He liked bears.
He liked bears. He didn’t care what they did to anything else. He liked his bears. I think Lou Hallock was very sympathetic to doing away with bears when they gave you troubles. But, anyway Lee and I got together. We left that bear down there at the time. We didn’t want any more people to know about it than could help because the fewer people that knew about it, the better off we were. So that night, we went down there after it was dark and we loaded that cub bear in the back of my pickup or his, I don’t remember which. And we took it down to just the other side of our house, or to one of the viewpoints down Annie Creek canyon. We hauled the cub bear out of the back of the pickup and one of us got on the head and one on the heels. We swung that bear and swung that bear and threw it in the canyon. Well, the only problem was that when we looked down, it didn’t sound like it went down. So we shined our flashlight down there and it didn’t. It lodged about thirty or forty feet down. We knew we had to do something about that. So we had to get ropes and let ourselves down and get rid of that bear again. This is a rather famous bear story, between Lee and I, and our relatives. This is the first time it’s been taped.
Jean: He had to wait until he retired.
Nobody can do anything now. Lee’s retired, Leavitt’s dead, and Lou’s retired so it doesn’t make any difference. Now, we had other cases too. I remember the Chief Ranger’s house up here, which is the one that’s unoccupied (10). The one we went through the other day. Lou Hallock was in that. One wintertime, there must have been four or five feet of snow on the ground. This bear was out too late, no question about that. He tried to break in his door. Lou took his rifle and went out and he shot that bear. And of course, it’s perfectly legitimate to get rid of a bear like that, because it very definitely was trying to break in. It was probably a sick bear and didn’t have enough food to hibernate.
