One With the Tiger. Steven Church

at a cousin’s friend’s house, an older boy decided he wanted to test me. He kept teasing me and hitting me, and eventually wrestled me to the ground and pinned me down, putting all of his weight on top of me. He was laughing at me, calling me fat. And I didn’t like it. He’d gone too far. So I grabbed his legs and wrapped my arm over his neck, then I stood up, holding him up on my shoulders. And like something I learned from professional wrestling, I lifted him over my head and slammed him to the floor. After that he crawled under a bed and wouldn’t come out for a while.

      Unfortunately these are lessons my daughter is learning for herself now. At seven years old and well over four and a half feet tall, pushing five feet soon, she’s taller than almost every other kid in her grade level and towers over the boys. I’ve told her what I learned growing up big, that she has to avoid physical confrontations because if she pushes a kid, even in a simple game on the playground, it can have different consequences. It can mean bruises and parents talking. She has to be like the bear, playful but solitary, self-possessed and rarely predatory.

      But I’ve also told her what my father always told me:

      “You don’t ever start a fight. But you finish it.”

       Be the bear, not the bull.

       Q: What can you tell us about the cave where you were found, Mr. Haas?

       I don’t remember the cave. Just the shadows. And sounds. It felt like I’ d drank way too much whiskey. Everything was blurry and I kept blacking out. The noises were bad. How long was I in there?

       All night, Mr. Haas. The rescuers found you in the morning. Some hikers had stumbled across your campsite and could tell something bad had happened. That cave, though, was pretty convenient, huh? Had you scouted it out before as a possible shelter?

       Cave is a little generous, really. It was more like a hole between some bigger rocks. I might have hit my head diving into the rocks, just trying to get away. I remember waiting for the light to change. I wanted the sun. And I wanted to find Janey.

      BASED ON A TRUE STORY

      In 2007 there was a Stephen Haas who sold advertising for KYAK-FM radio in Yakima, Washington, which now appears to be a Christian radio station catering to a largely Latino population. This may or may not have been true at the time that Stephen Haas was attacked by a bear. This may or may not have even been the same Stephen Haas. In fact, the deeper I got into my preparation to play Stephen Haas, the less real he became.

      I read again the AP news story that the teacher had given me, but I could find no record of a similar attack in any newspapers or other sources. Craighead’s death was not listed on a fairly comprehensive list of fatal bear attacks in North America. In fact, in the course of my search, I could find no record for anyone named Janey Craighead at all. Moses Lake, where she was supposedly a captain for the fire department, is a small town in Central Washington, 377 miles from Glacier National Park, but only about 100 miles from Yakima, where Stephen Haas may or may not have lived.

      There did seem to be a Rick Acosta who worked for the National Park Service but it wasn’t clear if he ever served in Glacier National Park; and though initially I (perhaps foolishly) assumed the story to be true, I slowly came to realize that the whole thing was most likely fabricated or cobbled together from other stories for the purposes of the class. It was a fiction. A fake. A lie of sorts.

      For some reason this disappointed me, and not because the teacher used fiction to teach students how to report facts in a journalism class. It disappointed me to know that I’d put all that work into pretending to be a fake person, a character in a fabricated attack story. I believed that I was pretending to be a real person. I wanted to be part of a “based on a true story” story because I like the way the truth bends to the details in those stories, and because these have always been my favorite kinds of stories; and I guess I wanted to feel that all of my research and writing was an effort at intimacy and empathy with a real person who’d suffered real loss.

      I eventually realized that it was just my own subjectivity, my own imagination at work. Stephen Haas could only be as real as I made him. He was just a vessel. It was a lot of pressure caring for such a container. Suddenly I felt responsible for making my performance convincing, for creating a whole person out of the ether, a character with a parents and a hometown, a backstory that informs his present existence. I was the only one responsible for telling the story of Haas and Craighead and for keeping them alive.

      This only partly explains why I was reading a lot of bear attack stories and eventually found myself thinking about the “Drama in Real Life” sections of Reader’s Digest that I used to consume as a child during visits to my grandparents’ house, many of them recounting dramatic and harrowing tales of animal attacks and narrow escapes. I loved these stories. You can still find them online and in the magazine. They pretty much always end the same way, with hope and survival against great odds. The stories are inevitably a kind of celebration of the indomitability of the human spirit, combined with a graphic portrayal of the savagery of a morally indifferent natural world. And bears. Lots of bears. I figured these “Drama in Real Life” stories were exactly the sort of story I needed to tell if I was going to be convincing as Stephen Haas. It seemed I should be able to answer my own questions, however uncomfortable. The problem, however, became knowing where to begin and where to end.

       Q: Mr. Haas, what do you think you learned from your encounter with the bear?

       Learned? About what?

       Perhaps about yourself or about bears, or maybe about the safety of backpacking and camping in Glacier National Park?

       The bear was just being a bear. We were in his territory. We’ d leaped into his cage. And the point of such leaps, I suppose, is fundamentally selfish. I mean, it’s about you, ultimately. It’s about testing oneself. It’s about being humbled.

       What do you mean by cage?

       Look, think about it this way. How do you define a cage? The only differences between a zoo and a national park are the size of the cage and the consequences of leaping into that cage. In a zoo, the probability of attack is increased exponentially, but the difference between a zoo cage and Glacier National Park is mostly a matter of percentages. You know what I mean?

       I’m not sure I do. Are you suggesting that our national parks are essentially very large zoos where we are allowed to climb into the cage with the animals?

       Yes. Yes I am.

      ATTACK RESPONSE

      Though it’s not a pleasant thought, a bear will, more often than not, eat a person it has killed. Stephen Haas spent the night injured in a cave, hiding from the bear; but what did he hear, what did he hide from, and what did he face there in the dark?

       The question I don’t want to face: Did the bear eat Janey?

       The question I would ask: Did the bear eat Janey?

      To put oneself in proximity of bears is not to simply risk bodily harm but bodily consumption, a true kind of communion with the wild. I didn’t know if the bear who’d killed her had eaten Janey, or part of Janey. I wasn’t given that information. But I could imagine the scene. I knew how these stories often went and I was prepared to offer up some grisly details.

      Unlike the case of Janey Craighead and Stephen Haas, most bear attacks occur on trails, when a hiker or backpacker surprises a sow grizzly with cubs. It’s even more rare for a bear to attack people in a tent. When a bear does attack, it will often go for the head or neck. A great many people who survive a bear attack report having their scalps ripped off and their skull chewed upon. Often the bear will jump up and down on top of a person, breaking ribs and knocking the wind out of him. Often the bear will break your neck. Sometimes, if you play dead, a grizzly will leave you alone. Sometimes they will kill you and eat you no matter what you try