Forty years ago, a fellow with California plates showed up in the parking lot of a bar in McCall, Idaho, piloting a new Buick with a steaming radiator. He announced that he hit a small bear about 5 miles up the road, that he didn’t stop to lend assistance, that he desperately needed a drink to calm his nerves, and could anyone spare a clamp to fix his bottom radiator hose?

Near where the fellow had hit the bear was a small tent city in an old gravel pit, settled by working folks who could not afford to live in more conventional housing in a tourist town. A couple of these were fixtures of the bar and viewed the prospect of a wounded bear wandering around their camp as bad medicine. They ordered a case of beer to go and asked me if I wanted to tag along on a bear hunt. In those days I would have followed a case of Hamms into a leper colony.

The accident was easy to spot. A couple of hundred yards above the lake, skid marks in the southbound lane pointed directly toward where a 2-year-old black bear was curled up in the borrow pit, eyes wide open like its final wish was to catch one last glimpse of the Big Dipper.

The brew was gone before any decision was made about the disposal of the bear. One of the tent dudes remarked that a bear was his totem animal, assigned to him by his shaman in Cleveland, and that he intended to remove its claws and pay homage to the spirit of this animal by making a necklace of its fingernails. The other said that ever since childhood he had wanted a bear rug and that he was claiming dibs on the skin to make cozy floor for his tent.

I mentioned that this particular bear would probably not skin-out to much more than a bath mat and that it looked to me as though when the bear and the Buick collided that the critter’s front set of necklace charms had been broken up pretty well by Mr. Goodyear.

I also noted that Idaho Fish and Game might figure that the bear was theirs, somehow, and that the proper thing to do was to go back to the bar, use the payphone, and let them deal with the dead bear. Meanwhile, we would have a perfect opportunity to purchase more beer.

My comrades balked at this suggestion, except for the beer part. To them, what we had here was akin to finding a shipwreck. Laws applying to salvage took precedence over any arbitrary roadkill laws. The sensible thing was to reap the bounty that had fallen in our laps. We hadn’t killed the bear, after all, but had every much of a right to the spoils as did the ravens and coyotes that were bound to appear. The Cleveland Indian went to the glove box to retrieve a toad stabber that he often wore strapped to his leg.

Having spent a few winters in the high country living on mashed potatoes and elk jerky, I figured that I had a couple more chevrons on my Amateur Pathfinders uniform than two guys who were a month out of Chicago, so I pulled rank and pointed out to them that there was more than a necklace and a rug laying down there in the granite chips. I wasn’t talking of the primeval soul of a sacred beast. My concerns were more practical than that.

What about the next car that came along? Did they really want to be down in the ditch, with ridiculously long knives, bent over something about the size of their mother, smeared with blood, when a carload of tourists putted past on their scenic midnight drive? And what about the rest of the bear? Steal its coat and paws and you still had a hundred pounds of flesh left over. Were they the kind of fellows who were going to waste the chance for a roasted bear party?

I proposed to help them to load the critter in the back of their rig if they would take me back to town so I could get my old Ford stock truck and at least a case of beer, then we would convoy back to their camp where I would teach them how to butcher the bear and whatever I knew about cooking its flesh.

It took several more beer runs to get the job done. During the process the one fellow gave up on the bear rug notion when he realized that bears are prone to ticks and that our little buddy had several hundred of them burrowed into the nape of his neck and down his backbone where he couldn’t reach them. The kid from Cleveland abandoned the necklace idea when his girlfriend screamed while he was hacksawing bear knuckles.

We did have a fairly good bear feed though. I showed the city kids how to treat bear meat as though it is dark pork, how to fillet off strips of butt muscle and tenderloin and hang the strips from willow sticks over a small fire, how to roast them until very, very well done, just in case the little bear had committed suicide after discovering that bears can carry trichinosis. Personally, I’ve never really enjoyed bear meat. Tastes too much like bear.