One With the Tiger. Steven Church

forgiven the bear that killed Janey?

       Of course.

      2. Because the best way, apparently, to avoid acting like food was to make a lot of strange noises, many places in Alaska sold “bear bells,” which were just cheap metal bells that you were supposed to clip to your pack or belt. Reviews seemed to be mixed regarding these bells with some anecdotal evidence suggesting that they simply sound to a bear like birds or a dinner bell.

      3. Maybe. Other stories I heard in Alaska mentioned the likelihood that pepper spray might just aggravate a charging grizzly or, worse, blow back in your face. Most of the locals we encountered on the trails packed a different kind of heat—typically a .45-caliber Magnum pistol or a shotgun with lead-slug shells—but there was something about this that I found extremely unnerving. I didn’t keep a gun in my house, and I didn’t pack a gun when I was out in public, and I didn’t understand why that should change when I was backpacking in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness.

      4. If you are, however, an Olympic sprinter, then, by all means, try to outrun a bear.

      BEAR AWARENESS

      It would be ridiculous to say that I had gone to Glacier and Alaska because I wanted to be attacked by a grizzly bear. It would not, however, be an exaggeration to say that I wanted to encounter a grizzly bear in the wild, perhaps even in close proximity; and in preparing for my role many years later, I thought this admission might be something that could get me closer to Stephen Haas. You don’t go to Glacier or Alaska, and you don’t backpack there without knowing there’s a chance you’ll see a bear. In fact, many people travel there for precisely that experience of encountering a bear in the wild. They seek it out.

      In Alaska I sometimes tried to reassure my girlfriend that being killed and eaten by a bear was a noble death, or that it would be a sign that it was probably our time to go. I told her that we’d be famous, that people would read about us in the papers. Maybe they’d even make a movie. Maybe actors would be hired to play us in the movie. She didn’t find this line of argument particularly convincing.

      My desire to come face-to-face with a grizzly began to get more complicated once I was actually living, camping, and trying to survive in bear country. It wasn’t just that I’d brought someone else along with me. It was that the reality of encountering an apex predator in the wild moved from the realm of possibility and imagination into the realm of reality. And that reality began to feel pretty heavy after a while.

      The visitor center of Denali National Park where we picked up our backcountry camping permits displayed numerous books and videos about bears and bear safety. One video playing on the monitor showed a massive grizzly the size of a small car running full speed across tundra in pursuit of an elk calf. The video said he was moving between thirty and forty miles per hour. I watched the bear’s muscles rippling beneath his fur, his bullish haunches and beer-keg-sized head take down the helpless mewing elk calf like a brown wave washing over a seashell, and my guts quivered. My knees wobbled and I felt a little sick.

      Sometimes when I’m driving my car at forty miles per hour, I’ll still think about that bear. But more to the point, a day later as my girlfriend and I trudged up a hillside across tundra, an experience not unlike walking through a field of two-foot-thick wet sponges, I would remember the image of that bear and the ease with which he moved, and I would think more about what it would be like to actually encounter an Alaskan grizzly bear out there on the tundra, exposed and vulnerable.

      As we labored up that hillside to our first camping spot, stumbling beneath the weight of our packs, I looked back at my girlfriend a few paces behind me. Half my size, the going was harder for her, and I remembered that bear galloping full speed across the tundra, and the half-joking advice my father had given me before we left on the trip: You don’t have to be faster than the bear, just faster than the slowest person on the trail.

       Q: Do you have a family that is worried about you, Mr. Haas?

       I have some family.

       I’m sorry, Mr. Haas. Can you clarify that statement?

       Two children. They live with me half the time. They’re with their mother now. I talked to them last night on the phone. My daughter . . . she was crying.

       I’m sorry, Mr. Haas. But can you tell us what she asked you about what happened?

       She asked me if the bear got our food.

       Your food?

       It’s a long story. We went camping once. There was a bear.

       A bear?

       I don’t want to talk about this right now. She was upset. That’s enough for your story. My son, too. Maybe even more so. It’s hard for them to understand. And they don’t know the whole story. They don’t know about Janey. Or not everything. I didn’t know how to tell them.

      BEAR CONFESSION

      Here is what I wouldn’t admit to the student reporters: We never did encounter a grizzly in the wilds of Montana or Alaska. We saw plenty of grizzlies from the backpacker’s bus that we rode into Denali, and spotted other bears along the side of a road that snaked around a lake in the Yukon Territory. But the only personal experience I could really draw upon to get close to what Stephen Haas witnessed during his encounter was a brief run-in with a black bear, not a grizzly.

      We’d been backpacking over Eagle Pass, just outside of Anchorage, and seen plenty of evidence that grizzlies were around. There were spots along the trail at the higher elevations where grizzlies thrived, and it was clear bears had bedded down in the brush, perhaps just taking a nap and waiting for their next meal to wander along. We found their tracks everywhere, along with piles of berry-laden scat.

      Obeying the guidebooks, each time I came across a pile of poo, I bent down and put my hand close to the pile, feeling if there was still heat radiating off of it. If the scat was warm and steamy, that meant the bear wasn’t far away. That meant the heat from the bear’s intestines still lingered long enough for me to feel it fog my palm.

      The trail wound through alder thickets that were tall and dense enough that you couldn’t see around the next bend in the trail, and we kept seeing more and more grizzly tracks. The hike seemed to take forever; and while I put my hand close to a lot of poop, we never saw a bear.

      We eventually made it through, but not without some tension and creeping fear, some real worry about what might happen if we did encounter a grizzly. Burdened with our packs, there was no way we could run or even move quickly. And the next day, as we descended into the valley, we started seeing black bears. Lots of them. We were trudging along a trail that followed a bend in the Eagle River, when one bear who must have weighed 200–300 pounds swam across the river, climbed the bank, and started running down the trail toward us.