 |
The Long, Strange
Journey of Timothy Treadwell, The Grizzly Man
As the float plane that had
ferried us in to the Katmai Glacier shrank to an speck against the clouds, I
turned to face the ice. Hanging above us, the glacier's quarter-mile-thick
slab hung like a snow-pillowed eve over the strip of coastal sedge that
Timothy Treadwell had called the Big Green. This was the idyllic,
spruce-bordered meadow where, devoting himself to bears, Treadwell had spent
the last thirteen summers of his life. Beside me on the shore was Marc
Gaede, Treadwell’s best friend, come here, as I had, to live for a couple of
days as only Treadwell had managed. Shielded by no electric-wire perimeter,
or even campfire, we had asked to be dropped off precisely in the midst of
the most concentrated population of the largest terrestrial carnivore on
earth, Ursus arctos, the Alaskan brown bear, or grizzly. This was a
place, it was clear, where man had not yet established himself as the
dominant organism, and if we were abnormal prey for the bears, in a
heartbeat a human visitor could nevertheless become just another food
animal.
Two hundred yards to our left stood a scraped-bare spruce. With a chill I
realized it was the same tree I’d seen in Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man:
the big back-scratching post just beyond Treadwell’s tent where he’d filmed,
with a telephoto-less home video camera, an ten foot tall grizzly jostling
its itching shoulders. “That is one huge… Just a big fucking bear!” Tim
exclaimed on his camera’s audio track. Then, as the thousand pound animal
had dropped to all fours and -- its shoulders chest-high to a big man --
lumbered to within inches, Tim had cried “You’re the Boss! Just no
closer. Please! No closer.”
Most of the bears in that film were still here, undisturbed because the area
had remained closed to humans (a fact which had called for Marc’s and my
surreptitious entry by unauthorized float plane) since that rainy afternoon,
two years before, when one of those grizzlies had killed and eaten Treadwell
and his girlfriend Amy Hugenard.
It was an hour before the first Katmai bear found us.
A quarter mile distant, roving a rocky shoreline the grizzly was tiny even
through binoculars. Almost black, leggy and stick-like rather than rolly
polly, the bear moved more quickly than any I’d seen on film, and with his
first glimpse of my upright form, he’d raised his head and come straight for
us.
I nudged Marc. The grizzly was safely on the other side of a deep, swiftly
flowing river, he pointed out. Still, radiating determination the big male
had trotted keenly up the far bank, uplifted snout searching the breeze for
the scent wafted from our opposite shore. “Ribby,” I thought, from the
chocolate corrugations girdling his trunk: the way old bears look when
they’re about to enter hibernation with too little body fat to sustain them
through the winter.
As the bear reached the end of the far bank’s gravel shelf Marc turned to
watch him halt. But the aged grizzly, now just yards away across fast
water, never hesitated. Without breaking stride he plunged chest first into
the current, pale blue with suspended till leached from the glacial moraine,
and began to swim. Almost instantly, despite his lunging strokes he was
swept away, carried fifty yards downriver where, it seemed, he’d never make
it to midstream. But he found footing, dug in, and in a fountain of flung
spray lurched through the shallows onto our side of the river, wagging his
head in search of whatever we were that he’d seen from afar.
It took only a second for him to home in. As he reached dry ground and came
up the slope I saw Marc ready his canister of pepper spray, and as
disconnected as if in a dream I heard the hammer click back in readiness on
the red plastic flare pistol -- our first line of defense – gripped in my
right hand. Before loosing it, though, Marc and I stood, waved, shouted
and, midway up our beach the bear realized his error, saw that we were not
his normal prey and veered away, angling his swift, implacable lope into
the tall green sedge that surrounded our campsite.
Twenty minutes later, hearts barely settled, Marc and I were struggling with
the aluminum docketed riddle of his son’s never-before erected tent, when he
once more whispered “bear.” A car-length behind me stood a yet larger male,
scenting the tracks we’d left hauling our gear up from the water. His
head, I realized, was as large as the biggest circle I could make with both
arms bowed, but it was evident even in the first glance of recognition that
for the moment he was regarding us with a calm, nonabrasive curiosity.
We froze. For a long
time. Finally, the bear lowered his log-like snout and trudged on,
passing, like the first grizzly, out into the tall-grass meadow. There, a
couple of dozen yards beyond our still deflated tent, he lay down, and like
some cowlick ursine, began to chew on his grassy mattress.
“See?” said Marc, putting
the happiest peace and love face to put on things. “He’s telling us it’s
all right. He’s not after us, all he’s interested in is eating grass.” It
was true that the bear had a possibly benign demeanor. But any reassurance
that might have brought only lasted through his first mouthfuls of salad
because this far north dark came early at the end of September, and within
minutes it was clear that we were going to have, bedded down just out of
flashlight range, a half-ton, soon be hungry predator.
One whose hunger was almost
sure to be of an exceptional caliber. What I’d somehow failed to pass along
to Marc was that I had just learned from Missy Epping, Katmai Preserve’s
former supervisor, that at this season every one of these bears was engaged
in the annual feeding tumult known as hyperphasia, a last minute binge that
reaches near frenzy among older animals become instinctively aware that they
are too lean to survive the long fast of their impending hibernation. Bears
like the dark brown boar that had just crossed the river in search of Marc
and me; bears like the twenty-eight year old male (the oldest U. arctos
ever recorded) that, also late in the season, on October 6 killed and ate
Treadwell and Hugenard.
The chill of autumn and the
end of day seemed to descend together. For a moment, above the clouds the
sky glowed brilliant orange, and in the last light I saw our still- grazing
neighbor heave himself onto his terrible, claw-splayed feet and slosh off
toward the frieze of taiga spruce that sprouted like an unkempt beard around
glacier’s lower face.
In minutes it was night,
and with the darkness our world shrank into the few yards in any direction
lit by our pistol spotlights as the unseen world beyond their searching
beams grew into a black infinity of mystery. Then the bawling started.
From somewhere in the night a long, lingering roar – deep as a bull’s bellow
but threaded with the unmistakable, guttural cough of a carnivore -- ripped
in. Teeth clenched, I looked at Marc, just as an answering roar blew in
from the darkness on the other side of camp.
“Way off, both of ‘em,” he
replied slowly, though I could hear the tremor in his voice. “Back, maybe,
by the glacier spruce.” I nodded, but not only did the competing bellows
not end with their first exchange, they didn’t stay way back by the
spruce. Before long they were coming from all around us, tearing though the
darkness somewhere just beyond our watery beams.
When she had tried to camp
here, Epping said, those hyperphasia-frantic roars had gone on all night.
Finally, her cooking tent -- set up almost exactly where we first saw the
rangy old boar that had come at us -- was flattened by bears she could not
see, forcing her to call for help on a satellite phone.
“No sat. phone,” Marc
observed. “So, what do you plan on for sleeping?” as though the possibility
were actually in question. My plan was to alternate shifts, and as much to
hide as to attempt sleep I took the first session in a sleeping bag that,
even pulled tight over my head, did not even partially muffle the nearby
snarls of skirmishing bears.
An hour later, as I emerged
for my watch the rasping bellows had retreated back to the semi-distant
spruce. “You missed the beautiful part,” Marc said. “Two grizzlies right
here on the shore. One down by the water, against the moonlight.” Then, as
he bent to take his turn in the tent he mused “These bears don’t really
kill, then devour prey, you know. Once they have an animal, they just start
eating.”
I knew. Years ago, at
Denali, the bawling of a caribou calf had drawn me into a clumsy-booted jog
over a low ridge, coming out almost on top of the adolescent grizzly that
had pinned a newborn caribou in the heather. The fawn’s bleating cries were
still strong, despite its being shaken like a rag, but what knotted my chest
was the sight of the calf’s midsection, most of which was nothing but a
gaping red emptiness, its stomach and intestines having already been
swallowed by the long jaws that now gripped its flailing foreparts.
That, of course, is exactly
what happened to Timothy Treadwell and Amy Hugenard. But never mind the
circumstances of their deaths. They were deaths, horrible in their
particulars, but yet deaths like many others. The violent end of soldiers,
mountain climbers, bush pilots and NASCAR drivers, cops inured to dangerous
streets. Yet what is entirely unique -- astonishing -- about self named,
self created Timothy Treadwell, is how this otherwise unremarkable
individual found the undaunted courage to live, mostly alone, through more
than a thousand nights filled with the same bawling, roaring horror that I
and his best friend Marc Gaede, in order to try to understand this strange
man, had come here to experience on his behalf.
Morning’s light brought the
ebbing of our terror. Finally we I could see what was around us. And what
was around us was more bears. Lots more, but gentler ones, it seemed. A
mama sow with a yearling cub ambled past, another mother and her St. Bernard
sized offspring snuffled between piles of driftwood, and a couple of
wanderer adolescents moved off ahead of the rest onto the just-exposed tidal
flats, searching for stranded marine life and buried clams.
Here, I saw, was the other
side of Treadwell’s world: the Disney-esque demi paradise of half ton
cuddle grizzlies named Mr. Chocolate, Sergeant Brown, and Aunt Melissa.
This was a world where Treadwell eventually became so thoroughly embedded in
the lives of bears that busily foraging females would park their vulnerable
young near him when the best feeding sites lay close to the territories of
the big males always dangerous to cubs.
Then, when those titans
encroached upon each other and launched their gargantuan, galloping battles,
ripping chunks of fur and flesh from each others’ shoulders and haunches,
somehow Tim managed to be there too, scrambling alongside the flow of battle
so close that his little hand held camera caught the finest ringside footage
ever shot of those sometimes mortal Brobdignagian struggles.
Staying alive in those
circumstances required a hyper-developed ability to read bear moods, which
Treadwell, by hair’s breadth trial and error, eventually acquired, although
what fueled him to go this far – farther than any other man in historical
time – was his vast, often irrational goodwill toward his ferocious
neighbors. Yet Treadwell was never the blindly fortuitous idiot savant. He
knew the danger. Knew that in his love for bears he was an elf, a sprite
among them; a fragile Peter Pan held aloft largely on the tenuous wings of
the great beasts’ innate forbearance
In this, Treadwell knew his
role, which in spite of his frequent terror was of necessity always one of
bold posturing. “I am Samurai,” he wrote in one of his last journal
entries. “If I show weakness, my friends will kill me; the smell of death
is on my fingers.”
This was the strangely
interdependent world of man and primal carnivore whose images -- back in the
world of men – year after year won Treadwell prizes at the Telluride Film
Festival. Yet this was also a cosm that meant far more to him than any mere
gateway to recognition. It was a world in which, after a decade of effort
to get as close to bears as any human being could, somewhere in the course
of stretching those limits of mind and body Tim Treadwell actually found his
ursine soul mate. She was pale-furred young Downy bear, the female cub with
whom he forged an intense, years-long bond of understanding. Maybe, during
their long, face-to-face communions, even a sort of spiritual intra-species
union. For Downy, Tim finally came to feel a love almost as though for a
daughter, and it was to return to look again for her, after she had vanished
near summer’s end, that Tim and Amy returned, much too late in the year, to
Katmai’s Kaflia Lakes. It was always dangerous there – a place Treadwell
had termed the Grizzly Maze – and though Downy should have been there,
fishing for the last salmon of the year, what Tim and Amy found instead was
the aged, hyperphasia-hungry, desperate late–season bear who broke the
rules, ripped down Treadwell’s Samurai mask of strength, and tore them both
to bits.
Only now, seeing how he --
and no one else, ever, was able to live -- only now was it possible for
Treadwell’s life among the Katmai grizzlies to make sense.
Copyright: Alan Tennant
October, 2005
Please be patient while the
gallery is loading
|