Humans and bears - Wild encounters

[brotherbear]

Grizzly Years by Doug Peacock.

Just as the elk reached the trees I saw the peculiar gait of a lanky, dark grizzly. It was Happy Bear, whom I first came to know in 1976 when he was a skinny four-year old. Now he was about my age in bear years, one foot already in the grave. Happy Bear is the most playful solitary bear I know. Once I filmed him sitting in the tarn contemplatively blowing bubbles in the muddy water and biting them. Then he attacked the water, like the elk, beating it with his paws and slashing the surface with his jaws.

Happy Bear ambled across the basin, lumbering in the stiff, swinging gait that made him so easy to recognize. He walked up to the snow patch and sniffed at the scat of another grizzly. Suddenly he leaped into the air as if stung by a bee, careening and prancing up and down the anvil of whiteness like a baby buffalo. Leap for joy, grizzly bear! Happy Bear approached another caviared pile of berry scat with feigned seriousness only to repeat his magic dance. He shook his head like a shaggy ox and leaped in tight circles. I filmed him leaving the snow, prancing across the tiny sedge meadow into the brush. Reply