The Gift of Grizzly Bears
An encounter with grizzly bears was an opportunity for Charlotte McGuinn Freeman ’85 to consider the relationship between human animals and apex predators living in the same part of the world.
We were at my partner’s cabin on the lower slopes of Emigrant Peak, about 20 miles as the crow flies north of Yellowstone National Park, sitting on the screen porch and enjoying one of the first cool evenings. It had taken until late October for the warm weather to subside. I’ve been here about 25 years, he’s been here nearly 40, and we’ve watched the summers get hotter and drier until now they stretch into October. That evening though, it was lovely, with the temps dropping into the low 70s. We were waiting for the bats that live in the shed to come out. The Bat Show we call it, watching their nightly shenanigans, zooming millimeters away from the porch screens, scooping up insects attracted by the light.
That’s when we heard the noise. Almost like the falling croak of a nightjar, but louder. And it didn’t sound like a bird. We looked around. Everything seemed normal, but I got up to bring Hank the dog in off the front doorstep just in case. As I came back onto the porch, I caught something out of the corner of my eye, off to the right, something large and black.
And then it moved. “Bear!” I hollered. And then it was two bears. No, three! As the bears separated and turned toward us, it was clear they were not only three bears, but three grizzly bears. In our yard. An adult grizzly with two subadult cubs, maybe 100 yards away, on the other side of the irrigation ditch. I grabbed the binoculars from where they hang on a nail. We handed them back and forth, watching as one by one they hopped the barbed wire fence (well, one sort of blooped through the wires, and got stuck for a minute). Then they disappeared behind a rise.
Credit: Charlotte McGuinn Freeman ’85About five minutes later, we saw them ambling up the neighbors’ driveway. Our cabin is at the end of the road in a rural subdivision. Lots are 20 acres minimum, and these neighbors have a big second (or maybe third) home on a large parcel of land uphill and to the north of us. They’d left a couple of weeks back, which was probably for the best, as the bears seemed to be heading for the remnant apple orchard in their front yard. They seemed to know there was an orchard over there, and the smallest bear, who was the size of a fully-grown black bear, was bouncing along up the driveway, like a kid going for ice cream. A white-tailed doe saw them coming and hightailed it out over the jackleg fence. We watched them until it got too dark to see anymore.
All summer, I’d been reading a French philosopher, Baptiste Morizot, who posits that for most contemporary first-world people, “Being at home is being able to live without paying attention … to be able to operate everywhere, in any place, despite one’s ignorance, quite carelessly, i.e., without knowing a place and its inhabitants.” However, one thing you learn from living a long time in a place where you are not the highest creature on the food chain is to pay attention. You pick up a sense of pattern recognition. You learn to notice the unusual noise, to recognize the unfamiliar shape. We’ve seen a lot of animals up here over the decades. A cow-calf herd of elk hangs out in the yard most of the winter, in numbers that vary from 20 to 1,000.
We’ve seen only one grizzly on our game cameras but a number of black bears, and for a couple of years, there was a very large, very handsome male mountain lion who’d stroll through in the middle of the night. Coyotes use our driveway as a road on the regular, and once in a great while, a wolf will show up. But three grizzly bears, a big sow, her very large cub, and a smaller cub all emerging from the irrigation ditch? That was unprecedented.
The gift of grizzly bears in the yard is the way it wakes you up.
Although they hung around our neighborhood for only about a week, I carried bear spray for most of the autumn when I took Hank out to do his business. Even all these months later, when I walk him down the driveway in the mornings, I can still envision them, those three bears, nearly liquid in their movements, gigantic and powerful, three animals who could have killed any or all of us, but who chose not to. I can still see them emerging from the irrigation ditch a few mornings later, while we were drinking coffee on the porch. That sow on the driveway looking right at us, taking charge of a space we’ve always thought of as ours. She made it very clear. It was her ditch, her mountain, her apple orchard, and her two big cubs backing her up.
Credit: Charlotte McGuinn Freeman ’85
Writing about animal encounters is tricky, because frankly we humans are weird about animals. Especially about the apex predators that we live with here — grizzlies, mountain lions, and wolves (also black bears, bobcats, and coyotes). Too many people are terrified that these animals even exist. There’s a woman I used to see dog walking, the wife of a rich Texan whose living room, rumor had it, was decorated with an entire pack of taxidermied wolves. One morning I ran into her and she was all freaked out. She showed me a picture on her phone of two guys holding up a large dead mountain lion. Her husband had given them permission to hunt on their land, and she was terrified that the gigantic cat had been up there. “Connie!” I said. “You’ve been living with that lion for years now! Did it ever bother you?” She had to admit it hadn’t.
For many people, most perhaps, it’s normal to try to kill what they’re afraid of, even when it isn’t bothering them. Even when what they fear is other people. People round up those who are different because they’re afraid of them. Under a regime that’s turning guns on its own people, is it any surprise they’re trying to remove wolves and grizzly bears from protected species lists and turning a blind eye to poaching?
Two days later, my partner told me the bears had been in the alfalfa field under the big cottonwoods when he drove in. They were agitated, he said. He stopped for only a minute to watch them because they were so upset. The fact that they were hanging around was both very cool and a little worrisome. For us, and for them.
They were fugitives. Too close to houses. Too close to livestock. If they got in someone’s trash or chicken coop, if they drew the attention of the authorities, the best they could hope for was relocation. The worst, a death sentence.
How we think about animals is how we think about the world. That I’ve been thinking and writing about the natural world and animals for nearly 40 years, is in large part due to Beloit College. I transferred in after being told by the University of Illinois that I couldn’t do environmental studies and writing because they were in two different colleges. When I told John Rosenwald in my transfer interview what I wanted to do, he said, “That sounds really interesting, what can we do to help?” In my three years at Beloit, I spent a summer in northern Minnesota in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area at the Wilderness Field Station learning field biology, and I went to Dublin to read James Joyce’s Ulysses. This was never a contradiction. Eventually, I wound up in the masters program at UC Davis, where I helped run a summer writer’s workshop called The Art of the Wild, and then I did a doctorate in creative writing at the University of Utah. All along the way, I was following those trails I’d set out on at Beloit, trails that meandered between art and science, literature and wilderness.
Credit: Charlotte McGuinn Freeman ’85The habits of curiosity and scholarship I learned at Beloit mean that even all these years after I left academia, I’m reading people like Baptiste Morizot and still thinking and writing about how we can build better stories between humans and other-than-humans. I’ve been dog-earing and underlining his book Ways of Being Alive, which outlines the roots of the dualistic thinking that hinders our ability to work relationally with the natural world and shows how false the very idea of “the natural world” is. We all live in one world, a world of animals and viruses and oceans and rivers and mountains and forests and cities. As my grad school mentor Gary Snyder wrote 30 years ago, there is “No Nature.” It’s all one living breathing world, a world in which — as Gary’s beloved Dõgen, the eleventh-century Zen monk, observed — the mountains and rivers are endlessly walking.
Morizot proposes that the way to escape the trap of the human/ nature, civilization/wilderness dualism that governs our relationships with animals is to reject the notion that dominating the environment is acceptable and to recognize that we live in an interdependent ecosystem. For Morizot, the philosophical figure of The Diplomat, a figure he inherits from Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers, demonstrates how we might begin to communicate and negotiate across species. Diplomacy, for Morizot, is not the process of the powerful coercing the lesspowerful to concede, but rather, a process that involves multiple actors, each of whose interests must be fully taken into account. He cites the example of the interspecies diplomacy that conservation groups are using to navigate the age-old problem of wolves and sheep. Wolves have been reintroduced to the Pyrenees, and just as here in the Rocky Mountain West, reducing wolf-sheep conflict means using large-breed guardian dogs, electric fencing, and human attention. These are systems that require pastoralists to give up the idea that they “own” the high mountain pastures and require people who value apex predators to get involved in helping shepherds protect their flocks. It is a web of multispecies diplomacy that brings other-than-human species into negotiation with different groups of humans who also have varying values and priorities.
So where does this leave us and our trio of grizzly bears? Diplomacy in this case meant keeping out of the bears’ way, not ratting them out to the authorities, and stowing our trash cans in the shed while they were in the neighborhood. In this particular case, the bears seemed to understand their role in these diplomatic relations. Those three bears walked right past our garbage cans and right past my elderly herding dog on the doorstep. In our only photo of the grizzlies, taken on the game cam, they are crossing the yard while my partner was in between trips packing up his car.
Diplomacy meant that while those bears were seen all over the valley, for the first time in the 25 years I’ve lived here, there were no calls to kill them or even to relocate them. The stories came out only after the bears had gone safely on their way. A woman at the vet’s office told me they’d cleaned out her apple trees, which was a favor, since she’d already canned more quarts of applesauce than she could possibly use over the winter. A friend saw them in Tom Miner Basin, digging wild caraway roots. Finally, about three weeks after we hosted them, someone posted that they were back in Yellowstone National Park, where at least we all knew they were safe from hunters, if not from vehicles.
This outbreak of human-wild diplomacy didn’t just happen. It’s the result of at least 30 years of work by the constellation of organizations in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, the result of decades of education about living with predators. Diplomacy requires that we live in a state of attention, even on the first cool evening of autumn, when you’re just hanging out on the back porch. It means knowing the regular noises well enough to recognize a change in the pattern.
We’re all too aware of the arguments against liberal arts education these days, but if there’s an argument to be made in its favor, I’d claim it’s that an education like the one we all experienced at Beloit College. An education based on curiosity and attention is the bedrock of a diplomatic approach to the world, whether we’re negotiating with animals, or tech, or one another. It’s the way we can learn to pay attention, to be good neighbors, to take care of one another.
Charlotte McGuinn Freeman ’85 is the author of Place Last Seen (Picador, 2000). A graduate of the University of California Davis and University of Utah creative writing programs, she’s been published in Dark Mountain, Big Sky Journal, Terrain.org, Montana Quarterly and Best American Food Writing. She lives in Livingston, Montana, where she is working on a memoir, Wilderness of Bones.
