No matter how long in country, no matter how solid the understanding of the general docility of bears, there comes a certain primal apprehension at the discovery of a grizzly back-tracking your trail in the early season snow.
Suddenly threatened is everything you know to be true about these animals:
• That they generally try to avoid people.
• That they generally fear us more than we fear them.
• That the odds of being attacked by a bear are infinitesimal.
• That the risk of being in an automobile accident is so much greater than the danger of being attacked by a bear that these two possibilities don't even deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence.
Replacing rational, cerebral reactions is a reactive tightening in the gut and a heightened sensory awareness. There is no more daydreaming on the trail back home.
Suddenly the ears are tuned to catch every crunch of snow or snap of twig in the woods, and the eyes dart from scanning the wide-open spaces far ahead to probing the dark, shadowed patches beneath and between the trees.
The rational part of the brain factors the odds are that the bear is long gone, but concedes it still it won't hurt to stay alert. The best way to avoid problems with bears is to avoid bears. See them before they see you, and then maneuver around.
The instinctual brain, meanwhile, is busy with other thoughts, calculating the weapons at hand for use in self-defense and pondering the nightmare possibilities of encountering that rare, hyperfagic bear -- hyperfagia being the state of being consumed by the quest for food.
By the time the snow flies in Alaska, most bears are beyond that. They are fat, happy and looking only to find a good place to den up for a long winter's nap. They have stuffed themselves with sedges and salmon and any of a variety of berries -- blueberries, devil's club berries, soap berries, cranberries, bear berries.
But there is that rare bear -- usually an old bear, sometimes a bear very near the end of its natural life, sometimes an injured bear -- that hasn't been able to get enough to eat over the course of the fruitful Alaska summer.
Most of us, thankfully, will never meet a bear like this. It is the rarest of the rare.
But it is out there somewhere.
Some have theorized it was such a bear that finally claimed the life of Californian Timothy Treadwell. For 13 summers, Treadwell trekked to the Katmai Coast to pursue an obsession to try to communicate with grizzly bears as if they were pets or people. In 2003, for the first time, he pushed his season with the bears into the month of October. He and companion Amie Hugenard ended up dead -- killed and eaten by a 28-year-old bear with broken canine teeth.
The bear wasn't exactly in poor health, but neither was it heavy with a winter's supply of fat. It was a still powerful animal apparently possessed by the need to eat more before denning in a year when food supplies along the Katmai Coast were, by some indications, poor.
Nervous searchers looking for Treadwell and Hugenard killed the old bear and a young bear near the couple's deserted campsite. When investigators came back later to try to piece together exactly what had happened there, they found still more bears at the site battling for the chance to consume the remains of the dead bears.
Remembering Anchorage's chill summer, which left local gardeners talking about plants that never bloomed and fruit that never ripened, and thinking about local salmon runs that weren't all that strong, it was hard to ponder fresh grizzly tracks in the November snow and avoid a passing thought about Treadwell, though it is not all that unusual to encounter local grizzlies out this late in the season.
Denning behaviors vary widely. Some local bears will be in dens by early October. Others might wait until mid- to late-November. Some bears on the Kenai Peninsula will push denning back even father into the winter, and on Kodiak Island, some male bears don't den at all.
All of which serves to underline the rationalization that it's no big deal to find a grizzly out in November. But while the brain rationalizes, the gut reacts. We are, or most of us at least, to this extent still bound at some visceral level to our ancient history.
"We pay close attention to large predators," writes Val Geist, a University of Calgary wildlife professor. "We do so because we evolved as prey. It was our ancient fate to be killed and eaten, and our primary goal was to escape this fate. Our instincts are still shaped that way.
"There is a reason why the bloody carnage on our highways is a mere statistic, while the mauling of a person by a grizzly bear is news.''
Geist, it should be noted, is not a big proponent of that Wonderful World of Nature some believe existed in North America before white people showed up on the eastern shore of the continent 500 years ago to start making a mess of things. He, in fact, theorizes that big, powerful predators -- the short-faced bears standing seven foot at the shoulder, the saber-toothed tigers, the North American lions twice the size of their African counterpart, not to mention other bears and giant panthers -- for tens of thousands of years successfully killed and ate any people that tried to move in here.
"North America during the Pleistocene was a predator hell-hole compared to Eurasia or Africa ... It's likely that our abilities to deal with (smaller) African and Eurasian predators were much too limited to deal with the full array of native North American predators," he wrote in the fall issue of the magazine "Fair Chase." "They kept the continent free of humans for nearly 50,000 years until, for reasons still disputed, Americas megafauna declined to the point of extinction over a period of about 6,000 years."
Those "megafauna" were the huge animals that used to live in Alaska -- the 6- to 12-ton wooly mammoths, the 1,500- to 1,800-pound steppe bison, and the Clydesdale-size Pleistocene horses.
All went extinct, as did the mega-predators who once preyed upon them.
As much as extinctions are a bad thing, we should probably still all give thanks for that.
Though grizzlies are known to occasionally attack people, they've never been known to prey on people the way the big cats still do in Africa and India. Better to have a grizzly exploring your back track than a saber-tooth tiger.
Find Craig Medred online at adn.com/contact/cmedred or call 257-4588.
CRAIG MEDRED
OUTDOORS