“Consolation”, that’s what Catholics call it when God gives you a small, unexpected gift that renews your faith. I’ve heard Protestants call the same phenomenon “Tender Mercies”. The wife and I received a Consolation the other day, in the most charming way. First, I need to tell you a story. Behind my house is a forest and in the forest are critters. The biggest critters are bears and they wander through the yard in a perpetual search for food. By nature, these bears either ignore or avoid humans . Except for mean old males and mothers with cubs, they aren’t aggressive, just shy and hungry.
One mother bear has a litter of cubs every other year and this is the third litter we’ve watched her raise. They’re friendly and cute but if you pet one you deserve your fate as the mothers are protective. Hug an adorable cub and your next memory will be the operating room and the surgeon saying “He’s lost a lot of blood but I think we can reconstruct his face”. If you watch the National Geographic TV channel, on a program named “Animal Extractors”, you’ll see footage of this particular mother bear and her two cubs, filmed early this Summer in my neighborhood. In late Summer disaster struck.
In September, the mother bear was hit by a car and her front leg broken. Without the bone being set and a cast, broken legs don’t heal. The mother is a tough animal and she hobbled around on three legs slowly, getting scruffier like a mongrel dog as the weeks passed. From experience, we could see the cubs were becoming underweight. Cubs have a 50% mortality rate their first year and by autumn they weren’t fattening up to hibernate. Their behavior became more desperate as they came into the garage and house when we weren’t looking. We made a decision to break the rule “Don’t feed the bears” and show mercy to this family by feeding them. Nevada has no law against feeding the bears but it’s inadvisable.
I took the hungry cubs and mother buckets of dog kibbles and cooked them a mix of lard, sugar, bird seed and black sunflower seeds which they devoured. Bears need to eat 20,000 calories a day in preparation to hibernate. I went through a 50-lb. bag of dog food and 10 lbs of sunflower seeds a day for a month. The mother’s coat got shinier and the cubs started gaining weight. We saw them play again instead of the hobbling, desperate, roaming behavior they exhibited for the six weeks after the mother broke her leg. We saw the cubs swinging in our hammock and standing up to gently swat our wind chimes and listen to the sound. We knew they had turned the corner and could now gain enough weight to successfully hibernate through the winter. This was probably the mother’s last year but the cubs had a chance to survive.
Then on Tuesday the mother showed up for breakfast with the sister cub, but the brother cub was absent. This was the first time we didn’t see the three of them together all year. After about 15 minutes my wife suspected the worst, the male cub had died. She became sad, then almost distraught, talking quietly to God: “You take care of the sparrows and know when even one falls, please help this little cub. We have worked so hard to save him.” Another half hour passed and both of us felt the weak incapacity that we experienced as each of our three dogs died last year and we could not save them.
Then came the Consolation, the Tender Mercy we have not seen before or since. The male cub showed up and started to eat. Then three more cubs and their mother appeared. The cubs all climbed nearby trees and the mother peeked over a log. About 40 yards away, high in a tree, we saw a 4-year-old young male in a tree. He was the first litter of this same mother, in 2003-4. So standing on our deck we could see in one vista 8 bears, 4 in trees, all looking at us. The message came to us both: “Yes, I care for all these bears. I created them and they are mine. Be not afraid, the hairs on your head are numbered and you are mine.” We were overwhelmed with gratitude and relief. Within an hour the others had left and our little family of one crippled mother bear and her cubs were relaxing under the tree, noodling together. They were at peace and so were we.