FORBES TOWNSHIP, ONT.—They arrive from the forest as dark shadows, almost spectral, their presence signalled by twig snap or branch rustle.

Black bears, mother and child. First comes the cub, born this past winter, only weeks from the den, not much bigger than a dog, hungry.

In a battered oil drum, punctured and propped aslant in a small clearing in the bush an hour or so north of Thunder Bay, there’s a mixture of grain, trail mix, chocolate-covered almonds, used cooking oil, fudge icing, marshmallows.

The air is redolent with the unlikely mixture, the aroma promising contented bellies.

Almost always, it is the cub that comes first to the feast. The mother bear hangs back, circling the area, rising up on a fallen log, nose in the air, scenting, always scenting, testing for anything out of the ordinary.

As the little one all but disappears into the barrel, bear bottom in the air, mother huffs softly and woofs and clacks her jaws, assuring her baby — and warning anything or anybody inclined to bring harm — that she’s nearby.

While the youngster tucks in, the mother continues her patrols — momentarily breaking to eat, slurping at the pool of oil under the barrel, lapping at a fudge pail, but never for long.

As it happens, she is wise this particular June evening to be wary.

Overhead, seven metres up in the trees, harnessed and belted to a hunt stand, is a man dressed head to toe in camouflage, the cover so convincing that birds occasionally land on him.

The tree is downwind from the old drum and, he hopes, the hunt stand has lifted him and his human scent above detection by the mother bear’s continual sniffing.

In his hands is a crossbow. It can fire arrows at better than 120 metres a second.

When Glenn Rivard, president since March of the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters, shows up to spend the day explaining the rationale for the provincial government’s recent reinstatement of the controversial spring bear hunt on a trial basis — it began on May 1 and runs until Sunday, June 15 — there are massive muddy pawprints all over his Ford F-150, marks left the day before by a curious black bear.

“They don’t leave much alone when they come around,” laughs Rivard. But this visit was less costly than others. “I’ve had them bust the mirrors off.”

Since the cancellation of the hunt in 1999 by the PC government of former premier Mike Harris, the black bear population has significantly increased, Rivard says, and nuisance complaints have skyrocketed.

Bears in backyards, bending saplings. Bears in garages or plaguing municipal dumps. And whatever the numbers, they are probably on the low side, he says.

Since not much tends to happen when complaints are lodged, other perhaps than a warning by the Ministry of Natural Resources to hide garbage and barbeques away more diligently, some people in the north have stopped complaining.

“There’s almost an underground movement — ‘shoot, shovel and shut up,’ ” he says. “That means people are taking care of the problem themselves. And that’s a terrible form of wildlife management.”

With the growth in population, bears have been forced to find new turf. “One of the markers of growing populations of any species is expanded range,” he continues. “We know by that alone that the bear population has increased.”

When Premier Kathleen Wynne’s government announced in early April the six-week pilot project for the spring hunt this year and next (open only to Ontario residents for now), concern about “public safety and human-bear conflicts” was cited as the chief reason.

“When I was growing up in Guelph, it was unfathomable that you’d see a bear around,” says Rivard. Now, it’s not uncommon to have bear sightings in southern Ontario and bears show up in towns and suburbs. Through that proximity, he says, they are losing their fear of people.

“If you go back pre-1999, (a bear attack on humans) was a very, very rare thing. And last year there were several in Ontario.”

Beyond the threat to public safety, the cancellation of the hunt has had enormous economic consequences to regions of the province that were already struggling, Rivard says.

Up in northwestern Ontario, the decline in the pulp and paper sector has wiped out jobs and caused a population exodus from some communities. People have pieced together livelihoods from various types of seasonal work. The spring bear hunt provided a shoulder season between winter and summer outfitting. But the scrapping of the hunt wiped out traffic from the U.S. that brought significant tourist money to the region.

“A lot of outfitters didn’t survive those years,” says Rivard, who calls the cancellation a triumph of politics over biology and a victory for misinformed urban animal-rights activists.

Rivard is a strong and weathered 60. His clothes, boots, truck, home and hunt camp are all made for function, not form.

In many ways, in fact, he is a man who illustrates the fault line in Ontario between urban and rural people and culture — a rift that has recently seen a government elected in the province without a single seat outside of cities.

Up where Rivard has lived since leaving Guelph to attend Lakehead University, marrying and raising two sons and working 35 years for Ontario Hydro before retiring last year, life is more visceral than virtual. In the north, people make livings more in the actual than the abstract.

Human existence is necessarily more entwined with nature and landscape. Sensibilities are more attuned to the natural world, the changing seasons and the remorseless and unsentimental circle of life.

Here, the creatures of the forest and the waters tend to be seen as they are — not in the anthropomorphic manner of Disney and the lucrative world of animation.

“We view (killing a bear) as a harvest from the forest,” Rivard says. “The same as picking blueberries, something that we’re harvesting from the forest.”

Such matter-of-factness — in fact life as lived by many in rural parts of Ontario — is faintly repulsive to some in a condescending south.

On their side of the great divide, people engage with nature by kissing dolphins on Caribbean vacations, by taking selfies in front of caged polar bears at zoos. Ontario’s black bears are regarded as kin of the Berenstains or Winnie the Pooh of bedtimes stories — not as a threat to children as they wait for the school bus at the end of a rural lane.

If the city and country, north and south, are unlikely ever to meet, Rivard thinks it nevertheless couldn’t hurt if people had a better understanding of the spring bear hunt, what it means and how it’s conducted.

Licences are required to shoot bears. It’s mandatory to report the killing of one. It’s illegal to shoot a mother with cubs. It’s illegal to leave game meat to spoil. It’s illegal to sell it or other animal parts. Most hunters, he says, are scrupulous about meeting regulations. And most game killed by hunters is used.

He would like opponents of the bear hunt to understand that bears are a sustainable resource and that the hunt is a needed management tool and has little impact on cub survival rates. “In some cases, it’s quite the opposite where we’re harvesting bears that would potentially kill cubs themselves.”

As it turns out, a car will take you only so far on a trip to the hunt camp of Glenn and Debbie Rivard in Forbes Township. His truck continues on roads where cars can’t. Then it’s onto ATVs for a bone-jarring run over trails of rocks, fallen trees and, in this late spring, sections of squelching mud and calf-deep puddles.

The Rivard camp is a ramshackle collection of buildings, remote enough to receive few drop-in visitors. “It’s not a cottage in Muskoka,” he laughs. Some of these buildings carry evidence of recent bear visits — the piece of door yanked off the privy, the torn wall of a shed.

Once, Rivard says, a particularly persistent bear was trying to get into the camp (as northerners call their cottages), pushing on the front door until his son fired a warning shot an inch or two above its head and sent it packing.

For now, Rivard runs three bear bait sites on his property and has cameras with motion sensors mounted on trees to see who’s been visiting.

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Now and then, touring the sites, he stops his ATV to point out bear tracks in the mud, fresh scat, the claw marks on trees where dominant males standing to full height have declared themselves — “I’m this big, just so you know.” (If they return to find marks higher up the tree, they know they’ve been called and raised.)

The hunt stands are usually set up near swamps or waterways, which bears tend to patrol because of the abundance there of vegetation and other prey such as beaver.

At the sites, Rivard has been regularly replenishing the barrels before the berry crops come in, hoping to make the sites regular stops on a bear’s foraging travels.

If the log or board he’s laid at the barrel opening — something heavy enough that only a bear could move it — has been shifted, he knows that bears have visited a site. “When he smells that bait, he’s not going to take no for an answer.” If the bait has been hit, there’s some refilling to do.

Up in a hunt stand, hunters can spend more than five hours staying as motionless and silent as possible. To some degree, it’s like fishing. Just because you bait a hook doesn’t mean you’ll catch a fish.

“A bear is as wary a game animal as a big buck will ever be,” Rivard says. “They’ve got a better feel of where you are than you do of them.”

But the time waiting can bring peace and periods of contemplation, a capacity for getting comfortable with one’s self and surroundings — something that’s all part of the experience for hunters.

Rivard says he’s read a lot of books sitting up in the trees. He feels privileged, while waiting, to have seen a lot of things most people never will in the bush. For example, otters playing with each other, catching fish and hauling them up on a bank to eat.

Baiting generally provides a better shot, he says, allowing for a quick kill rather than the mere injuring of the animal. And contrary to allegations that the shooting of mother bears regularly leaves orphans to a cruel end, Rivard says baiting enables hunters to have the bear come close enough to make sure it’s male or, if it’s female, that it’s alone and without cubs.

Almost without fail, he says, the cubs show up first. When they do, “you know you’re in for an experience. But it’s a different experience. It’s an experience just to be there and witness that.”

Rivard and the federation are optimistic that the two-year pilot project will lead to reinstatement of the spring hunt, especially since this year’s has already survived a court challenge from the Animal Alliance of Canada and Zoocheck Canada.

Other northern municipalities, outside the eight wildlife management areas where it’s taking place, have already been clamouring for inclusion, he says. And opening the hunt to people from out of province would provide a much-needed tourism boost to the local economy.

Those who might be quick to caricature Rivard after a glimpse at his “FATGUY1” (he isn’t) licence plates, his camo-covered car seats or the wild turkey feathers mounted on the window of his truck would get a lot wrong.

Around his 160-acre hunt camp, Rivard sets out specially designed habitat for pine marten, the better to help females nest. “We try to look after what lives here as well.”

When he notices his Beagle pup Trouble tiring on a trail, he stops the ATV to scoop the dog into his arms and give it a ride.

The sauna is sourced off rainfall collected in 100-gallon tanks — the only real way to keep clean out where there’s no water.

There is about him a quiet quality of competence, self-reliance, self-sufficiency. In many ways, he is probably a better steward of his environment than some of those who would be quickest to condemn his hunting.

But in the north, where they feel under-represented, neglected and misunderstood, that’s long been the way of things.

As a woman working the counter at Larry’s Bait Shop in Kakabeka Falls says, “they make the rules down where they don’t have bears.”

At their home outside Kakabeka Falls, just west of Thunder Bay, the Rivards have built their own butcher shop, equipped with a band saw for heavy cutting and a grinder to make hamburger. The butchering is done by Debbie Rivard, who learned the trade from a couple of local pros.

“Most of the meat on our table comes from the forest,” says Glenn, who also hunts deer and moose and traps pine marten, fisher and beaver in winter.

Debbie says, “I couldn’t tell you the last time I bought beef, it’s been that many years. I look at the price once in a while and giggle and walk by.”

In the cooler, kept at 0 to 5C, hangs a black bear harvested five days earlier by their son Doug. He got it with a single cedar arrow shot from a longbow at about 8 o’clock in the morning, then eviscerated it in the field, leaving about 50 lbs. of innards to the pleasures of other creatures before hauling the carcass on an ATV back to a truck.

By 3 p.m., it was hanging head down, great forepaws dangling, a touch under 300 lbs., in the Rivard cooler, where it will age for about three weeks before being butchered (the family says bear meat is gamey but good).

“There is a sense of pride in being able to do it hands-on from forest to table,” Glenn says. “It’s unfortunate today that so much of our society is so far removed from what actually happens (in producing their food).”

There is a ritual in the Rivard family. They usually pour small shots of whiskey after a successful hunt. Then they toast nature’s bounty and offer “respect for this animal’s life.”

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Ontario is right to bring back partial spring bear hunt: Editorial