Hal Morrison

SH: So, did you get the boat started?
Hal: Well eventually we did. We had an ax on board and we thought we’ll just chop through it, but this was easier said than done. This was a hard old chunk of wood, and it was difficult to chop too. It was moving and bouncing as the boat was being pushed by the river back and forth. It was a dynamic situation; we’re not just sitting there skewered. The boat is moving around on the sweeper. We figured out that the fuel solenoid was pooched and the engine wasn’t getting gas. What had happened was the solenoid that allows you to select the left gas tank or the right tank, it had shorted out and it had gone to the centre position where it didn’t allow you to draw gas from either tank. So, hurry up and bypass the solenoid and got her started and managed to wiggle ourselves off that freaking thing. Then we headed back down the river.
In Cape Breton Highlands we had a 17 feet Boston Whaler with a 60 horse on it. DFO called us up one day and wanted us to assist with some pilot whales that had beached themselves on a beach on Cheticamp Island. Their boat was too big; they couldn’t get into the shallows. So, we said “Absolutely, sure, we’ll give you a hand.” Pilot whales are one of the smaller whales, but a big adult is likely a ton, maybe more. We go over there and it was quite a commotion. There were maybe fifty whales in the shallows and three of them were dead up on the shore and they were in a real state of disarray. They didn’t appear to know what to do or what was going on.
We arrived and tried to decide what we could do to help, and somebody came up with the idea that let’s pick out the largest live whale and tie a harness on it, and we’ll hook onto it and pull it out and maybe with some pushing the rest will follow.
So, we did that …. We found the biggest whale and rigged up this harness and line and tied it to the back of the boat. Jennifer Hoffman was with me in the boat, and I could see the way this might play out. It might work or it might not, but my concern was what if this whale didn’t want to be towed and we end up in a tug-of-war, I wasn’t sure that our boat would win that tug-of-war, and I didn’t want to be towed back under, by the whale trying to go back to its buddies. So anyways I said “Jennifer, you go to the back of the boat and hang out there with your knife and if we get into a big tug-of-war and we start getting down into the water, I’ll give you a yell and then you cut that rope, and get us out of this”. So, she goes to the back of the boat, and of course now film crews start showing up, and they’re filming all these whales on the shore, but then they see something more exciting, us trying to tow one out. So, we have all these cameras on us, and we start pulling the whale off while people on the beach pushed. It didn’t go too bad for a while until this whale realized it was being pulled away from its compadres. The compadres didn’t want to follow it anyways, but now it really wanted to go back to the beach. We’re getting in a bit of a tug-of-war but things still weren’t dicey yet. We’re moving back and forth, and spitting up lots of water, and the whale has now turned itself sideways. The back end of the boat is sucking down a bit, and by now Jennifer is breathing lots of two stroke engine fumes, lots of blue smoke, and the boat is kind of bucking and moving and she’s starting to feel pretty ill, and it’s about this time that the whale is starting to win the tug of war. So, I said “Jennifer, I don’t think we can win this. Just cut the rope.” But by now she’s feeling pretty ill and she’s heaving over the side and all this is taking place on camera, and I’m thinking “Oh man, this is not going to look good”, Anyway Jennifer got the rope cut and the whale went back onto the beach in kamikaze mode. Once she cut the rope, we rocketed out of the hole we had created like a racehorse out of the starting gate. So we went back to the beach and decided that wasn’t worth repeating. New plan, tie up one of the dead whales. So, we tied up the biggest dead whale. There was a bunch of people on the beach, so they helped push it into the water, and we tied it up the same way, but this time the whale was dead so it wasn’t going to fight us. So, we towed it out and with a lot of people pushing a lot of whales the rest of the pod did follow it out. It was quite interesting. We towed it probably two miles out into the ocean and they were still very stressed and disorganized and vocalizing, and milling around in a big bunch but we did get them off the beach, other than the remaining two dead ones. Anyways, we cut the rope and the dead one headed down into the depths, and this pod of very disorganized whales went milling off down the coast, and they didn’t end up on another beach that DFO knew about. We assumed that one of the whales had taken leadership and they started to get it together.
SH: That’s fascinating Hal.
Hal: It was truly an interesting one. In Lake Louise, I got called to the Mountaineer Hotel, and dispatch said “There’s a staff member there that has an issue with a woodpecker.” Well, that’s run of the mill, so l go talk to this lady about this woodpecker and see what’s up. At the front desk there’s this young Japanese girl there and her English is very limited. I said, “You guys have an issue with a woodpecker?” And she says “Ya, it’s mean at the staff residence.” So I said “Okay, what’s going on?” and she said “Early morning, every morning, I trying to sleep but this wooden pecker is hammering away at me, my building, this wooden pecker.” There are other people in the lobby and we’re starting to get some pretty odd looks. It was pretty funny at the time. This was a very determined woodenpecker, the staff residence was peppered with holes. We tried a bunch of different things. We put up a plastic owl and it attacked the owl, pecked a hole through it. So we tried a whole bunch of different things. CD’s sparkling in the sunlight on a piece of string, this and that. Chicken wire …. there was nothing that was going to deter this wooden pecker and I’d almost come to the realization but there was no way I wanted to shoot the thing. But it was doing a lot of damage and a lot of people were trying to sleep through this, but then it just took off. So that one was out of the ordinary, …. this wooden pecker that was hammering away and wouldn’t let her sleep.
SH: Great story. I like it. Okay Hal you have to tell one bear story at least. (Tape 54:02)
Hal: Okay so, a sow grizzly bear, I can’t remember her name or number, but she’d been runover on the railway or the highway, and her cubs, they were yearlings, cubs of last year I believe, they may have even been two years old. They were in tight, close around Lake Louise and they didn’t have the sow to guide them. The potential for them to get into trouble was high and I wanted to get a collar on them. So, I set up some culvert traps, and we were successful in trapping one. The other one was very shy of the culvert traps and wouldn’t come near it. So, we processed the one cub and got a radio tracking device on it, and the other cub we could see it lurking in the bush. Every now and again it would peek out, maybe 70 meters away. There was just no way it was going to go anywhere near those culvert traps. It would have been difficult to snare it. So, I thought we’re here right now and the sibling is the most important thing in the world to it right now, so let’s just put the immobilized cub out in the bush a bit, a little way away in the trees, and I’ll see if I can free range dart it. Anyways, it did work. The other cub came out to see its sibling, and we got the dart into it. So, I said “That first cub is getting a little bit long on the tranquilization. It’s been an hour now, so let’s just grab it and run it back to the trap, put it in the trap because I don’t want this thing recouping as we’re working on the other bear.” So, we go to grab the cub and it kind of jumps up in a drunken fashion and stumbles and looks at us. I thought “Oh no here we go.” I’m trying to get a snare on it so we can tow it back to the culvert trap and put it in there. Jimmy Mamalis and Pat Langin are kind of backing away a bit, one of them is my safety with the shotgun but I can see they’re kind of laughing, like this is funny. I can’t get the snare on this cub and now it starts to chase me. So, this 90 pound grizzly bear cub has come around enough that it’s able to run in a semi coordinated fashion, and so I’m running around the culvert trap, and it’s chasing me and the only thing that’s keeping me ahead is when I’m jumping over the hitch. It had trouble jumping that hurdle. I wasn’t in serious danger from this whacked out cub, but I didn’t want to get bit. I had a snare pole in the back of the truck, and as I ran around the truck and the trap I managed to grab the snare pole and jumped up on top of the trap, the bear wasn’t sure where I had disappeared to, so I was able to lean over, and get this snare over its head so then I could wrangle it into the trap. That was a chore too, trying to wrangle it into the trap. You got to get some humor out of some situations and that one, Jim and Pat thought, was their opportunity.
I’ll finish off with an elk story. There was an elk running around Field with all these Christmas lights in its antlers. He was very decorative. But there was another one, this cow elk had been … it was springtime in Field and the snow was starting to melt. Right around the buildings, hard against the sides of the building, the snow had melted right out and there’s shoots of green grass and stuff. She’s working along the edge of the building and nibbling the green grass and tulips, but there was a bike leaning against it. She put her head through the yoke of the bike to nibble at whatever greenery there was, and when she lifts her head up, the bike hits her on the top of the head and the frame slides down her neck. So anyways here’s she’s got this bike around her neck and she’s not happy. She’s running around town, dancing around on her back feet and whacking this bike with her front feet and trying to get it off. I’m getting calls from everybody. So, I’m driving around town but could never catch up to her. I was just going to try to dart her and get the bike off her neck. Anyways, finally someone said “They’re down at the Field flats, there’s a herd down there.” So, I head down there. There’s probably about 20 elk there and I glass them over and I don’t see any bike. So, I start walking towards them and here’s the bike on the edge of the flats, all beat up. The rims are bent, the fork is bent so this must be the bike. I’m looking at the herd and it looks like everybody is in pretty good shape. I can’t figure out which one had the bike around her neck. So, I picked up the bike and one elk out of the herd went screaming off down the river flats like the hounds of hell were on her heels, so I knew which one it was. There was nothing wrong with her. She was running well.

SH: You mentioned black bear. Let’s hear the black bear one.
Hal: Well, there was the black bear in Field. I got to take a second to tease two stories apart because I think I’m mixing two up. So, this resident of Field, she got a couple of crates of peaches, and she’d been cooking up peach pies. She had cooked up a huge, big whack of pies and she was putting them in her freezer, and her freezer was in kind of a root cellar underneath the garage. This black bear had smelled all these pies and had managed to get in. I think the door was open, but it had gone in and peeled back the freezer lid and helped himself to a few of these pies. So, I came over there, and I was talking to the lady, she said, “It scared the hell out of me. I went back in to clean up the mess after I discovered this, and I turned around and here in the doorway is this damn black bear again, right in the middle of the doorway and he wants in to get more peach pies”. She didn’t want to be stuck in there with him so she’s screaming and grabbing things out of the freezer and hucking them at him, and she’s beaning him, with frozen pork chops and stuff and finally he grabs something and heads off and now we’ve got a bear that’s convinced he’s found Shangri-La, and he’s going to be a pest. He’s going to be back there for sure. So I pulled in a culvert trap and baited it up with my best half rotten moose meat. I said to Ester, “I’m sure he’ll be back tonight. Let’s board up the cold room.” The freezer by then had been offloaded. So, in the middle of the night, she gives me a call and says “He’s back and he won’t go in your culvert trap.”
So, I go over there and Ester was by the door, and she has the door open just a little crack, and says “He’s there.” She is whispering. There was no way he was going in that culvert trap. Rotten moose meat is not nearly as good as peach pies so I said to Esther “Well the only way we’re going to get him is to trap him with peach pies. I’m going to need two peach pies from you.” So she gives me two peach pies and I baited up the trap with one, and I got him almost right away. He couldn’t wait to get into the trap and as luck would have it, I still had one peach pie to take home. We ended up calling that bear, because back then bears all got names, that bear was called “peaches and scream”.

SH: Wow, love it.
Hal: Yes, good fun. Then we had another one where somebody had left a half-eaten hamburger in their vehicle and the window was down a couple of inches. He put his claws in and managed to break the window, and went in and got half a Big Mac. It seems he thought this was just the best thing and all cars must be full of Big Macs, because later that night, or maybe that was the next night he broke into seven vehicles. There was quite a bit of damage and in Sophie’s car he managed to eat half of a headrest off a seat of the vehicle. The long and tortured story involved relocating the bear. Back when we thought catching them and moving them was a viable solution. But it wasn’t. weeks later he arrived at the O’Hara parking lot, and he was breaking into vehicles. We caught him again and moved him again and then I caught him a third time and shot him. Anyhow I skinned him out and had him stuffed and he was in the Yoho Info Centre, and may still be, with his complete story of how he got into trouble and why he ended up being destroyed.
SH: Got any more?
Hal: Let me see … in Cape Breton, one of the things we used to do in fall time or early winter, is we would set out pickets to try catch poachers. We had some night vision gear and a couple of wardens would go out to a likely spot. We’d turn the lights out in the truck and drive with the night vision gear on,( but we only had one pair, so the passenger was petrified driving at speed in the dark) Then one person would get dropped off at a spot, and would sit and listen , and the person with the night vision gear in the truck would go back to another spot and go hide the truck and go sit, listen and look. So anyways, Randy and Jennifer are heading up North Mountain, doing one of these poaching patrols, the pickets, and they stopped into our station and were having a coffee with me and Janice. It was dark enough out, so they decided to head up to North Mountain and I think Jennifer was driving and she was going to drop off Randy. So, she was driving along, and I can’t quite remember what happened but the night vision gear had cut out or something to that effect. But by the time she managed to get stopped, she ran full on into a moose, in the middle of the road, with no lights on. So anyways, I get a radio call and she doesn’t want to say much on the radio because she wasn’t too happy about what had transpired, so she said “Hal, we’ve got a situation up here, get up here and bring a gun.” I thought they had got into a jackpot and were having some safety issues. So, I grabbed guns and raced up there at top speed, not sure what to expect. In the headlights I see the truck and it’s got a crumpled front end and a moose that has by now died. “Well anyways, let’s just push the moose to the side of the road here and deal with it in the morning, and we pulled the truck to a pull off and headed back down to the station. We had a de-brief and off we went and had a nice sleep. The next morning, we thought we’d winch the moose into the back of the truck and to the carrion pit it. We headed up there and where the moose was supposed to be there was a gut pile and a head. That one just did not turn out. There was no way you could put a positive spin on any aspect.
SH: Well, I guess he was already dead, that’s the positive spin.
Hal: There you go. (Tape 1:11:05)