Brown Bear Directory

[brotherbear]

~Grizzly Years by Doug peacock.The wind blew at 20 mph across my face and I could not get a scent. A bedded buffalo, maybe, but the fur wasn't right.I edged a few steps closer and stared down at the biggest bear I had ever seen, fifty feet away, lying alongside the creek. He was on a carcass. It was the Bitter Creek Grizzly, the first time I had ever seen him in broad daylight. If he heard, smelled, or saw me, it would be all over. Fifty feet is much too close to a dominant bear who is almost certain to be aggressive in defending a food cache.Slowly I stooped, pivoted, and silently padded back over the snow out of site, up the hillside, one step at a time. It took me an entire hour to withdraw. The wind held and the bear never got my scent. I circled as quickly as I dared; I wanted to get this griz on film from a safer vantage point. I waded the creek and traversed up to a hilltop directly opposite the great bear. He lounged and slept, waking intermittently to feed. Now and then he shook his head or made short lunges at a flock of ravens also feeding on the carcass. He watched a coyote pass, curious but wary. Finally he rolled over on the bank and went to sleep. I studied all this through the viewfinder of Gage's camera. I had finally filmed the most elusive of my Yellowstone bears.I watched from the hilltop across the creek most of the day. Sometime in the late afternoon he moved off, dipping his nose to the ground and swinging across the snowy meadow to the far end of the valley into the trees. The huge grizzly lumbered seemingly oblivious of everything. His face looked relaxed and peaceful, an impression contradicted by a long scar below his left eye. The Bitter Creek Griz moved across the open valley as you might expect a dominant male grizzlyto move even when other grizzlies were present. While such a bear looks taciturn to us, his body language sends a message of warning to other bears.Before the Bitter Creek Griz disappeared, I filmed him with snow on his nose. He had a striking narrow silver-tipped collar around his ribs that I had not noticed earlier. Grizzlies look different as the intensity or angle of light changes.I sat spellbound at my good luck for an hour, then loaded up the cameras and tried following his tracks over the snow. The crust that held up a seven-hundred-pound bear was incapable of supporting me. Reply