A LIFE WITH BEARS

I GREW UP IN TEXAS, WHICH MIGHT BE SEEN AS PART OF the problem. Football was the deity, whiteness was dominant, and guns were the answer, the final punctuation to any disagreement.

I want to make something beautiful. I believe these are the very words spoken by the earnest and nerdy playwright-turned-screenwriter Barton Fink in the eponymous film, a movie in which—atypical for America—I recall no handguns appearing for the simple matter of a sagging plot. Perhaps because the Coens are good writers and in no need of guns, save for a weird dream sequence that spoofs private-eye noir. (And now that I think more about it, the devil, as played by John Goodman, does make a brief appearance with a machine gun. Ah, well.)

We see that today in all forms of cinema—the two cultural media of our times, guns and film—and I wonder how we can regulate cigarettes, nudity, and alcohol on the airwaves but not the most dangerous of our many addictions and distractions.

Relax. I have turned my back on all that stuff, while the rest of society goes to opera and ballet openings and binges on Game of Thrones. (I don’t know what it is but hear of it often, so that I imagine it lies somewhere between electricity and the precise origins of World War II as yet another thing I don’t understand, will never understand, and really don’t need to understand.)

I am of no help to society, even as—sedated, happily or unhappily—distracted, we pile sandbags against the rising waters that are the manifestation of the self-fulfilling legacy of self-destruction that follows from biting the apple in Eden’s Garden.

As a novelist and essayist, I just want to make something beautiful.

I’ve been working on a novel, I can feel it in my blood and see it in my mind, can access its interiority on a few ghostly occasions when I’m walking at dusk and it’s just me and the novel, with time to inhabit it as a fly, strangely, might be said to inhabit a spiderweb. I want it so badly, and while I’ve known logistically that the day was coming, the wall where time and energy begin to become finite (where previously they were not), I am in no way eager for nor prepared for its arrival. My yearning for the novel, thirty years of dreaming, rises steadily, slowly, still growing—increasing maybe 2 to 3 percent a year—but now the focus, and on good days the incandescence, the burning that hollows you out and fashions you anew, sends you forward, is harder to reach. It always requires at least as much a physical act as mental—the two are not separate—and, for the first time, nap taker that I have become, in times of stress, I find myself only able to do one or two things in a day, so that my choices seem to matter more. They always mattered. There were just more of them available.

Relax. In addition to avoiding a discussion of gun control, this is not going to be an essay about fiction writing, or about the abstract concept of time—though as a geologist, how I would love to wallow in that ore for an hour, a day, a lifetime. Nor is it even about the burden of activism, which has become, somehow, in a way I still haven’t been able to figure out, both an indulgence and a necessity in my life.

I want to focus on bears. On knowing them, and on what they need. Which is—let’s be honest—what I need. Where I live, the Yaak Valley of northwest Montana, only about two dozen remain. Twenty-five, tops. Three or four breeding-age females with young.

I guess this makes it an essay about activism after all. But is not everything we choose to do, then, activism—in the sense that living a life of direction and action is, over time, a form of activism—an expression of one’s self and values, for better or worse? Of course it is.

This isn’t even an essay about global warming.

It’s never lost on me that the things I am most passionate about are things it seems almost all the rest of the world knows nothing about, so that I exist as if on the tiniest of rafts, floating, lost in a vast sea but stroking, paddling, nonetheless, though with the currents—Humboldt, equatorial, Indonesian—so varied and powerful. I know and care about Paleozoic sedimentary point bars buried a mile beneath the surface in the Black Warrior Basin of north Alabama. I know, and care, again passionately, that a quarterback can pump fake to get a cornerback to open his hips while running in deep coverage with a wide receiver; I know half a hundred ways a defensive lineman can entice an offensive lineman to flinch, particularly on a passing down.

I know and care about the names of plants and trees and birds in the Yaak Valley, and know and care about the intricate human politics of my home, my immense state with such a tiny population: Jeannette Rankin, the first woman in Congress; Jon Tester, the last farmer in the Senate; Ted Kennedy’s progressive schoolteacher pal, Pat Williams . . . I know and care about the tribes, the Indigenous communities that were first here back in the old days, and that remain. These values and ideas and images are what I hunger for when I spend too much time in my head fretting about the future, or about ideas.

The one thing a person needs to understand about a grizzly is that it’s powerful. And indeed, that’s people’s main impression. A grizzly inspires awe and fear. And what a great word, grizzly. Not toad or pig, not butterfly or hippo. There is no fear wrought in the name of the lovely little ocelot. Armadillo is uttered with the whimsical Latinate flourish the animal deserves. Swan, elegant.

It’s hard, being an environmental writer. If one puts on one’s blinders, gets in a canoe early one cool, sunny summer morning, and paddles solo, or perhaps with a pup, down a lazy winding river—say, the Bull River, in northwest Montana, or for faster waters, choppy little whitecap rapids on the Yaak River—lovely runs of clean water funneling in a long tongue, then splaying into broad still stretches with high cliff banks on one side and rich green meadows of grass that’s already shoulder-high, and not even the solstice yet—

—it is easy then to write of the bald eagles perched along the river in the tops of towering cedars, their snowy heads bowed to watch with a fierce intensity and perhaps judgment of the paddler or paddlers below, on that lazy stretch of river, plates of sunlit green water spinning in radials, drifting past giant boulders midriver, and feeling as a traveler might not have felt in a very long time—suspended in water, with only the thinnest membrane between one’s self and the body of water, and the water moving forward, past eddies and riffles, being pulled along: blah blah blah blah blah.

So an environmental writer can write about those kinds of things, and change very little, if anything.

Or one can go to war, can beat the drum and preach to the choir, can run one’s traps, call in favors, agitate, riot; can pen Lamentations: The Sequel. Gone are the brief days when this high-adrenaline scorched-earth accounting, though it would not be inappropriate, was effective. We ourselves are a different species these days, overstimulated and constantly adrenalized—essentially inhabiting a toxic soup of nonstop worry and fret and fear, for which plenty of short-term distraction exists but no true cure. After only 180,000 years in this world, we have lost our way, if ever we had a way. I am not optimistic about our chances for emerging reunified and graceful, which is one of the many reasons I think I am all in with the bears. They still are unified, still graceful. And they’re incredibly endangered, and in this, as in so many other things, we share a great similarity, so great as to sometimes resemble familiality. Natural historian Douglas Chadwick reminds us that grizzlies and humans share 88 percent DNA.

The second and other thing one needs to know about a grizzly is that, in all place-based cultures of humankind, bears have always occupied the level of deity or, in the case of contemporary Christianity and secularism, of demigod, which is what passes for deities and worship in these days of money-as-God, in which commerce or business is godlike, as is the decidedly unpoetic word entertainment. Vancouver Grizzlies, Grizzly ATVs, Grizzly chewing tobacco, Grizzly Car Wash.

Irony went extinct a long time ago, and it’s hard to say what moved in to occupy its place. Nature abhors a vacuum. Something less complicated than irony, I’m almost certain. Maybe something more elemental, like pain or sorrow.

Let me tell you what a grizzly is first.

A local reporter has been asking me what good are they, why do they matter. How are they different from any other nature? The questions elicit a sinking feeling in me, not unlike the one I had when I was first charged by a grizzly, a mother with young, up here in the Yaak.

There was a tiny bit of slow-motion quality to it, but for the most part it pretty much took place in real time. I would have loved a little more of a slo-mo aspect. I’d been watching the young bear, a sub-adult I’d spooked up a tree. He was having a hell of a time getting up it and staying up—it kind of looked like it was the first tree he’d climbed in his life, and his mother stood up from behind the hill, kind of Godzilla-looking—how could a bear be that tall?—then galloped down the hill toward me, from maybe thirty-five yards away.

Things I saw clearly: her long, straight dinnerware claws; dust rising from her as she ran. Had she been dust bathing? The sagging old radio collar on her, placed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to track her movements—it wasn’t berry season yet, so she was still lean.

And though I didn’t panic, I had the distinct thought, Ah, I’m fucked now. That a thing had been initiated that could now not be undone. It was—cliché—a decidedly sinking feeling. Falling, floating, descending to a place and a situation, a predicament, where one did not want to be, with not enough time remaining, and not enough space. A situation, it occurs to me now, that mimics the bears’ own existence.

Obviously, it turned out okay for all of us. I drew my bear spray, discharged it even as I was pretty sure she was starting at the last possible moment to veer away. It was tense as hell but not quite terrifying—in part, I think, because it was so beautiful. These days when I see other hikers in the hills, whether hunters or not, their hips bristle with dual canisters of bear spray—good—but more often than not they also have strapped to their chests, in a weird sports-bra kind of contraption, some thick, ugly, blue-chrome-and-black thousand-dollar pistol. And if they’d seen that mother stand up, presenting such an easy target, I have little doubt they would have unstrapped (the barrel pointing disturbingly toward the shoulder as they hike uphill) and discharged the bullet rather than the spray. Such a tempting target.

The reality of a standing bear (“She reared,” in the parlance of purveyors of magazines filled with sagas of blood and matted fur) is that, while intimidating to behold (one of the evolutionary elements of the bears’ and our coexistence), it’s essentially a get-out-of-jail-free card for a hiker. She’s only standing up to get better scent details, to see better (their eyesight, by the way, is excellent, better than our own), and to gauge your response. She’s buying time. This is a very good thing for both of you. So long as you don’t do something stupid to change the dynamic or force the issue—like shoot a gun—you’re already home free; it just may not yet feel like it, in the moment.

The bears who don’t stand up are the ones that’ll bite you. Those bears’ charges are not of considered meditation but of blind fury. A standing bear, however, has pretty much already made up its mind not to initiate conflict. All you have to do is sign on the dotted line. Still, they can be really tall.

Why do bears matter, and in the Yaak? The fact that someone can ask such a question makes me feel—again—that we’re sinking. Let me tell you a little bit about a thing I love while it is still here on the earth.

Famously, they hibernate. They climb high into the mountains, drawn to a northeast slope, often at the base of a steep cliff, where snow piles up deepest and stays longest. Sometimes they go into a cave or den they have dug themselves—it’s almost impossible not to think of Christianity’s borrowing of this ancient saga—and pretty much stay there until spring.

Their cubs are born as the mother sleeps, a snow astronaut, in January, each cub small enough to balance in a soup spoon. There is no other animal in the world with so great a disparity in size between birth and maturity. You tell me, god or demigod?

Their relationship with time is beyond profound, so aligned with and fitted to the landscape they inhabit as to expose our crude notions of time—sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour—as the mathematical abstractions they are. In hibernation, their heart rate slows to three or four beats per minute. Call it four beats; between each heartbeat, an entire dream, of an entire season. Winter, spring, summer, fall. Winter, again. Four months per breath. Timelessness not in their dreams but in their living.

There are five subpopulations of grizzlies in Montana: in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem, which includes Glacier National Park, and in the Cabinet Mountains, the Yaak, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, and the Selway-Bitterroot, currently extinct, though with a few bears sensing it’s out there and trying to get back home. No one subpopulation can reach the other, however. Even in Montana, a matrix of logging roads, highways, railroads, towns, cities, and villages prevents them from connecting with each other. “Blood knowledge,” wrote D. H. Lawrence, in At Home on This Earth. “Oh, what a catastrophe for man when he cut himself off from the rhythm of the year, from his unison with the sun and the earth. Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and setting of the sun, and cut off from the magical connection of the solstice and equinox. This is what is wrong with us. We are bleeding at the roots.”

They don’t live quite as long as humans or parrots, but quite a bit longer than most animals on this hard continent: into their midthirties, if no one kills them. A big one in these parts is six hundred pounds. The bulk of their diet is grass. Every subpopulation has adapted and evolved to depend on the specificity of the particular landscape of its residency. Each subpopulation has negotiated, over the long course of its existence, something quite a bit more elegant and sophisticated than what Darwin saw in the far more recent, even nascent, economies of the Galápagos, which was termed, mistakenly, survival of the fittest. (In reality, what Darwin was witnessing was a brief hierarchy of the luckiest—the ecological equivalent, perhaps, of white privilege.) For example, the famed Galápagos tortoise. Having gotten a leg up by sheer luck, not cunning, and having made random landfall on a patch of bare ground so new in the world as to still be smoldering, the tortoises pretty much had it made from the beginning. It was not through cunning or wile or strength that they found the Garden of Eden that was the Galápagos, newly made Day One, blossomed from fire, but instead the grace of the equatorial currents that guided the tortoises—tossed overboard when no longer needed for sailors’ food on long voyages. And it wasn’t the tortoises’ cunning there, either, but more luck, that a lighter-weight sailor, one who ate less across the long seagoing journey, resulted in a few tortoises—possibly the weaker, more infirm ones, at that—being spared.) Whatever it was, grace or luck, it definitely wasn’t survival of the fittest. Chance is as good an in-the-middle word for it as any. Luck and chance are far and away the greatest drivers of evolution, not the more dramatic elements of strength and cunning. Cooperation is the greatest tool, and the hardest. Darwin didn’t see it because it wasn’t there yet. It wasn’t needed yet.

What if we ourselves, now inhabiting what was once a much larger garden, nonetheless arrived here under similar circumstances—once to have been briefly useful to a god or demigod, or even a single great creator, only to be cast aside, no longer a necessity, the creator’s journey—the farther shore—in sight, leaving us to drift and align wherever we landed, which is here?

And, still so new to this world, we struggle. Even so, we ourselves are capable of exuding, at times, a kind of primitive grace, leaving here and there patches and residues of it in our own small travels, a pattern or trail that glints gold in certain conditions of light, like the glittering sheen a land snail leaves on stone—visible perhaps only to the eye of whoever cast us out of heaven, or aside, and then visible only under certain conditions. Still, we, and all living things in this slightly larger garden, this earth-island, struggle, with the most successful and enduring inhabitants surviving not by brawn but by the connections to all others: establishing complex and numerous interdependent points of attachment within the ecosystem, the garden that they—we—inhabit.

(In fiction and nonfiction, these points of attachment are what allow a reader to enter and inhabit the dreamscape of the story. Specificity: it’s what keeps us out of our heads and in our bodies.)

Along the coast of British Columbia, grizzlies grow larger on diets of oceangoing salmon returning to lay eggs in the headwaters of the rushing snowmelt rivers discharged from the flanks of glaciers. It seems a simple case of the bears utilizing bounty, and it is that—bears line the shores and scoop salmon out of the narrowing creeks’ rapids, farther inland, gorging until they can eat no more, in the period of hyperphagia as they prepare for the nearing of hibernation. (Dr. Barrie Gilbert calls bears lipophiles—fat lovers—because, even after they can eat no more, they open the skulls of sunken spawn-ravaged dead salmon and pull out the salmon’s brains neatly with their teeth, unable to resist that sweet protein-rich delicacy.)

So it’s a utilization of bounty, horn of plenty. But the bears are also the firmament on which all others stand within their ecosystem. Without the bears redistributing the marine-rich nitrogen from the oceangoing salmon in their spoor, the granitic soil of the inland mountains would be too sterile to grow anything, much less the old-growth cedar forests that shade and cool the water to temperatures that the salmon depend on, the forest without which the bears and salmon would not exist. Who among us would not be forgiven for wondering if such a relationship of symbiosis exists in our spiritual lives, between a creator and the created?

Similarly, in Glacier National Park, the bears aerate the alpine soil, rototilling it to just the right depth with their daggered claws as they search for roots: gentle farmers furrowing their fields, away from hikers and campers. In Yellowstone, where the high-elevation whitebark pine is the ecological driver of the ecosystem—each seed the caloric equivalent of a little bomb of butter—an elegant evolutionary cooperative agreement exists in which the Clark’s nutcracker, with its specialized bill, pries open the tight clutch of the pine’s cones, and squirrels cache the leftover cones, which bears then raid and, again, redistribute in their spoor, as do the nutcrackers, at the highest elevations, which are favored by female grizzlies with young.

The bears’ attachment to high places, wherever they are still found, is nothing less than mythic.

If I consider them a deity, it is not so much in the traditional sense, in which one offers up an irregular stream of prayers that are at least partly, if not most or even all of the time, aimed at delivering products or desired outcomes not for the god or demigod but for the supplicant. A sort of calling in of goods and services. How fucked up is that, instead of giving, as some long ago have advised, unceasing thanks for being allowed to be here?

So no, it could not be said that I worship bears, nor do I find myself in conversation with them; I neither thank them for my existence nor lobby and beseech them for favor and fortune. I do, however, find my days filled by service to them. Pretty much unceasingly, now that I consider it. In the mornings I campaign for their protection, and the protection of their habitat, and in the afternoons I try still to get out and take a little walk through their woods. Only on occasion now do I go up to their mountaintops. They need the rarest thing now, rarer even than time: space.

Increasingly, I dream of them: never dreams of violence, and never of lambs-and-lions unification with them. Instead, between us there is always a slight distance, one that is enforced by them, not me. Often in the dreams I am with another person or persons and am acting as a guide, and in the dream I am worried not for myself but for the other travelers.

When I’m not dreaming I prepare press packets, a pamphleteer waging a war of rhetoric against state-sponsored reassurances that the bears are recovering, have recovered, everywhere, and that all is good and that, in the words of the primary agency tasked with their protection, the USFWS, global warming is not a threat to them now nor is it anticipated ever to be so in the future. How different am I, really, from any other true believer who leaves copies of The Watch or The Watch Tower or End Times in phone booths, or Gideon Bibles in the drawers of hotels throughout the West, or, depending on location, The Book of Mormon? (The last grizzly in Utah, Old Ephraim, caught his foot in a trap and was chased down in 1923 by a Boy Scout scoutmaster, whose scouts pelted the bear with stones. Some fun.)

One by one the bears have been blinking out. This is the fate of all small and isolated subpopulations. David Quammen’s excellent book The Song of the Dodo details the mathematical reasons for this phenomenon. With each grizzly subpopulation in Montana cut off from all others, they are having to wander farther, as if lost in the wilderness, seeking one another, and through an increasingly complex maze of fragmented environment. And as with everything, global warming is taking a blowtorch to their old world: scorching their old food supplies, forcing them to travel farther, risk more to find less. Immense and magnificent creatures that were once far more intimately fitted to the intricacies of their home than any citizens to a civilization of humankind. As fitted to place as the proverbial Swiss watch is to itself, with every piece, no matter how tiny, fitted to every other piece. A bounty of attachment points. Naturalist Doug Peacock says that grizzlies hold down the skin of the earth with the weight of their four paws.

I hate to be the evangelical in the room, but now that they are on the move, forced to expand their territories as the resources within grow thinner and more scarce—the book of Exodus—and as they encounter record and unsustainable mortalities in their globally warmed peregrinations, what might that mean for us? When, in our shallow past, have we too been forced to get up and move, abandoning our homes—our gardens, our forests, our prairies, our hilltops—forsaking all and wandering, equally lost, searching for any of the three basic requirements of our own identity—food, water, shelter—and, if we are different, requiring one more of the softer necessities, love or compassion or even beauty?

This summer I received an Apple Watch, the function of which breaches, then breaks down whatever tenuous firewall existed between one’s brain and the coming thing called artificial intelligence. Let me disclose here, in the requirement of full journalistic transparency, that one of the things I love, perhaps worship, about art is that it is an avenue by which one can present the self one wishes to explore—to celebrate or, conversely, purge. Short of the slicing and splicing of genes and the nip and tuck of various sun-blasted chromosomes, art’s the best way, still, to remake the human mind, the human being, into something different from the individual who emerged from the womb.

We do change, over time. We do assume different genetic identities, picking them up simply from living proximate to, in the same environment with, others. A yew tree growing next to an aspen absorbs aspen DNA through the soil and from the shared atmosphere, from its respiration, its breath. The world is complicated; life is more connected that we have been taught or led to believe. I’m sure there’s a Bible verse somewhere that reinforces this truth, but I don’t know it offhand. If I had time, I’d go back and reread it to find it.

I don’t have time. The last twenty-five grizzlies in the Yaak Valley don’t have time.

The Apple Watch receives texts, profiles my pulse rate in blue EKG mountains and valleys of sweet “good” sleep, etches in red the terrifying peaks and troughs of nightmares—even identifies for me, for them, what articles I’ve read, and what I reread. Whether I am agitated or becalmed, where I go, what I buy, what I sell, what I like, what I don’t like.

How much stuff, really, do I need to know? How much do any of us?

Is there a more marvelous feeling known to a writer than the condition in which the lawn mower’s buzzing down the street falls away, and the thrumming of one’s heart becomes even bigger in the writing of the scene, next word by next word, than it would be, could possibly be, even in the living of it? Which is to say, those moments when the dream transcends and towers above even the miracle of the living, and the body, the brain, the soul are transformed, and one becomes a better, fuller person—a real person rather than just a regular person.

The Los Angeles Times newsfeed, Instagram, Accuweather—it all comes pouring into my blood now, the three tiny sensors tapping my wrist, buzzing, searching for a connection, seeking to send their electronic blossoming of facts into my veins, the clutter and detritus of our times surging up those blood rivers toward my brain, where—in a finite space crowded and cramped with plaque, the geologic signatures of concussions and time—those facts collide, as if in bumper cars, with a lifetime of carefully and also sometimes randomly curated events; a smattering of facts, their perimeters fraying and disintegrating as they shape-shift into something less than full or accurate and become instead metamorphic amalgamations of time and place as if everything is living: stones, grizzlies, memory. As if memories, isolated, yearn to get up and travel sometimes. As if, buried, they reemerge in later seasons with many of the old characteristics of their predecessors but also modified, transformed.

Life is this way, across the span of almost any amount of time. Perhaps the abstraction of time, beyond its sixty-second/sixty-minute paradigm, does not even exist, the truer measure of what we are seeking when we try to speak of time being instead the degree or amount of alteration, modification, or transformation any one thing experiences—so that time might exist not as an abstraction but indeed as a physical presence, sometimes erosive and corrosive, and at other times creative, generative.

The fancy Apple Watch: It tells my average resting heart rate as well as beat by beat. It monitors me when I read articles from Fox News, when I read the NYT. I am a tiny, extraneous, outlaw part of the forming of the one-brain, the brain that always makes sense, is always predictable, sterile, insensate, dead, doomed.

When I was in my twenties, still playing football and doing marathons and triathlons and all that youthful stuff, my average pulse was low forties; there was a measuring cuff, a rubber sleeve, at the YMCA where I lifted and worked out, where, on occasion, I could and did descend to the dream state of thirty-five beats per minute. Good writing territory.

That’s no longer the case. This is an essay about grizzly bears and why they matter—not just to me, but to keep the world spinning for all of us, which, as I understand it, is one of the main duties and responsibilities of the gods—not the false gods we’ve created to serve as vessels for our needs and desires, but the real McCoys, the ones who were here before we arrived, and who I would hope will be here after our departure.

I cruise around at seventy heartbeats now. Discouraging, when forty came as easily, and miraculously, as each next breath. And yet: even now, an old man, in search of late-spring and early-summer morels, I take my first step into the old forest that I have loved for decades, and a glance at my watch shows the sweet plummeting of love, back down into the midforties, as if descending into the lovely orange mulch I will soon enough be rejoining. It’s where I most want to be, and a place from which I have been too long absent.

At other times the pulse-o-meter drops wonderfully, precipitously, into the deep thunk of the dreamscape of a story—in the words of George Plimpton, recalling Muhammad Ali’s description of boxers’ concussions that cause them to envision “the Near Room”—a dungeon in which alligators play trombones.

It doesn’t drop quite as far—the mental journey—as it does in the real and the physical. In the writing dream, it only gets down into the low fifties. I take this to mean that the difference between the real and the virtually real is about 10–20 percent. The more you know of the real world, then—the more there are of these anchor points of attachment—the more recklessly you can inhabit your dreamscapes. Eudora Welty was onto this, I think, when she wrote, “A sheltered life can be a daring life.”

Still.

I don’t like writing, someone—maybe Dorothy Parker—said, I like having written.

It was Flannery O’ Connor who said, when asked why she wrote, Because I’m good at it.

Bears are really good at living where they live. They used to be great at living where they lived—in at least the western half of North America, and maybe all of it—but our species has killed their species, either by killing them outright or, more recently, by converting their habitat into unnatural and essentially unrecognizable fragments of ruin. There is nothing about a logging road that is replicated in the wild nature in which bears evolved. There is nothing in nature, other than a volcanic blast, that replicates a clear-cut. We have killed bears steadily, wherever we have encountered them, so that now they live within less than 1 percent of their former range. They are essentially invisible.

Sometimes a careful hiker will see clues that they are still there, proof that such a being is still out there, if no longer in our midst, no longer in our memories or in our own hearts and, who knows, maybe one day no longer even in our dreams. There are still clues, and rumors of sightings. A few twists of hair caught in drops of sunlit amber, where the animal has rubbed its back against a fir tree. Sometimes they do this because they have an itch and at other times—scientists can never be fully sure—to create a signpost for other bears and, I suspect, for humans also: that one has now entered the last homeland of bears, and is advised and encouraged—strongly requested—to behave accordingly.

On the island of Hokkaido in extreme northern Japan, emigration or immigration requires a bear to make but a short swim or walk, depending upon the presence or absence of ice, to reach Russia, and from there another short jaunt, no more taxing than a subway transfer, to North America. On the island of Hokkaido, the Indigenous people—the Ainu, of whom there are still a few dozen remaining—used to make statues of standing bears, deep in the forest, particularly along the Ainu’s own territorial borders. Other peoples around the world used to do the same thing, carving them out of wood or chiseling them from the stone where, I suppose, they were worshipped, reflected upon by solitary hunters; so far back in the mountains, the place where bears are safest and least likely to be killed by interactions with humans. I myself have never come upon such a statue in our forests and mountains—the bears were here before the humans—but wonder if, should our species persevere long enough on this continent, we might one day think to place one or two statues in some special place—maybe not in the heart’s center of their territory, for we have already taken so much from them, but perhaps at the edge of such wild country, as a signpost or other signal that we would welcome their expansion, would welcome their recolonizing their old territory, and that this time we will behave better, will be better neighbors. That we support their need to reconnect with one another. That it was a mistake to set them apart from one another.

God or demigod? I don’t kneel in their presence, but I never move as carefully, or with so much reverence, as when I am breast-stroking into the sun through rain-drip blazing green alder up above five thousand feet in June, the heated breeding season, and the path before me is impressed with their fresh prints and their grass- and deer-fur-wrapped scat, deposited hours or even minutes ago.

I come close to praying. But maybe more than praying, I work. There are so many threats to my valley’s last twenty-five grizzlies. Global warming, and a copper and silver mine proposed beneath the Cabinet Mountains Wilderness Area, which is located in the mountain range to the south, through which Yaak bears would otherwise be able to reach Yellowstone and central Idaho. Also inhibiting bears’ ability to connect is the Burlington Northern Railroad (BN; now Burlington Northern and Santa Fe), with increased traffic hauling coal—coal too dirty to burn in this country—from eastern Montana’s Tongue River Valley to the ports in Seattle and Tacoma, where it is then sold for a penny on the dollar and shipped to China, in the hope that investors can lure Chinese manufacturers into building new coal plants to utilize this subsidized largesse from the United States. (Karl Rove’s Carlisle Group owns the largest reserves of coal in the world, beneath the West’s public lands.) Once China builds their new coal plants, the price of that penny-per-ton dirty coal will, of course, escalate—ka-ching! And in the meantime, there’s a correlative uptick of dead Yaak grizzlies on Warren Buffett’s BN line, should any bears be peppy enough to obey their ancient territorial imperative of dispersing into new country—traveling south to the Cabinet Mountains and Idaho, or north, from Yellowstone and the Bitterroot, up toward the Yaak. (Also correlative, let it not be forgotten, is the rise in pulmonary disease and fatalities in China.)

What is the price of that sweet yellow sweater, that Captain Marvel lunchbox? More than we would be willing to spend, I have to believe, if only the true accounting could be known. More than we could afford. Instead, a great roar of white noise drowns out even the ability to ask or wonder if the cost is greater than the advertised sale. Pick apart any one thing in the universe, wrote John Muir, and find, always, it is inextricably hitched to all else.

So there are a lot of threats against those last twenty-five. But the most imminent threat is a dark-of-the-night legislative rider that authorized, without debate or committee hearing or consultation with the Montana delegation, a high-volume through-hiker trail that would act as a spur trail, a link and connection, between the immensely popular Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) and Continental Divide Trail (CDT). For thirty-two years, the two land management agencies in charge of our national forests and our threatened and endangered species—the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service—opposed the hiking club’s proposal, recognizing it would be expensive but more importantly against the law, in that the proposed route would bisect almost thirty miles of designated core grizzly bear habitat.

There was an independent grizzly bear biologist working in northwest Montana at the time, a big old friendly Santa Claus–looking guy with a surprisingly high voice, Dr. Chuck Jonkel. Let me tell you a little about him. He was a man on fire, a big old roly-poly four-season ball of passion. He changed lives when he was alive, and now from beyond the grave his work is still helping protect a thing he loved perhaps more than all others: grizzly bears.

I have drifted far from one of the early exploratory premises of this essay, that we can change one another, even across interspecies barriers, just by being in close proximity, as if through the heat of our ideas, our dreams. I’m exploring the idea that our dreams can intrude upon reality, can edge into the territory of reality, can come to occupy the territory of reality, like a big old boar grizzly hip-checking a cub away from a moose carcass. For a little while, I got down into the stinkweeds of public policy, down into the sterile limbo land of politics—but Chuck’s passion, which took place out in the field, is still having this effect of transformation, every bit as profound as genetic splicing or procreational mixing.

What a fireball, what a force. He served as on-the-ground ambassador for the bears, the shadow bears that pass back and forth across the international border between Montana and British Columbia. He once cut six hundred pounds of fresh grass from the banks of the Flathead River to rush to a bear being held in a zoo in Seattle, detained there for one bear-ish crime or another. He wanted to use the opportunity to study digestibility coefficients—a chance to feed a bear its native foods and measure calories in and calories out. Chuck Jonkel was a scruffy-looking field guy—there never seemed to be time to shave—and when he passed through the customs gate just before midnight, bleary eyed and salt stained from his day’s labors, and the agent looked at the camper shell on the back of his truck and asked what was inside, Chuck didn’t miss a beat, said, “About six hundred pounds of grass.” The agent stared at him for a moment—Chuck stared back, deadpan—and then the agent waved him on.

Chuck Jonkel started the Wild Parade in Missoula, now an annual street festival where children and adults alike, little pagans all, dress up as their favorite wild animal for one day each year.

He developed bear spray. This in itself would have been more than a lifetime achievement. How many hikers’ lives—how many bears’ lives—have been saved by pepper spray? And how revolutionary is that—to circle back to the topic of Americans and our guns, a nation of pistoleros—to subvert the fucking dominant paradigm, to not shoot and kill a thing of which one is frightened, but to instead preserve it: to send it away, changed, altered, and with both human and bear better for the experience.

He taught wildlife biology at the University of Montana for decades. He took students up to Canada to see polar bears.

He held a bear honoring every spring, when the bears were first coming back to life after their long sleep.

He walked the suburbs at night in Missoula, picking up loose apples that might otherwise lure grizzlies into people’s yards: the reverse of Johnny Appleseed.

Native cultures call the grizzly the real bear. I’d say Dr. Jonkel was a real human.

Best of all, to my thinking, or most pertinent to my home, back in 1978—forty-one years ago now!—Congress directed Dr. Jonkel to make a report assessing the proposed Pacific Northwest Trail. He did, and found that the route the hikers desired would be the absolute worst route for Yaak grizzlies, but—as if knowing, even as a young man, that no work is ever wasted, and that despite being in his prime he would someday grow old and die, which might severely limit his future effectiveness—Dr. Jonkel recommended a scenic southern route that would still please high-volume through-hikers while keeping the bears safe.

When, in 2009, a hiking club finally succeeded in getting Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) to authorize the trail nonetheless—with the senator evidently having been misled into believing there was no science arguing against that route—it was the thin imaginary line, the dream, of Dr. Jonkel’s that endured, giving us hope even now that we can convince Congress to correct their oversight, their mistake.

We pour money and time—our lives and livelihoods—into fighting to move this trail. We’ve hired attorneys, traveled to D.C.—our staff of seven, our board of six volunteers—thirteen people working for five years now, the equivalent of one full human life, sixty-five worker-years—to try to correct something as innocuous and dangerous as a line on a map drawn by a long-ago hiker who did not live here and who chose to ignore or hide the science, for whatever reasons. To try to protect these last twenty-five grizzlies.

There is no end to the shit going on in the world.

I need the dreamscape of fiction.

I also need a wilderness with grizzlies still in it—to wander off-trail on certain days, not in a floating cloud or bubble of trail buddies, a roving pack of others of my kind with nicknames, trail names, ten or twenty strong, but moving quietly, slowly. Noticing every breath of breeze, every molecule of scent. Praying, I guess you could call it. Listening. Looking. Knowing—believing—knowing—that the thing you most need and yet cannot see is out there, nonetheless. (Developing such a mind, such a spirit, is probably very good training for becoming a writer.)

It’s the summer solstice. The mountains are flooded with light. Snow remains at the highest elevations. I continue to feel wracked by my biological and neurological destiny—to write stories, tell stories, inhabit dreams—which is in conflict with my heart, my desire to serve a greater good and—I believe this—a greater being. Beauty incarnate; beauty in motion across a beloved and singular landscape. Twenty-five beauties.

What good is a grizzly? Even if years or decades hence scientists do discover that the germination of huckleberry seeds requires ingestion by the very grizzlies that, like gardeners, broadcast those seeds in the most favorable locations for the berries’ survival—those curious and just-right places on the landscape with the thus far immeasurable differences between pockets of cool air and warm, and a certain geometric arrangement, like a composition between shadow and sun, at a certain time of year, and a certain soil chemistry, a certain enzyme in the guts of grizzlies, which they each and all twenty-five of them carry around within them like a fire in the horn—even if all these things and more are discovered, I would say they need no reason; for if we judge them thus, how can we avoid asking ourselves the same question? And what would our answer be? Surely to make beauty is all we really have to offer—and thin soup, that, against the majesty of what is already here, was already here before us.

The fight has gotten into my head. I read all the self-help articles that come into my watch—the silent counsel of Siri and Alexa, who listen to my own silent turmoil as they chart the wild metrics of my pulse, my sleep and my sleeplessness, my self-medication, my binge-hikes back into the wilderness. Indeed, the frenzy of my activism is destroying my inner capacity for wisdom or even peace. The peace that is wisdom. I know too much to be calm, or if not too much then more than I want to know or need to know, to be a good writer.

What does one really need to know, to be a good writer? Definitely, less is more. I was born into the tribe of Welty, Munro, Cheever, Updike, and of Wolff, Beattie and Moore and Carver—but have allowed myself to be seduced, brainwashed, recruited by anger, fear, fury: all waste, right, when the dirt is piled atop one—the dirt from which there will be no springtime reemergence.

I’ve trafficked in novels but what my brain and being were made for was, still is, short stories and novellas. I want to make something beautiful. I don’t want to be a soldier. Because I love what I love, I’ll be the best I can be. But approaching the age of sixty-two I am beginning to be keenly aware of what a waste it is. Or what a waste it seems. I do believe no work is ever wasted. Wasted is too strong, too bitter a word. Still: this is the first year of my life in which I have to honestly say, I have left stories unwritten. I have given away much. Youthful time is cheap. I would encourage all young writers to write like there is no tomorrow.

And yet, like a life possessed, a life squandered can be wonderful also. In the Yaak, it’s exquisitely lonely. No help is coming. There are twenty-five of them, and I fear in a perverse way that my fate and theirs are strangely connected. If we lose even one female every other year—not every year, but every twenty-four months—the Yaak subpopulation will be extinct within twenty years.

“Lord, let me die,” writes the American poet James Dickey in “For the Last Wolverine,” “but not die Out.”

The closing in and connecting of full circles. In college, in Utah, I studied wildlife science and geology; took one essay elective, and one Appreciation of the Short Story class in which, to give a sense of how undialed-in I was to writing, whenever the prof waxed rhapsodic about Flaubert, I thought—this was in the strange new western landscape of Utah, mind you, not Texas, where I’d grown up—he was speaking of a highly revered but intensely local Native American chieftain and evidently consummate storyteller, with the curious name of Flow Bear.

My professor in wildlife science was Dr. Barrie Gilbert—then a young man who in 1977 was attacked by a female grizzly with cubs in Yellowstone. Over nine hundred stitches and two quarts of blood and one year later, he was teaching me and now—where have forty-plus years gone?—has written a singular and revolutionary book, One of Us, about his experiences with grizzlies, and specifically about how some populations learn to move quietly and unobtrusively, becoming smaller, living up high in marginal habitat. Nocturnal secretive nonconformers who, though being much like us, and vice versa, survive by staying away from us.

The Yaak is nothing if not a landscape constructed of dreams and ghosts. The Yaak, like a bear itself, once rested beneath two or more miles of thick blue ice pressing down on the bowl of this low valley, this garden-to-be, even as the rest of the West, far above, clattered and groaned and shrieked with the retreat of the last Ice Age. Glaciers screeching and carving the most amazing peaks. The high winds of the cordillera scrubbing the newly exposed cliff faces. Hawks and eagles wheeling in circles, in sky-sentences, above the blue ice that remained, trapped, like a lake of blue fog, a lake of blue ice: the land that would become our home.

Finally—a couple of thousand years later than the rest of the West—the Yaak emerged from its den. Bears that had been walking above the thinning ice now moved through its then-nascent old-growth forests, flipping logs and boulders still cold from the ice, looking for beetles, ants, tiny rootlets of grass. Fire would eventually come to the valley, in flickers and tongues, but mostly it was rot. And the fuel for rot: a riot of life.

Glacier lilies, yarrow, hedysarum, angelica: a vegetarian’s feast. Berries. Buffaloberry serviceberry huckleberry chokecherry kinnikinnick. The bears tended to the garden. Nothing exists long without the support of another thing.

Then came the roads, then came the schools—then came the churches, then came the rules. To the best of my knowledge, native cultures never lived up here year-round, but instead lived down along the Kootenai River, a fish culture, coming up into the valley in the summer and fall to hunt woodland caribou, in the old forests of larch and cedar, and mountain goats—all gone now, ghosts.

The Forest Service, my nemesis in war and in peace, bulldozed ten thousand miles or more of logging roads on the Kootenai, clear-cutting so fast to feed the mills—ghosts themselves, now—that they couldn’t remember which places on their maps still had trees and which did not. Phantom forests, the legal experts called them. Picture the old filmstrips showing calendar pages flipping past in a fast-motion whir. Under pressure from the courts, the Forest Service put up gates to prevent people from cruising those ten thousand miles of roads with guns, shooting at bears and other wildlife and in general disrupting what had always before been a pretty quiet place, the wilderness.

Many of the grizzlies fled north to Canada, where they met a fate no different than had they stayed. And the gates were easy to drive around—ghost gates, protecting ghost bears that inhabit ghost forests.

When I write, I inhabit the dreamscapes of fiction, comprising ghosts and ideas, and yet even when I emerge from that lowermost place and run to join the fight above, I find myself still amid ghosts. Even the names of things in this newer, younger place—the Yaak Valley—are the names of the often invisible or unseen, described in a lexicon that suggests they might not even really have a true identity, residing instead in artifice and otherworldliness, or diminishment. False azalea, false morels. False hellebore. Lewis’s mock orange. Least weasel.

One thing is not false or invisible or ghostly or lesser, yet: the presence of those last twenty-five grizzlies. I often suspect our two species, bears and humankind, are linked in ways we don’t even fully know, but again so much so that one might as easily ask, What good are humans? For surely the answer veers quickly to the spiritual, rather than the economical or even what is termed ecosystem services (filtration of air and water, recycling and redistributing of carbon and other nutrients, etc.).

Grizzly bears help define us as a species. In Montana, they have the opportunity to help shape us as a culture. It is good to have other sentient beings in the forest, beings that are more powerful and more deeply established than we are. What else is this but a primary lesson in humility for us, the most recent experiment and offshoot of the ancient and still-living tree of life?

I have a secret, wrote the poet H.D.; I am alive. The writer or person who knows something has a secret: she or he is alive.

Sally Matsuishi, the executive director of Next Generation Scholars, says of writing that “radical care is a form of wildness. It is all we really have to break the reader’s heart.” She says there is no more radical political act than to inhabit the life of another being. Inhabit, please, in your minds and hearts, a race of grizzlies living on the island of the Yaak—one of the last places where the ice remained during the last episode of global warming, even after global warming had come and gone.

Slowly, the Yaak stirred: loosened boulders that clattered like dice thrown by the retreating flanks of that cold ice, blue as an old man’s or an old woman’s eyes. The Yaak slept still, as if in hibernation, holding the last of the ice, the bowl of the Yaak being compressed, metamorphosed, transformed, beneath all that weight. Finally, however, it too emerged, as the last ice melted and flowed to the Pacific, to the north and west, following the trail of the Kootenai River, to the Columbia.

Down from the north, a unique clade of grizzly bears tumbled into the valley where they find themselves now surrounded. Their alpine meadows, the tops of bare ridges in the Yaak, are only a few acres in size—sometimes little larger than the lawn of a rich person’s home in a gated community, or even in the burbs. The mother bears with their young rototill and aerate these small gardens for each day’s sustenance; afterward they sleep with their noses pointed to the wind coming from those tiny meadows. They hear no hikers, no bells; they scent no campfires. They exist, and wait, for a radical act.