Humans and bears - Wild encounters

[brotherbear]

Grizzly Years by Doug Peacock.

Moving cautiously, I climbed down to study the bear prints. The rear pads were more than ten inches long on hard ground; the left track was asymmetrical and toed in. I checked more tracks to confirm the pattern. It's him alright, I had thought so - the Bitter Creek Griz, my favorite Yellowstone bear.

I first got to know this unusual bear in 1977 and have seen him almost every year since. Even back then, he was a huge grizzly with a grayish muzzle - probably a survivor of the purges of the early seventies, when almost a hundred grizzlies were known killed or removed from the Yellowstone ecosystem in a single two-year period. He also appeared to be an effective predator, killing yearling bison and an occasional moose. His pigeon-toed spoor, perhaps the result of an old injury, was distinctive.

I followed the prints out onto the crusted snow. The grizzly tracks followed my snowshoe trail for nearly a hundred yards, then veered off to the right in a tight circle to an icy depression behind a large deadfall ten feet off my trail. More tracks led away.

The story was clear: last night the Bitter Creek Griz had backtracked me, then circled around and bedded, waiting for me behind a log ten feet from where I would walk. Had I gone farther into the timber that night he would have been right there. The icy bed told me he lay in wait a long time.

This was the second time this had happened to me - a grizzly setting up what looked like a deliberate ambush. I do not know what it means. Maybe it is only curiosity. Still, there were moments when I imagined a malevolent intelligence lurking behind that log.

Stalking or ambushing humans during the day is exceedingly rare although not unknown in the literature of grizzly lore. There was one report from British Columbia that during the winter of 1970, a Doig River Indian tracked a grizzly that circled back behind a mossy hummock and killed and partially devoured him. So I don't know what to think. I do not think every grizzly lying in ambush intends to do me harm, but I do not think the bears are joking either.

This kind of unsettling behavior by grizzly bears resists easy categorization. It is one of the things that attracted me to them in the first place. Living with grizzlies is an eternal freshness: you can never be sure exactly what you are dealing with, and your curiosity transcends bafflement because you are bargaining with an animal who can kill and eat you. Reply