The Kiwi, the Bear, and the Dog

Facing Violence

A Kiwi and a Gun

Long ago, during one of her pre-immigration visits to the United States, I took novelist Phillipa Ballantine to the shooting range. She’s from New Zealand, a country in which guns are heavily regulated and the average person doesn’t get any experience whatsoever with them. She was writing an action novel at the time, and had realized that some first-hand experience with weapons would not go amiss.

Pip isn’t a woman of impressive stature. I don’t quite scrape six feet and am the shortest dude in my family, but Pip looks like a hobbit standing next to me. She’s got a spitfire attitude most of the time, but when the weapons came out, she visibly quailed. She wasn’t the first “I don’t like guns” person I’d taught to handle weapons, and on a previous occasion one of my students had broken down crying and dropped a weapon like a hot rock after firing the first shot, so I was expecting the worst. So, for safety, I started Pip off on a rented weapon instead of risking one of mine.

As she squared off against her first target, Pip raised a 5-inch .38 Special revolver into the Weaver stance, squeezed the trigger, and...whooped! Her face lit up with pure elation. She cheered with every shot she fired for the first twenty rounds. The flush of excitement on her face and neck were what one would expect if she’d just stepped off a roller-coaster.

Just goes to show, you can never really tell how someone will react to their first taste of explosive violence.

The Bear and the Dog that Bit Him

For six weeks after I moved up to my secret lair on top of a mountain, I was alone. It was just me and the RV I was sleeping in. There was nobody else around for almost a mile in any direction.

But there was some pretty gnarly wildlife.

Camping situations in rugged mountains have a few basic protocols, especially around food waste disposal. The most important rule is don’t put the food waste anywhere near camp. Food waste attracts coyotes, cougars, and especially bears, all of which are dangerous and two of which will eat you if you scare them in the wrong way (coyotes generally won’t attack a human unless rabid or cornered, and will almost never kill a human).

The problem with bears, though, is that even the wimpy ones are strong. And, at least in the California mountains where I learned my bear protocols, they know about things like freezers, coolers, cars, and RVs. They know these things contain food, and they know that they can rip into them with ease.

I slept with one eye open next to a loaded gun, and covered the ground around the RV with empty cans.

On the fifth night, after a long day of building a shed and a bunch of workbenches for what would become my shop, I roasted myself a steak on a little outdoor wood stove, and went to bed at around ten o’clock.

But I forgot to burn the steak’s wrapper.

At midnight, I sat bolt upright in bed. Something had crinkled. A moment later, something else crinkled.

Then something knocked the little wood stove over.

I cautiously grabbed my weapon and peered out the window.

There was a bear out there, a big black shadow against the moonless night landscape, and he was right next to my RV door rooting around on the ground. The RV door opened outwards, so I couldn’t actually open it without interrupting the bear’s dinner. I had no clear shot (not that it would have been legal to shoot it before it charged me, but the adrenaline was going hard by this point and I didn’t consider that aspect).

I sat down on the floor and shook.

I tried to wait the bear out, but it wasn’t going away. Now that it knew about human food, it was investigating everything, including snuffling at my windows and doors. It was, I was sure, only a matter of moments before it decided to tear through my walls. I knew that if I could get up the nerve to bust open the door and shout and shoot at the ground, it would run off, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. So I called a distant neighbor and asked him to come over.

Fifteen minutes later he and a friend pulled up in his truck and jumped out loaded for bear (literally).

The bear bugged out.

I’ve been in a lot of violent and dangerous situations, but being trapped behind that door took the fight right out of me.

A year later, with my family on site, I awoke in the gray hours of morning to a bark from the dog. Looking out the window, I saw the bear again. He was huge. Four hundred pounds or more, stood taller than me on his hind legs. He wasn’t taking any interest in my dog’s warning barks—and my dog wasn’t attacking, because she’s been trained not to unless ordered.

In fifteen seconds, I was up, armed, sandals on my feet, and out the door. I ran straight at the bear, shouting at it to bug out. It retreated in a direction I didn’t like, so I told the dog to attack it.

Every time we advanced, it retreated, but just enough that it could get back into camp pretty damn fast. We wound up chasing it almost half a mile before it finally got a clue, turned tail, and retreated for good.

At which point I realized that the sun was up, and I was a half-mile from home in the deep forest, and I was armed. I was also dressed in sandals and nothing else. I made a very scratch-filled (and, I assume, utterly ridiculous-looking) hike back through the forest to home base, and wondered all the way:

A year before, I’d been scared enough that I phoned a friend to help scare off a bear rooting around in my trash.

That morning, I’d run out naked to face an already-angry creature that could literally disembowel me with a slap.

Was I just braver from having been in the wilderness for a year?

I doubted it. Nothing in the wilderness is scarier than being shot at, and I’ve been on the wrong end of a shooting a couple times.

So what had changed?

I wasn’t sure.

I hadn’t thought, I’d just done. It was as automatic as reaching out to snatch the shirt of a friend who was about to fall over a cliff’s edge (that’s a whole other story). Was the difference because I’d had time to think?

No, that couldn’t be it. I had snapped into reckless action the moment I saw the bear. On the previous occasion, I’d gotten cautious when I saw the bear.

One thing was different, though.

When it was just me, protecting my own ass was my only priority. With my family here, I was the lowest priority. I would run out into traffic to push them clear of a bus, of course I’d run out in front of a bear to keep them from being attacked.

Context matters.

The Human Response to Violence

As pointed out by Rory Miller in his excellent book Meditations on Violence, while some training programs are more effective than others, training for violence doesn’t actually prepare you for violence. You literally never know how you’ll react to being attacked, to being in mortal danger, to nearly skidding over the edge of a cliff , until you’re actually there. That’s because, deep within our physiology are a set of instincts for self-preservation—in the heat of the moment we fight, we flee, or we freeze, and then, in the aftermath, we either fall apart, settle down quietly, or get insanely sexually aroused (this too is a survival instinct and very well documented among soldiers. The stories I’ve heard from veterans would leave your jaw on the floor).

But not all of us fight, or freeze, or flee at the same stimulus. Different aftermaths trigger different reaction, and all of these emerge in response to violence and danger per se (i.e. witnessing it, inflicting it, or having it inflicted upon you), not just to being under threat.

Once you’ve been under fire of a given sort in a given context (say, being shot at, or chasing a shoplifter, or facing down a wild animal) you know how you’ll react to that danger. That reaction doesn’t necessarily translate to other dangers. I’ve watched dashcam footage of a twenty-year police veteran, with his gun drawn and held on a suspect, go into a speech loop while the suspect calmly walked towards him, picked up a shotgun, and blew the cop’s head off at point blank range. I’ve also seen footage of a teeny old woman beat the living fuck out of a twenty-something prison-tattooed purse snatcher after he punched her in the face.

Humans will run or freeze when we think we might survive that way. And we will kill and maim and become utterly reckless when we believe, down in our bones, that there is no other option. But where that breaking point lies varies by person and situation, and you can’t easily predict it in advance.

So when I hear tales of a still-bleeding Teddy Roosevelt laughing and taunting the guy who shot him, or see the video of Trump standing up after being shot and pumping his fist and screaming “Fight! Fight! Fight!”, I don’t find it particularly startling.

But what I do find startling is the reactions I see on the Internet from all quarters, expressing some form of “Why would someone react this way?! Is this even real?”

Yes, it’s real.

And people react this way because deep down in our primal animal selves, when there is nothing to lose, we fight. And when we win, we feel euphoria, and we want more.

We, like all animals, are creatures of violence.

And it terrifies me to know I’m living in a world where most people can’t even imagine what they’d be capable of if the bear showed up to threaten their family.

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