… a most tremendious looking animal, and extreemly
hard to kill notwithstanding he had five balls through his lungs
and five others in various parts he swam more than half the
distance across the river to a sandbar and it was at least twenty
minutes before he died; he made the most tremendous roaring from
the moment he was shot.
— Meriwether Lewis; May 5, 1805
There are roughly 500 grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone
ecosystem (the three million acres of Yellowstone National Park,
plus six million acres comprising six surrounding national forests
in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho). This is up from approximately 200
in 1975, when they were listed as “threatened” under the auspices
of the 1973 Endangered Species Act (ESA). There are 700-800 more
scattered from northwestern Montana to the Washington Cascades.
Grizzlies have recovered so well in the last generation that they
are now candidates for “delisting” under the ESA, a “process”
causing much legal and bureaucratic wrangling among multiple
federal agencies, environmental groups, and the Fish and Wildlife
Services of three states. But all that is fodder for another
article.
The bears as encountered in newspaper stories or as the subject
of government reports found on obscure official websites become
abstract: the estimated numbers of breeding-age sows extant,
sow-cub ratios, current mortality rates, etc. Then there’s the
overall health of the habitat: Will drought affect the whitebark
pine nut crop? Army cutworm moths? Serviceberry, Buffaloberry,
Whortleberry? But life in the Northern Rockies means that the
grizzlies aren’t merely the subject of weekend trip to the zoo or
the stars of bad nature television programming. Out here we tend to
bump into them.
I’ve seen eight. Three from the relatively safe confines of a
car at the roadside; two from the comfortable distance that
required observation with binoculars. And three in a close
encounter I will describe later.
When on all fours, even the largest seem small because of their
short legs. This doesn’t inhibit their ability to run up to 40 MPH
over short distances. They have large heads and prominent shoulder
humps that are a mass of muscle and the center of the incredible
strength that permits them to break an elk’s back with one swipe of
a paw or to excavate a large hillside while digging rockchucks out
of their dens. They are omnivorous and will eat anything from
winterkilled elk, deer and bison carrion to summertime grasses,
forbs and berries, and the human food left by careless campers.
Unlike the dog-like faces of black bears, grizzlies have a
“dish-shaped” profile, that is, a flat, concave face with rounded
Teddy Bear-like ears. They walk pigeon-toed, and their tracks are
noted for long, finger-like elegantly curled claws of two or three
inches. Boars can weigh up to half a ton; sows usually in the
300-600 pound range. In an interesting Darwinian twist, stray boars
will readily kill and cannibalize cubs. Thus a sow in defense of
cubs is noted for her ferocity and will usually drive away a boar
up to twice her size. And this defensive instinct certainly applies
to people.
On the same day as the John F. Kennedy, Jr. aviation tragedy in
July 1999, I had a scary encounter with a sow grizzly and her two
cubs while hiking on the North Fork of the Shoshone River a few
miles from the east entrance to Yellowstone National Park. The two
events will be forever fixed in my mind as being related.
I had had my lunch at the edge of an old grassy forest fire burn
that I scanned with my binoculars while I ate. This was a security
measure. Because of the variety of available food — from bugs to
roots to berries — self-rejuvenating snag-strewn burns are popular
with grizzlies in midsummer. It was a warm, breezy day with
sluggish cumulous clouds dragging shadows across the surrounding
mountains, and I dozed off while sitting propped up against a log.
As I snoozed for a few minutes, the buffeting wind and river sound
seemed far away.
Upon awakening, I shouldered my pack to resume the hike. The
river was nearby just over a nearby hillock and down in some
cottonwoods. I decided to check it out. I scanned the burn one more
time and saw nothing but acre upon acre of blackened snags studding
the breeze-waved carpet of grass and wildflowers. I left the trail
and crested the little rise — and froze.
About a hundred feet away a large round sow grizzly nosed in the
grass by the river. Two cubs of the year wrestled playfully near
her. The sow’s windblown furry rump faced me, and the cubs were
preoccupied with their play. Grizzlies are nearsighted, so she
didn’t see me, and being behind her favored me. I must have been
upwind because her keen sense of smell didn’t scent me, even the
whole time I was snoring through half my lunch with only the little
grassy knoll between us. And if either cub had detected my presence
they would have alerted her, and millions of years of evolutionary
ursine motherly instinct would have been on me in seconds. A rule
of thumb in grizzly country is don’t hike alone, but in this case
the presence of other people would have complicated things with
movement, voices, etc. As it was, I was for a split second frozen
in time, and in the frame was the bear and the cubs, and the
flashing river with a soundtrack of chattering water and thudding
wind. I had hit the cosmic lottery of luck. God watches over drunks
and idiots.
I simply backed up over the hillock and temporarily out of sight
again, then turned and ran a couple of hundred yards back up the
trail, where I climbed atop a huge boulder and watched the bears
with my binoculars. The tumbling, playful cubs stood about a foot
and a half tall, and were marked by white furry bibs on their
chests. Mother continued her nosing in the grass, and with an easy
push of a paw rolled over an old log to see what insect delicacies
lay beneath.
On the way back to town that evening I heard the first reports
of the Kennedy tragedy on the car radio. By the time I got home CNN
was all over it. In a different set of circumstances, John Kennedy,
his wife, and sister-in-law would not have had their plane crash or
would have survived it. In a different set of circumstances, the
sow grizzly would have killed me.
While I cooked dinner my eyes were glued to CNN. Life is luck, I
thought.
