Entertainment did not come easy to young men stuck in camp in the deep woods along the Alaska Highway. Edward “Whiskers” Frankenberg and his fellows found that getting bears to eat out of their hands definitely provided entertainment. Whiskers told Donna Blasor-Bernhardt about it for her book, Pioneer Road.
Link to another story “The Rude Bear”
If a camp stayed in one place for a week or more, garbage tended to accumulate. They buried it, but that didn’t fool the bears who gathered to dig it up. The men carefully avoided “alarming them” and the bears “didn’t seem afraid of us.”
Could they get the bears to eat out of their hands? “Young and foolishly brave”, they coated their hands with honey or syrup. And, sure enough, the bears would happily lick it off.
On one occasion Whiskers got himself in an awkward stance and had to lean in extra close to the bear to keep his balance. “Talk about hot bear breath! That bear could have slapped me silly…” The older Whiskers, telling Blasor-Bernhardt about it shook his head. “I sure wouldn’t feed wild bears like that now.”
The bears not only cheerfully cleaned the men’s syrupy fingers, they also developed some behavior issues among themselves. They became jealous, selfish. “If another bear came too close, the bear you were feeding would drop down and whirl around…” Sometimes they would actually fight.
Ultimately, the men took bear relations entertainment a step further. They treed a cub then cut the tree down. “The cub jumped off and ran to another tree.” They caught him after the third tree and put him in a cage, but “he looked so sad that three days later…” they turned him loose.
“By that time, he was used to us feeding him and he didn’t really care to go.”
Feeding Bears is not encouraged today