I called Jeff Gailus, the Missoula, Montana—based author of The Grizzly Manifesto and a man who can be fairly described as a grizzly historian. He put me straight in plain language: “The grizzly bear is a grasslands animal.” The first undisputed grizzly sighting by a European explorer, a man named Henry Kelsey, took place in 1691 near the location of modern-day Preeceville, Saskatchewan—a thousand kilometres east of the nearest grizzly range today, and deep in the heart of Canada’s breadbasket. Lewis and Clark saw their first grizzly tracks in 1804 in the Great Plains state of South Dakota. In their first close encounter with an adult grizzly, Clark and another member of the party shot the animal ten times, then watched as it swam half the Missouri River to a sandbar, where another twenty minutes passed before the bear was dead. “These bear being so hard to die rather intimidates us all,” Lewis wrote in his journal. The explorers were in a part of Montana now best known for its wheat fields.
Gailus’s own research into grizzly history began when he saw a rogue bear loping through the prairie of southwestern Alberta, a visual shock he compares to “a trick of the sun or a fatigue-induced dream.” To the few who keep its memory, the grasslands bear is known as the plains grizzly, though it was not a separate species. A plains grizzly was simply a grizzly bear, Ursus arctos horribilis. In fact, some of the bears in the Rocky Mountains today are thought to be descended from grassland bears that were pushed westward as the bison were wiped out and the land ploughed under. Some of the bears’ open-country traits still linger: faced with a confrontation, they don’t look for a tree to climb. They take what’s coming, head on. Gailus watched his plains grizzly run straight through a barbed wire fence.
I asked Gailus if there was anywhere on earth where I could still see a grizzly roaming a landscape like the one that I grew up on—where I could witness in reality what my mind’s eye could not imagine. I had the feeling I was asking the impossible.
“Go to Yellowstone,” Gailus said.
It took sixteen hours to drive across the American West, and I looked out on the passing forests and plains with thoughts of the past. The only large wild animals I saw were birds: a few hawks and herons, a lone bald eagle. The land seemed eerily empty at a continental scale.
That impression changed when I entered Yellowstone National Park through its northern gateway in Gardiner, Montana. Over the next half-hour I saw bison, elk and pronghorn, as well as a mule deer and a lone black bear. Gailus had told me: to see big carnivores, look for people. Whenever a bear, wolf or cougar is spotted in Yellowstone, the roadside quickly turns into a parking lot, complete with uniformed traffic rangers. I found one of these gatherings soon enough, the crowd ogling the liminal distance through telescopes and zoom lenses. The scene was faintly absurd—a paparazzi of the predators—and yet there was something heartwarming, too, in this hunger for a glimpse of a faraway wolf, asleep at the base of a tree.
It was dusk when I moved on, intending to camp in the Lamar Valley in the park’s northeastern corner, where I would go searching for grizzly bears the next day at first light. The Lamar is a sagebrush bottomland surrounded by slow-rising peaks—a near replica of my childhood home. Or so Gailus had told me, anyway: my first view was of darkness, my headlights flashing across signs that informed me every campground was full. I found a vacant site, though, on the banks of Slough Creek. A young couple had reserved it, but was hastily packing to leave when I pulled up. I was welcome to take their place, they said. They’d seen the first grizzly of their lives that day, and no longer wanted to sleep in bear country.
I know the fear that bears can inspire. I inherited it from my mother, who, when she was a girl, walked to school every day through a windrow of aspen and maples. Every time she did it, she was afraid that a bear would be lurking in the trees.
There was almost literally nothing to fear. My mother grew up where the great central grasslands of North America once began to give way to northern forests, but by the time she was born, there were no real grasslands, only farmers’ fields, and no forests, only occasional groves of trees. Outside of the barnyard, there weren’t a lot of animals. She remembers deer, the odd coyote and prairie dogs with a bounty on their tails. Once, word spread from farm to farm that a mountain lion had been seen. She can’t recall if someone finally killed it, but she can still picture the awestruck men going out to hunt the animal. She prefers to believe that it got away.
My mother grew up among Finnish immigrants, the descendants of people who practised arctolatry, or bear worship, whose Kalevala creation story speaks of the “sacred bear with honey fingers,” and who saw bears as forefathers and foremothers. Given this heritage, my mother might reasonably have considered bears to be something like family, but she never had the chance. On the grasslands as she knew them, the plains grizzly was not only gone but utterly forgotten, and black bears were close to the brink of extirpation. My mother’s fear of bears was like a fear of ghosts—grounded not in truths but legends, not reality but vapours. Then, one day, her years of unrequited fright were miraculously rewarded: a black bear was actually spotted in the area. She went out with her family to see it, an animal so black it was as though the beast and its shadow were one and the same. She watched the bear walk the grid roads between the fields, and then disappear—into a windrow.
My mother grew up, married my father, moved farther west, and never allowed her fear of bears to limit her. Still, she passed it down to her children in situations like this one: She was leading me, my brother and a group of our friends on a mountain hike when the chronic pain in her knees forced her, as it often did, to walk backward the final few miles. Moving forward while looking backward is not a comforting way to travel in bear country, so my mother had all of us singing in order to scare any animals away. Without ever saying so in words, she impressed on us that any run-in with a bear would end with us in its stomach. And there we were: a troop of boys belting out the “Heigh-Ho” chorus from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, led by a pretty, black-haired woman walking backward with bells jangling on her rucksack.
My own fears have become inseparable from fascination. I had my first face-to-face encounter with a bear while I was still a child, riding my bike in loops around a mountain campground. I fled, but so did the bear, and my perspective on the animals began to shift. I have now seen bears in the wild more times than I can count, the vast majority of them black bears, Ursus americanus. They are individualistic animals, each one with its own personality, and can run at fifty kilometres per hour, climb trees like a cat, and are so strong that even yearlings have been observed flipping 150-kilogram rocks, backhanded, with a single paw, in order to get at the insects underneath. Their most fantastic achievements, however, may be in the field of play: bears have been witnessed turning somersaults, diving from high places, swimming through hollow logs, doing headstands, throwing rocks, shadowboxing, hanging upside down, swinging from vines, making snowballs and sometimes just quietly sitting and watching other animals.
Black bears have also killed an average of one person every twenty months in North America since the year 1900, making them statistically the most dangerous big animal on the continent.* Everything about large, meat-eating creatures is a challenge to our modern way of life. Most need a lot of land to find food. An average female grizzly in Yellowstone roams a home range of nearly nine hundred square kilometres; males may cover 3,700 square kilometres or more. Polar bears in the Canadian Arctic have been known to wander across some 125,000 square kilometres in a year, an area almost fifteen times the size of Yellowstone National Park. Predators are also often quick to disappear as humans intrude. A world map of the remaining places where brown bears—the species of which grizzly bears are a part—can still be found amounts to a map of the northern hemisphere’s most remote and undeveloped regions. Even the American black bear, which lives alongside people willingly enough to be a garbage-eating, orchard-raiding nuisance in some places, tends to fade as the human footprint increases. Other predators, such as
the wolverine, may begin to abandon large areas with the construction of even a single road.
The presence of fearsome beasts is also affected, of course, by the fact that they can threaten our lives. While psychologists have shown conclusively that people from across the world’s cultures tend to prefer natural settings over the built environment, that same research does make certain distinctions. As much as we favour savannah-like landscapes, we’re also generally wary of dark, dense underbrush or tightly spaced trees. Our modern culture may have inherited a bond with nature from our ancient ancestors, but we prefer a version of nature in which hungry animals with large teeth have nowhere to hide. On that count, we have had our wish. As our increasingly urban and technological lives widen the gap between us and nature, the globe has come to be dominated by a single way of relating to dangerous animals, and that is to banish them to places where few if any people live.
We have always had other options. Around the world, over long stretches of time, communities of people have developed ways of living in close contact with bears, wolves, tigers, lions and leopards—even giant, man-eating lizards and sharks. In the Malay Archipelago of Southeast Asia it was once a widespread custom to encourage the presence of the local macan bumi, the “village tiger,” with regular offerings of food. The relationship was a complicated one, and probably can’t be fully understood at this distance in time, but among the reported results was that even children could drive off a tiger if it strayed too close to a herd of cattle. Anthropologists among the Khoisan people of Botswana, in southern Africa, observed small groups of hunters effortlessly driving prides of lions off their kills in order to take a share of the meat; the lions could easily have savaged the lightly armed men, but did not do so. Similarly, early European settlers in eastern Canada reported indigenous villages that looked on mountain lions as providers—the people would scavenge portions of their kills—and resented it when newcomers shot the big cats. In Hawaii, explorers watched the islands’ inhabitants swim out to their ships while huge sharks passed beneath them; at times, a shadow would rise from the deeps toward a swimmer, who would reach down to strike the deadly animal on the snout, sending it on its way. Predators persisted for millennia in places where people were easily widespread and technologically advanced enough to erase them. Lions could still be found across northern India until the colonial era of the nineteenth century, when they faded to a single small enclave, and there were thousands of tigers in southern China as late as the 1950s. In Turkey, one of the oldest civilizations on earth, the last Caspian tiger was shot only in 1970. No one can say exactly what kind of truces permitted the presence of people and predators in so many places, only that today we have forgotten their terms. “Each generation has to renegotiate its relationship to these animals,” one bear conservationist told me. “We have to find new levels of meaning in these animals in a world that is increasingly confusing.”
Even the disappearance of “man-eating” beasts around the world contains a surprising fact: it isn’t fear for our lives that has led to their destruction. Most have dwindled inch by inch, not with a bang, but a whimper—an accumulating loss as we invade and destroy the animals’ habitat, slaughter their prey, sell their skins or gallbladders as trophies or superstitious remedies. Often, as with the bounty-hunting manias of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the slaughter is aimed primarily at protecting livestock. Only when a predator becomes rare do we tend to root it out as though the beast was evil incarnate. By then, like the bears in my mother’s windrow or my own childhood daydreams, what we are truly afraid of is the unknown. It isn’t fear that drives us to extinguish fearsome beasts, but once they are gone, it’s fear that keeps us from bringing them back.
Jeff Gailus had sent me to the right place. As dawn broke in the Lamar Valley, the day’s first light played across tussocks of bunchgrass, and the scent of rabbitbrush was rising with the dew. The song of the meadowlark, anthem of the grasslands, rang out above the balsamroot flowers; my brothers and I used to pick them for Mother’s Day bouquets. The valley was the living image of the land I had walked as a child.
I drove from my campsite onto the main road, a skiff of fresh snow sizzling under my tires. It was too early for most of the paparazzi, and I had to scan the landscape with my own myopic eyes and inadequate binoculars. At last I pulled over beside a lone truck whose driver was aiming an enormous spotting scope at a dark shape on a nearby hillside. “Black bear,” the woman said. “A big one.” I stepped up to her eyepiece and squinted. The bear was buckwheat-honey brown, nearly black, but it was not a black bear. The humped shoulder and flat forehead gave it away as a grizzly.
This was it, then: a grizzly bear in the grasslands. In my mind, I had already decided how the experience would play out. I would see the big bruin shouldering through the sagebrush, majestic in the way that only a grizzly bear can be, and I would know in that instant the thrill and awe that could have been a part of my childhood. It would be, I thought, a kind of home-coming—a way of making my own past more true and more whole. Angels would sound their heavenly trumpets, and glorious rays would beam down from the clouds.
Instead, I saw that the bear’s jaws were dripping with blood. Every few moments, it would dip its head into the entrails of a calf elk it had killed, while a cow elk, presumably the dead calf’s mother, stood a terrible vigil only a few paces away. The bear tugged and tore at the meat, the mother elk stepped in and out, in and out, of the monocular’s field of vision, and there was nothing at all familiar about the cold violence and danger that the scene implied. Of course there wasn’t: springtime in Yellowstone is not the season of gambolling fox kits, of carefree Mother’s Day bouquets, but of the hungry bear and wary bison. Of death, that ordinary horror.
I stood there long and long, as the poets say. It was a spectacular morning. Along a hill’s crest, a herd of elk waited for the dead calf’s mother to find whatever resolution would allow her to join them and move on. Young bison butted heads on the valley floor, while pronghorn chased each other so effortlessly and tirelessly across the sepia landscape that it was like watching a silent film on an endless loop. Later, after the grizzly had rolled onto its back to digest its meal, revealing hind feet that, at a distance, resembled a human baby’s, a pack of wolves came nosing out of the upland pines. The lead wolf was cream-coloured, almost golden under the rising morning sun. This was my home as it might have been. It was magnificent, it stirred the soul—and I knew I was a stranger here. The absence I’d grown up with had not only been around me, but within me as well.
As a boy, I sometimes sat down from my wandering only to wake up an hour later, surprised to find I had fallen asleep in a warm patch of grass. That wouldn’t happen in bear country. When I walk in a place like Yellowstone, it’s always with a slight but solemn recognition of the slender possibility that I will die, that some wild animal will kill me. My senses come alive: I taste the air, listen for sounds beneath the wind. Suddenly, nature is not the backdrop to life, it is life itself, and I am no longer myself, but myself in nature. I note and classify even small changes: a shrew darting across the path, an updraft twisting a fern frond, a hummingbird gathering spiderweb for its nest. Light and form take on greater clarity, and given enough time to sink into these sensations, visual tricks will arise that are somewhere between vigilance and hallucination, such as seeing clearly every trembling leaf on a tree while in the same moment watching a bumblebee pass by in slow motion. As my senses reach outward, I spread away from myself. The world expands. It’s the closest a person can feel, I think, to being a flock of birds.
The naturalist John Livingston described this perspective as a participatory state of mind, and speculated that among wild animals it is the ordinary form of consciousness. It would seem to have to be. It’s possible, of course, to stumble through the wilderness while locked inside yourself, mentally racing over day-to-day worries, but that is not a good way to remain alive. It’s not that self-awareness is absent in animals—it
has been tentatively revealed in experiments involving such species as apes, dolphins, magpies, even octopuses—but that it is a less useful tool than an outward mind: to endure among other species, you must experience the world as a place you share with them. “Awareness of the whole self is emotional, not rational,” wrote Livingston. “It is lived, not abstracted. It is received, not perceived. It is a gift, not an accomplishment.” Twenty years ago, researchers in Banff National Park began using remote cameras to monitor trees that bears were known to rub against. They were surprised to discover that not only bears were visiting these trees, but so was almost every other mammal in the forest: deer, moose, elk, bighorn, mountain goats, wolves, coyotes, foxes, lynxes, cougars, wolverines, martens, squirrels, wood rats, porcupines, even people’s dogs. The trees were everywhere—at least forty-two of them were identified along a single, twenty-four-kilometre hiking trail. While the messages that the animals were leaving behind in scratch marks and musk, in hair oils and urine, were untranslatable to our tongues, they were obviously important. Wildness has its own understandings.
Most of us rarely—if ever—inhabit the world in this way. The child raised among foxes is different than the child raised among grizzly bears. I hesitate to say that one is better than the other, but the two unquestionably stand apart. Who might I have been as a son of grizzly country? More anxious in life, or less? Better or worse able to negotiate the price of a used car? More or less likely to believe in the Bible as the literal word of God? I could no more answer those questions than I could say who I would be if I’d been born to different parents. The absence of the grizzly, the presence of the fox—the outcome was decided over so much time that no one even noticed they were choosing.
The Once and Future World Page 20