Grizzly's Last Stand

By Rick Bass/Yaak

Even though I love them, they are haunting in my dreams. When I see grizzlies in the northwestern Montana forest up here, in real life, it is more exhilarating than frightening. After the bear has seen or heard or scented me and galloped away in alarm, a feeling of awe remains. Almost always the bears run away. Sometimes if they feel that they don't have an escape route, they will bluff charge, veering away hard at the last yard, the last foot, the last inch. I don't know why they are so much more frightening in my dreams: possibly some cellular residue of caveman days. The West in many ways is a remnant of that imagination, as witnessed by the sadness of such titles as the Grizzly Drive-In, the Grizzly Auto Ranch, the University of Montana Grizzlies, Lady Griz volleyball.

I am fortunate enough to live in one of the last five scraps of country in the Lower 48 that are still wild enough to support even a vestigial population of grizzlies. In the U.S., the great bear has been reduced to near prisoner status, surviving only for certain in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem (anywhere from 200 to 600 bears); the Northern Continental Divide of Montana (400 to 500); the Selkirk population in northern Idaho (30 to 40); an enclave in northern Washington State; and, most imperiled, Montana's Cabinet-Yaak ecosystem, where perhaps two dozen survive. Lewis and Clark passed near here in 1805, south of the Cabinet Mountains, pushing hard for the Pacific then and having finally learned a little about grizzlies. It is in these remaining patches of wilderness that the endangered bears are making their last stand. We don't have much left to offer of what the grizzlies need: big, wild country without roads. They need these lands desperately, absolutely: lands that are an echo of what was once an unbroken frontier.

Grizzlies once occupied the grasslands of the Dakotas, where they fed on bison that had drowned in rivers, as well as the Pacific Coast, where they fed on stranded whales. These were grizzlies of prodigious size and power, bold as the noon sun. But the waves of humanity sent the grizzlies retreating into the highest reaches of the outback, into the farthest secret little forests, where they now exist in a no-man's-land, on diets that are as much as 90% vegetarian. The industrial force of the past two centuries selected against the larger, more aggressive grizzlies in the gene pool. Anecdotal evidence suggests that they are smaller.

In nearly 20 years of hiking the backcountry of the Kootenai National Forest, in the Cabinet-Yaak, walking high ridges into the wind and crawling through swamps, I have seen grizzlies only on maybe a dozen occasions. Once there were perhaps as many as 100,000 of them, west of the Mississippi; now they are down to around 1,000. Lewis and Clark had been seeing the great bears' tracks throughout the fall of 1804. While wintering with the Mandan, they heard stories about grizzlies all winter but scoffed, believing their superior firearms would vanquish the bear easily. Back then these bears were not used to running from much of anything, and the first grizzlies that Lewis and Clark encountered in the flesh set a template for many future grizzly interactions. When the explorers stalked and shot them, the bears charged the hunters and refused to die even after being riddled with musket balls. Writes Benjamin Long in Backtracking: "The captains marveled at how these bears withstood brutal punishment. 'The wonderful power of life which these animals possess renders them dreadful,' Clark wrote. The men took to stalking the bears in squadrons. When the wounded bear charged, the second group would fire while the others raced to reload. Soon Lewis revised his views: 'These bear being so hard to die rather intimedates us all...I must confess I do not like the gentleman and had reather fight two Indians than one bear.'" The corps eventually learned to avoid "the turrible gentlemen," although they killed at least 43 of them in the learning.

It is not uncommon for a female to travel a home range of several hundred square miles, a male as much as 1,000 sq. mi. Some biologists believe that to survive as a population, the bears need intact, usable ecosystems of at the very least 4,000 sq. mi. Scientists such as E.O. Wilson and Robert MacArthur have calculated rates of extinction based on area of available habitat, a science known as "island biogeography." Science is showing that the bears need big wild country--that although they will occasionally use roaded areas, they do so even less than most earlier scientific models had predicted they would. For the most part, the bears are still retreating to the last vestigial redoubts where we the taxpayers have not yet built roads for the use of the timber and mining industries.

The National Forest System contains more than 380,000 miles of logging roads, many of them choked with weeds or funneling murky sediment into once clear streams and acting as rivers in the spring, robbing the forests of water. The Forest Service estimates that there is an $8.4 billion backlog in maintenance on these roads, and still the philosophical argument keeps raging over whether to build new roads farther into the last, most remote places. During the Clinton years, under Forest Service chief Mike Dombeck, a public-comment period was initiated in which more than 2 million people responded; 95% favored permanent protection for the nation's last roadless lands--58.5 million acres in 39 states. That included nearly 80% approval from respondents residing in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. In one of his first steps upon taking office, President Bush began stripping power from the "roadless rule." Democratic Congressman Jay Inslee of Washington and Republican Congressman Sherwood Boehler of New York have just introduced a bill that would return and codify the rule.

One of the slowest-reproducing land mammals of North America, grizzlies generally don't breed until their sixth year of life, and then the cubs--usually one or two, but occasionally three-- remain with their mother for nearly three years, learning the lay of the land--where to find food and security in all the various seasons. Sometimes the Forest Service closes gates to various logging roads to help give the bears security from humans, but the opening and closing of these roads is erratic, unpredictable to the bears and their maternal culture of instruction. In the Northern Continental Divide ecosystem--Lewis and Clark country--153 grizzlies are known to have been lost to human causes since 1990, including 19 in the year 2001 alone, among them nine females.

We search now for the remnants of what was once a magnificent manifestation of this great country's landscape: a sentient, powerful, secretive creature that knows how to walk backward, stepping in its own tracks when it is aware it is being followed. A creature that descends into the earth to sleep for six months of the year, where the mother gives birth to two fist-size babies, even in the midst of her sleep beneath the snow, in January, with the embryos having delayed their implantation for months, waiting to see if there will be enough resources to support them. Are there enough resources to support them? The last unprotected roadless lands in the national forests have been charted as possessing less than two-tenths of 1% of America's timber supply. It seems to be a philosophical rather than an economic argument. As a nation, aren't we rich enough to set aside--for grizzlies as well as for our own need for spirit and diversity--these last frontiers? Who could argue against such ecological and economic prudence?

Where I live, in the Yaak, a wet foggy jungle, I have been searching all this spring for the sighting or the tracks of one mother bear and her offspring, on a mountain that is scheduled to be logged hard in the name of "fuels reduction," to theoretically reduce fire danger. I belong to a local pro-roadless group called the Yaak Valley Forest Council, which would like to see the fuels reduced on this mountain but in a way that would leave all the living green trees still standing. Last year many people saw the tracks of the bear and her cubs on this mountain. After much struggle, we have succeeded in negotiating a compromise with the Forest Service--on these 100 acres at least--and we hope to persuade it also to log this area only in the winter, when the snow is down, the ground is frozen and the bears are asleep.

On these particular 100 acres this spring, I am unable to find any certain tracks. The forest rings with health: soft, undisturbed duff underfoot, soil of the centuries carpeted with trillium, wild violets, mushrooms, lupine, ancient lichens and mosses--an outrageous diversity that is so rare elsewhere in the West. Like some lost explorer, I make little maps on scraps of paper about what I find, and I wonder what the future will bring. In Backtracking, Long quotes a wildlife biologist on the future of the bear in Montana: "Eighty years ago, there were grizzlies leaving their tracks on the beaches, right outside Los Angeles. Eighty years ago. I bet you have a living grandparent who was alive eighty years ago. Los Angeles is a different place now. Our job is to look ahead, eighty years from now."

A freak Memorial Day blizzard falls, nearly a foot of new snow. I hurry out into the forest, searching. After a few hours, I discover a set of fresh bear tracks. The bear is just ahead of me and is moving slowly, unconcerned, though the wind is not in my favor. Trees are snapping all around me under the heavy load of wet snow, a sound like occasional artillery in some newly announced or perhaps ancient and ongoing war. But I am not asking for the return of 100,000 grizzlies to the American wilderness, I'm looking for just one bear. The snow is so deep that I can't positively identify the tracks as belonging to a black bear or a grizzly. At one point the bear catches my scent and breaks into a gallop down the mountain. And--knowing it's being tracked--the bear hurries down out of the snow, and I quickly lose the trail. The next day, the sun returns, the snow melts, as do the tracks, vanishing, as if they never were.

Rick Bass is the author of The Hermit's Story, a collection of short stories to be published this month by Houghton Mifflin