Adventures with Joanie — Horses, Bears & Varmints, Oh My!

My mom was in her 80s, still riding her horse on lumber company roads behind McKinleyville with her friend Carol Stewart, accompanied, as always, by her pack of hounds. That is, one actual hound and two small dogs who thought they were hounds. Their job was to sweep the trails for dangerous wildlife like mountain lions and bears.

One day, my mom and her horse were in the lead on a trail so narrow that the underbrush scraped their legs. Way off in the distance, the dogs howled as if they had startled some prey. Abruptly, my mom’s horse stopped: she was head-to-head with a bear.

Afterward, Mom explained that everyone did exactly what they were supposed to do in this situation. She stood up in her stirrups, waved her arms and screamed. The bear whirled away. The horse spun to escape, but it was a very tight space on the trail and branches dragged my mother off her horse. Carol picked her up, dusted her off and helped her limp home.

She only broke a rib or two, and she bore the bear no ill-will.

Joan Ruprecht liked bears. She even commissioned a sculpture from one of the chainsaw artists of Orick, who carved two handsome bears out of redwood stumps at the end of her driveway.

On a later occasion, my mom was sitting along the trail down from her house to the stream, munching wild blackberries, when she heard a kind of grunting sound. She looked over and there was a bear beside her, also munching berries.

“Well, Mr Bear,” she said companionably, “these are really your berries. I’ll just leave you in peace.”

Sometimes her kindness to animals seemed misplaced. Once, when a racoon or some varmint was eating the horsefeed from the bin, my father set a catch-and-release trap near the barn. What actually got trapped was a skunk. My mom felt the poor skunk was innocent, and so she reached down to release the latch. Of course, the skunk sprayed her directly in the face.

Blinded, she crawled with her eyes shut all the way from the barn along the gravel driveway, across the lawn and up the house steps. My father quickly put her in the shower and emptied every can of tomato juice, spaghetti sauce and V-8 from the pantry to scrub her off.

This was the only case of the tomato juice remedy actually working that I have ever heard of.

Janet Ruprecht, 69, lives on Dow’s Prairie in McKinleyville. She is still collecting stories about her irrepressible mother for a book, “Joanie Rides Again.”