Pass Bears
Pass bears are the black bears of the Headwater mountain forest. They are smaller than the brown bears of the Elderweald and much bolder, and they have learned the roads. Each autumn they come to the walled waystations between the foothill towns, where stores, fodder, and the escort’s food are kept, and break in if they can. Ogre bands working the winter roads drive them off.
Appearance
A pass bear on all fours stands as high as a Human’s waist and is about as heavy as two large men. It is glossy black, sometimes cinnamon-brown, with a paler brown muzzle and often a pale blaze on the chest. Its face is straighter than a brown bear’s, its ears larger, and it has no shoulder hump. Its claws are short and curved, made for climbing.
It climbs trees easily and fast, walks flat-footed with a shuffling roll, and runs faster than a Human. It huffs, moans, and clacks its jaws when uneasy. A raided store smells of bear for a season.
Habitat and Range
Pass bears live in the mountain forest of the Headwater Marches and on the verges of the Ironspine, wherever there are woods with nuts, berries, and roads to rob.
Behaviour and Temperament
A pass bear eats berries, nuts, roots, grubs, honey, carrion, and anything people leave. It is clever and learns where food is kept: which waystation has a weak door, which caravan camps late, which town throws its rubbish outside the wall. In autumn, fattening for winter, it is at its boldest. It usually runs from people who stand their ground and shout, but a bear that has learned people mean food grows dangerous, and a sow with cubs is always dangerous.
Life Cycle
Cubs are born in the winter den, two or three, and stay with their mother through the next year. Pass bears may live twenty years.
Uses and Dangers
They give fur, fat, and meat. Their cost is the waystation broken into, the stores eaten or spoiled, a pack animal killed, and now and then a guard mauled defending the stores. Waystations are walled in part against them, and their keepers bar the doors at night in autumn.
Lore and Belief
Ogre crews that keep the winter roads open say a pass bear is a thief that respects size, and they drive bears off with noise, fire, and their own bulk; an Ogre who has turned a bear from a waystation tells of it for years. Headwater keepers say a bear that comes back to the same waystation three autumns running has made itself a member of the road and should be killed before it brings its cubs. Some carters leave a little food out at the roadside to keep the bears from the wagons, which teaches them the opposite.
A bear that has learned to break into waystations is hunted by the whole road, and a hunter who brings in its pelt drinks free at every waystation from the basin edge to the Ironspine gates for a winter.