One With the Tiger. Steven Church
hunting for humans, not even killing because he thinks he can eat the human. That comes afterward. Usually a grizzly attacks because it is protecting its young or guarding a recent kill—often a moose calf or caribou or some other ungulate it has run down; grizzlies are rarely predatory toward humans. They simply don’t often see us as food. We’re too much work. Too noisy and weird. We’re all limbs and skin—like brightly colored flightless birds awkwardly shuffling through the brush. We’re hardly worth the effort, so little meat compared to other animals; and besides all that, we often try to shoot them, spray them with pepper spray, or otherwise antagonize them.
Fatal bear attacks are actually extremely rare; but unfortunately such attacks are more common in the lower forty-eight states than in places like Canada and Alaska, mainly because there are more people, and bears have, in some places, learned to associate humans with food. When attacks do occur, bears that kill and partially eat people are typically then killed, sometimes because they hang around the area, protecting their food, sometimes because they can’t get away fast enough.
These bears are killed because they’ve now developed a taste for human flesh and see humans as a food source and could, thus, become predacious; and if an apex predator who lives in proximity to humans decides to hunt them, there is little that can be done to stop it, aside from killing that predator.
Survival is a wild bear’s only imperative; and they’re mostly unconcerned with our reasons for being in their proximity. Bears who attack humans are sometimes killed to confirm identity, necropsied and examined for evidence; and they are killed for revenge, killed because a bear can’t often kill a human without paying for it, even if a bear is just doing what bears do—operating on instinct, or even if it’s just a bear unlucky enough to be in the same area. One attack at Glacier National Park prompted the killing of five bears before it was believed they finally shot the one responsible.
I thought I might ask the student reporters if they knew this. I thought I might ask if they knew whether the bear that killed Janey had been found, and if it had been killed. Sometimes they have to open the bear up and look inside his stomach to be sure they got the right one.
“There’s the answer to your questions,” I’d say. “You have to look inside the bear.”
Q: Mr. Haas, can you describe what you saw when you emerged from the cave?
Shadows mostly. The light seemed like it had been sucked out of the sky. I heard voices.
The hikers who found you?
Sure. The hikers.
Anything else that you remember?
Have you ever seen those Buddhist prayer flags? You know the colorful ones hanging from a rope? The tent looked like that. It was kind of spread out across the alder, all torn up.
Were you able to locate Ms. Craighead?
I like that movie, Apocalypse Now. You know the scene I’m talking about. That one with Brando and Sheen where Brando is telling him, “You must make a friend of the horror.” That’s such a great scene . . .
Mr. Haas?
I can’t do it. I can’t make a friend of that horror, not those images. I can’t give them to you. Not yet.
MY SIDE OF THE MOUNTAIN
I realized at some point during preparation for my role as Steven Haas that Janey Craighead, my camping partner and the sole fatal victim of the bear attack, also happened to share a name with Jean Craighead George, the author of the 1959 young adult novel, My Side of the Mountain, a book largely responsible—in a somewhat indirect way—for my own trip to Glacier National Park and Denali National Park in Alaska in 1995 and for my preoccupation with a life of solitude in the wilderness.
At the age of eleven or seventeen, if you’d asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would’ve probably answered, “River raft guide or maybe a hermit in the woods.”
It was Craighead’s story of Sam Gribley, who chooses to leave his large family and society in search of a solitary life in the woods that probably ignited much of my fascination with a solitary life in the woods. Sam carves a home in a hollowed-out tree and keeps a peregrine falcon named “Frightful,” and this seemed like a pretty good plan to me.
Hovel in the woods? Check.
Animal for a best friend? Check.
I believe it may be books like Craighead’s or Walt Morey’s books, and later work from Edward Abbey and Jon Krakauer that inspire people like Christopher McCandless to actualize the fantasy, to break the chains of family, society, and home, and to leap into the wild; and I can’t deny that I always found these stories undeniably compelling.
I don’t mean to blame these books or authors, but rather to suggest that what makes them powerful and enduring works of art is that they tap into a deep and elemental desire of many people, especially it seems of young men in their twenties and thirties—that prototypical western drive to test oneself against nature, as if there is something hormonal or physiological about this drive, as if it’s in our marrow and coursing through our DNA. Hell, I had plans. And I shared these plans with anyone who would listen, including my girlfriend.
Craighead’s book (and Morey’s Gentle Ben) certainly planted the seed for me, and Jon Krakauer probably nurtured it. My writing mentor in graduate school told me that nearly every semester he teaches Krakauer’s Into the Wild, the perhaps largely imagined and embellished story of the life and death of Christopher McCandless, one or more young men in the class experience a kind of breakdown, sometimes even disappearing from class and school altogether, stepping away from life much as McCandless did and run for the hills. He tells me he has to be careful with that book.
He tells me that it is a dangerous book.
I love this idea. Because I think I’ve felt that urge, too. And that book is dangerous—a hypnotic essaying of this urge that so many young men seem to feel, a book that is both warning and siren call to chase the wild.
I’d already read Krakauer’s 1993 piece on McCandless from Outside magazine, “Death of an Innocent,” when, in 1995, after my graduation from college with a degree in philosophy, my girlfriend and I drove from Kansas to Denali National Park in Alaska. I knew we were going where the bears are as big as Volkswagen Beetles. I knew McCandless had died not far from Denali, but I didn’t really know where. I knew also that part of Krakauer’s mission in the article, and later in the book, was to normalize this urge to disappear into the wilderness and to rescue McCandless from a simplistic understanding of his death.
That first night, after we set up camp in a stiff wind, I pulled out my map and studied it for a while in the tent. It took me a while to see the full picture, but I eventually realized that we were camped on a ridge above the valley where McCandless lived and died in an abandoned bus. I hadn’t planned this. Or had I? When we picked up our backcountry permit, we’d taken one of the only quadrants left available that had any elevation. We’d just climbed to the top of the ridge and picked a spot to pitch our tent.
The next day we hiked up and peered down into a vast stretch of trees and green bogs, and I saw the river that, swollen with runoff, had supposedly prevented McCandless from making it out when he’d finally realized he needed help. On the map I saw the hand-crank ferry that could have saved him if he’d only known about it, if only he’d walked a few hundred yards farther upstream. At some point between the looking glass and the map, I realized I was staring into a future book, a kind of alternate reality, and perhaps into my own possible future.
Between Krakauer and Craighead, I found literary inspiration for my own engagement with the wild, my own desire to lose myself in bear country. What I didn’t realize some twelve years later as I was preparing to pretend to be a bear-attack survivor was that Jean Craighead was the younger sister of pioneering grizzly bear researchers,