In Defense of Fear:
Finding a Place for Large Carnivores in the American Psyche
It has become dreadfully cliché among writers to exclaim how once having met the grizzly on its home turf, one never again looks at the country in the same way. But there are only so many ways to dress up the same naked truth of that statement, and no honest way to omit it, so I’ll simply repeat the mantra.
- William Stolzenburg
I was doing everything wrong. To begin with, I was breaking the first tenant of wilderness safety, hiking alone, and, amplifying my error, I was hiking alone in bear country. There are precious few places in the lower forty-eight that can still be classed ‘bear country’, but I was surely in one of them: Glacier National Park, in northwestern Montana. I was on the east side of the park, hiking along Lake Josephine. There are certain suggestions, if not rules, about hiking in bear country. The first is to travel in groups. I was obviously not doing so. The next is to make ample noise, alerting any nearby grizzlies to the presence of a human, and many hikers employ bear bells for this purpose, small jingle bells worn on the body to herald the approach of a homo sapien. I found the bells noisome and intrusive; I wore none. I sang, occasionally, and shouted out half-heartedly from time to time “hey bear, Hey Bear!”, but the sound of my own single voice in all that wild expanse seemed somehow discourteous. More often than not, I walked in silence, trusting my all too human ears. I carried bear spray, a noxious and potent version of pepper spray, holstered like a pistol on my hip, but my faith in the lone, small canister was tenuous at best. There’s a Montana aphorism that goes something like this: ‘how can you identify grizzly shit? It smells like pepper and has bells in it’.
Like most gallows humor, the joke has dark truth at its heart. It bespeaks a sort of fatalism that one must eventually adopt in the face of something as powerful as a grizzly bear. Against seven hundred pounds of instinct, hunger, and muscle, the best of human cunning and artifice often amounts to little. Tiny brass bells and weaponized hot sauce can only ever offer so much security. To be out amongst grizzlies is to be, ultimately, in danger.
It was a conscious choice on my part to put myself in that danger. I was not hiking out of recklessness or with a thrill-seeker’s half-hidden death wish, but out of a measured need to be, for perhaps the first time, a second tier player in the food chain. I wanted, in some inexpressible part of my mind, to surrender myself up to a newly felt, deeply rooted fear. I wanted to feel, for a moment, what it was to be prey. I would get my wish.
The fear I sought was a fear familiar to our ancestors, a fear deeply ingrained within us still. Even after lowering themselves from the trees, the first early human forbearers had to contend themselves with the large carnivores of the African savannah. The lions, leopards, and hyenas that shared the grasslands with the new walking apes found little distinction between them and any other living meal; the infancy of our species was spent as prey. An australopithecine skull recovered from a bone-strewn cave on the edge of the Kalahari bears the all too evident marks of a violent death. The skull, that of a child, is pierced almost methodically at the braincase and cracked along the base of the cranium, just as modern-day baboon skulls are often found to be damaged. The holes match up almost perfectly to the talons of the protohuman’s killer. The murderer was an African crowned eagle. Our ancestor’s flesh was the eagle’s feast.
Yet all too quickly, early man began to push back against his predatory antagonists. Armed with stone, brain, and fire, man first defended himself, and then drove away killers from their own kills. Man became a scavenger, then a hunter in his own right, spreading out across the globe. The fear of the predator, which still lay in the primate mind of humanity, became twisted into hatred and contempt. With spear, bow, musket, and deadfall, man began to take a prey’s revenge on his tormentor, almost methodically. The slaughter reached its bloody pinnacle on the continent of North America.
In the Americas, European colonists found a host of carnivores, both those familiar, and novel. While wolves had long been hated and hunted in the Old World, Europe had nothing to match the stealthy prowling of the mountain lion or the sheer brute force of the grizzly bear, Ursus arctos horribilis. Presented with these predatory affronts to their God-given right of dominion, Europeans began exterminating large carnivores with a gusto unmatched in human history. With rifles, steel leg traps, and strychnine-laced, airplane-dropped tallow balls, humans butchered everything from foxes to wolverines to eagles. The death toll was, and continues to be, staggering. Nearly 100,000 coyotes alone are still killed annually in the contiguous United States, ostensibly in the name of livestock protection. From its historic range, which stretched from Mexico to Alaska and from the Pacific to the Mississippi, the grizzly bear was driven North, retreating into the Canadian Rockies, holding on by razor thin margins in isolated pockets such as Yellowstone National Park. Although featured prominently on the flag of California, the grizzly was wiped out of the state. In the lower forty-eight, the species retained barely one or two percent of its former range. For some humans, even that was too much.
And yet, slowly, almost glacially, some Americans’ attitudes began to change. In the absence of large predators, their necessity became apparent. Predators were examined for the first time from a scientific perspective, and throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first century, more and more evidence began to mount up in defense of the role carnivores played in maintaining ecosystem health. One of the earliest and most vocal champions of the predator was Aldo Leopold, a wildlife manager and a convert, who, in his early days, had been a leading proponent of predator removal. In his seminal essay ‘Thinking Like a Mountain’, Leopold describes, perhaps with poetic license, his own shooting of a she-wolf in the American southwest. As he watched “a fierce green fire dying in her eyes”, Leopold came to realize the wolves’ importance in the landscape. Years earlier, he had seen with his own eyes the effects of removing predators from the land.
On the Kaibab Plateau in Arizona, all the native wolves, cougars, and coyotes had been extirpated, leaving only an unchecked population of mule deer. In the absence of natural predation, the deer population exploded, first denuding the earth of all edible plants, and then crashing in short order. Thousands of deer died slow and awful deaths of starvation and disease. Leopold carried with him the unpleasant sight of skeletal mule deer too weak to stand. He came to realize how crucial a role predators actually played in keeping both their prey and habitat healthy. To think like a mountain was to appreciate the importance of every piece in the complex ecosystem, even those pieces with the most fearsome of teeth and claws.
Leopold’s theory was born out again and again by evidence gathered under scientific conditions. On predator-free islands in a man-made lake in Venezuela, howler monkeys and leaf-cutter ants ate their jungle to ruins. In the eastern United States, without wolves or mountain lions, whitetail deer numbers bloomed to unheard of levels, munching away the diverse plant life of the hardwood forests and leaving only ferns and feces. Most notably, the reintroduction in the mid-1990s of the gray wolf to Yellowstone, after nearly sixty years of absence, was followed by a remarkable transformation. Elk and moose, long allowed to linger and over-browse aspen groves, were re-acquainted with their former fear, forced to move from food source to food source instead of grazing patches of brush down to stubs. As the aspen regenerated, streamside erosion lessened. Beavers returned. Wildflowers sprang up anew, unmolested by the constant cropping of ungulate teeth. Ravens, golden eagles, even bears proliferated, fed on newly available wolf-killed carrion. Even songbirds, nesting in the re-grown aspen thickets, began to appear in greater and greater numbers. All this took place in the span of a mere five or so years. In Yellowstone, the return of the wolves was trumpeted with birdsong, and garlanded with wildflower blossoms.
Yet science will only take us so far. Although the need for large carnivores in ecosystems is now a scientifically provable fact, the survival of predators, particularly the man-eating kind, will never be merely a scientific matter. Rather, their survival hinges on the all too ethereal nature of the human spirit. To speak of Americans specifically for a moment, we, as a people, need to see if we have the capacity in ourselves to live with large predators, to allow them to live. Certainly many among us do not; hatred of wolves, bears, cougars, even coyotes, is as virulent today in some places as it ever was. In Alaska, rifle-armed sharpshooters in bush-planes continue to kill wolves in a misguided attempt to keep game species such as caribou safe. Our tax dollars fund the effort.
Yet it’s fairly easy for most compassionate Americans to decry such a situation. It is, after all, distant, almost theoretical. It’s much more difficult to embrace carnivores when they begin to return to your own back yard. In some parts of the country, southern California, the Northeast, this issue is coming to the fore, as mountain lions stalk joggers and black bears re-colonize suburban New Jersey. People who never expected to are having to face the prospect, infinitely slight though it may be, that they will encounter in their daily lives something that could kill them, and perhaps wants to. Such a concern should not be taken lightly. Fear of the carnivore is one of the most deeply ingrained in the human psyche; it’s why we jump when we see something move suddenly in our peripheral vision. And though the chances of once more becoming prey in the modern world are almost negligible, the actual horror of a predator attack shouldn’t be glossed over either. Consider the following account of a grizzly mauling, almost salacious in its details, yet all too real:
The bear quickly dropped onto four legs and ran after and attacked Cohoe, who was still running. Within seconds the huge bear clasped its powerful jaws around Cohoe’s face and bit. Cohoe screamed and within a minute or two the bear attacked twice more. Late the next morning the investigative team at the mauling site found fishing gear and the upper part of Cohoe’s jaw and mouth with nine teeth, his nose, and a large piece of his cheek. About a week later Cohoe died from his injuries.
Our fears are there for a reason. But perhaps it’s time to embrace them. We live daily in a world unfathomably more dangerous that the lion-thick Serengeti or the grizzly haunted McKinley Range. A lone tractor-trailer on the highway can with a single motion kill more people that have been killed by cougars and bears combined in the past fifty years. Our fear of the beast is not misplaced, simply out of proportion.
It’s time to accept fear, to be washed in it, to remember what it was to be less than godly in our dealings with the natural world. Now more than ever, we need a touch of that humbleness which fear brings. We need to see ourselves, at last, as part of the natural order rather than usurpers of it. If placing ourselves willingly, daringly, back in the food chain is the way to change our perceptions, then so be it. The world needs our perceptions changed. The large predators of this planet are important, crucial in ways that we are only now beginning to understand, now that we have done so much to expunge them from the face of the earth. It’s time to allow the carnivore back into our lives, to live alongside them, to accept the danger of it. To accept that beauty, order, birdsong and wildflower all must in some way come with risk. To walk carefully, with the hairs on the napes of our necks standing, and our hearts beating wildly in our chests.
In Glacier, I hiked alone, and almost died for it. Rounding a bend in the trail, along the shore of Lake Josephine, I came upon two feeding grizzlies. I had been too quiet, and the bears, who should normally avoid humans if forewarned, had not heard my approach until too late. As I rounded the bend, I heard them first, grunts so low as to be felt, tectonically, in my gut. Brown masses rising in the brush, twenty or thirty yards off the trail to my right. Everything clenchable in me clenched, everything paused — and after but a second or two the bears fell back to browsing on the hillside. I could hear their long, finger-sized claws raking through the rocky soil, a hollow, scraping sound. I was that close. My breath whistled in and out of my nostrils, my jaw ached, set as tightly as it was. I was terrified.
But I waited there. I began to talk to the bears, little nothings said only to let them know I was a human, and still down there behind them. They kept clawing up the earth, grubbing for Glacier lily bulbs in the spring morning sunlight. I sweated, and my knees, honestly, were weak. But I was enthralled too. I was held entranced by the rippling of heavy muscles beneath their brown coats, by the size, by the very presence of the bears. The hillside, the trail, the land, the day itself were all the grizzlies’; I was at their mercy. Yellow balsamroot bloomed beside me. A Swainson’s thrush cried from a nearby juniper. I quaked with fear, true and honestly afraid for perhaps the first time. Gloriously so.
