Mama Bear Stake

When she sends them up a tree, they go up.

A black bear cub can climb before it can do much of anything else. It is the mother’s whole defense: at the first sign of trouble she puts them up the nearest trunk, and they go — small claws, quick, thirty feet in a few seconds — and they stay there, sometimes for hours, until she comes back and calls them down.

That is the arrangement in this piece. Her out front on the limb, the cubs behind her, the three of them going somewhere in single file.

They start out about the size of a squirrel. Cubs are born in January, deep in the den, while their mother is in torpor — blind, nearly hairless, well under a pound. She nurses them through the rest of winter half asleep and comes out in spring with a family. By summer they are following her everywhere, which is where most people finally see them.

Then they stay. A cub lives with its mother roughly seventeen months, through a second winter in the den, before she runs it off to make room for the next litter. It is a long apprenticeship for an animal that will spend the rest of its life alone.

People buy this one for mothers, and mothers buy it for themselves. Set it where you’ll pass it — the trunk of the tree out front, the post at the end of the drive, the side of the shed.

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