from his 1792 circumnavigation of Vancouver Island note that any one of the large deserted villages around the Gulf of Georgia appeared big enough for the entire indigenous population he had encountered. He rightly guessed this was the scattered remnant of a much larger population. How large? As many as 200,000 people likely lived on the Northwest Coast when the first Europeans visited. Warriors and traders, they travelled in swift sea-going canoes whose hull design inspired the clipper ship. The biggest were capable of crossing the Pacific Ocean, which one of them did in 1901. Great houses were adorned with the crests of mighty chiefs—the Europeans thought them “kings”—and the heraldic emblems of clans. Warriors dressed in armour that resembled that of Japanese samurai. Trade routes for prized fish oil, obsidian, precious shells and stones reached deep into the continent. Sophisticated traditions produced oral heroic epics and for any student of classical antiquity the broad similarities between Northwest Coast societies and Mediterranean’s culture of the Homeric age are difficult to ignore. But the post-apocalyptic scenes witnessed by Vancouver were evidence of the pandemic that laid waste to that rich human pageant. Perhaps 100,000 of these people had perished—at least 400 percent more than died during the 1862 outbreak that later became a horrifying icon in British Columbia’s historic timeline. Think of this another way. Imagine a BC in which COVID-19 kills 2.5 million people over the next 18 months—about half our present population. In that first pandemic people died so rapidly that the death rate overwhelmed society’s capacity to respond. Hence an archaeology of normal burials, then hurried mass graves, followed by simply burning houses with the dead and their personal property still in them, concluding with the final indignity, the dead abandoned where they fell. Smallpox was far from unknown to Captain Vancouver. In the 18th century it killed about 400,000 people a year in Europe. Enlightenment Sweden lost one in every 10 children to the virus. In the final century between 1870 and its eradication, smallpox still killed 500 million—and that was with an effective vaccine. First described by Chinese, Indian and Egyptian writers 3,000 years before Vancouver was exploring our coast, the virus came ashore in North America in what is now Mexico with the soldiers of Hernan Cortes in 1521, and then swept through the “virgin soil” of Indigenous populations without immunity. Graphic illustration of the historical spread of smallpox, leprosy and malaria around the globe Explorer Alexander Mackenzie, travelling overland to the Pacific through northern BC in 1792, witnessed it on the Great Plains. “The smallpox,” Mackenzie observed, “spread its destructive and desolating power as the fire consumes the dry grass of the field.” It was so terrifying, he said, that when it first made its appearance in camps, the bravest warriors would kill their wives and children and then themselves to escape the malevolent, inescapable “spirit of pestilence.” What Vancouver’s midshipmen and maritime fur traders found from Port Angeles to southern Alaska were the cultural ruins left by a pandemic that erupted in central Mexico in 1779. Following ancient trade routes, it raced across the Great Plains, dispersed by a new transportation technology—the jet plane of its day—the horse. Along the Missouri River, it killed 60 percent of the population. American explorers reported abandoned villages of collapsed houses and widely-strewn human and animal bones. Smallpox, it is now thought, came to the Northwest Coast following the Snake River to the Columbia and then sped north and south with the canoes that sought to flee before it. In its path, it left famine. Food production and distribution collapsed. Lineages ended. The suffering lingered in collective memory, which itself was rent, so that the early disasters became conflated with the more recent. Smallpox pulsed through newly vulnerable generations again in 1801. Then 1836. Then 1853. Memories of these merged with those of the fifth great smallpox pandemic in1862. It, too, was followed by outbreaks in 1868 and 1874. Once, as we stood on the end of a dock while a gale lashed us with sleet and spindrift, a Heiltsuk chief told me about two ancestors. They’d been recently married and gone into the mountains to hunt for the summer. The Heiltsuk then occupied 50 villages over 15,000 square kilometres of the mid-coast, centred on what’s now Bella Bella. Their canoes traded from Alaska to Oregon. Their bent boxes, cunningly constructed from single pieces of carved and painted cedar, were in demand everywhere. The newlyweds came home that fall, travelling back to the outer coast. They found only empty villages. Everyone was dead. “Every day I think about those people,” he said. “I try to imagine the terror and confusion. They must have believed the end of the world had come and they had been overlooked.” Stephen Hume has spent half a century as a journalist writing about Western Canada, the Far North, BC and the Island.