Introduction
“Hey, Jack, come check this out.”
At my companion’s urging, I poke my head from the zippered door of a backpacking tent deep in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness in Montana. It has snowed overnight, one of the hazards of camping in the high-elevation portions of the wilderness in September. I pull on my boots and a jacket and then scramble out of the tent. The sky above is blue and unclouded, the ground beneath my feet carpeted in 2 inches of snow. Weathered alpine grass pokes from the pale mantle. The gnarled evergreens behind our camp droop with snowflakes, sparkling, pure, and cheerful in the day’s first bashful rays of sunlight.
As beautiful and pristine as are the surroundings, it isn’t the scenery that Brad is so impatient to show me. Waving his arm from the open meadow 100 yards from our tent, he beckons me with an expression somewhere between a smile and a scowl. I jog toward him, noticing a line of tracks leading from the edge of the timber across the clearing. Silently he points at the prints. They appear somewhat similar to fat, barefoot tracks of a human, but one feature indelibly sets these apart from the footprints of any naked, deranged individual cavorting about the alpine zone in a snowstorm at 2 a.m. In front of the toes on the prints are claw marks measuring several inches in length. The identity of the nighttime visitor is obvious. Our camp was closely bypassed by a grizzly bear.
But the bruin had no interest in us, or in the food cache we suspended from a tree 150 yards from our camp, although with its keen sense of smell it was most certainly aware of the presence of both. Instinctively I shiver, with both fascination and fear.
Grizzly bears arouse similar emotions in other humans to whom they are known. Many of the terrors and trepidations aroused by these indomitable predators are unfounded or greatly overestimated. However, only a fool treads unthinkingly into their domain without a large measure of respect and preparation. For a century or more, grizzly bears in North America have been maligned and misunderstood. Misinformation has been haphazardly distributed by both individuals who would have people believe grizzlies are bloodthirsty man-eaters and those who have falsely portrayed them as gentle giants. I offer this book in hopes that it will expand both your appreciation for and knowledge of these iconic creatures of the American wilderness.
The author would like to thank Jamie Jonkel, bear biologist with the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, & Parks for reviewing and making helpful suggestions on the manuscript.