I have a Russian friend. It’s similar with bears, there. I can’t remember the exact Russian term but it they don’t say the word bear. They call them ‘knowers of honey’.

Having worked in the boreal for a decade, they are on to something in my mind. I was highly superstitious about bears. You weren’t allowed to say the word unless you saw one on my crew. I swear to fuck, the bastards could hear you talking about them.

We had this one summer student who called them bitches. I adopted that so fucking fast. It was really versatile.

'I hope there are no bitches in these woods!

I saw a huge bitch over by site 0195, keep your eyes open!

I have quite a few stories.

One time I was on a mine, working between an overburden dump (big pile of waste material) and the main site road in this wedge of trees. The wedge was about 2 km long, by about 800 m wide in the middle. I was right at the top of the thing, so maybe 400 m in either direction and I’m out.

Anyway, I’ve got my head down digging, and my partner is entering data, so neither of us are looking around for bitches. I start to backfill my pit, and I look up and here is this fucking bitch, just outside of bearspray range, licking his chops and chuffing at us.

Me: “BEAR!”

Partner: “Whaugh! Wow! That bear has a long tongue!”

Me:‘seriously?! That the first thing you’re thinking?!’

We yell at this fucking bitch and he’s not having it. Just keeps moving towards us slowly. I’m ready to spray this fucker, but really didn’t want to do the paper work, so we slowly start backing out of the bush. He escorts us out of the bush and we get back into the truck, safely, and then proceed to metaphorically change our pants.