Free Pecked to death by ducks by Tim Cahill

"You can feel that real strong pulse there. Press it against the bone." For the legs the pressure point was up front near the groin, and you pressed it against the pelvic bone. "Tourniquets are out completely," he said. "People lose limbs they don't have to lose with tourniquets. And, of course for head wounds, direct pressure is the only thing. You wouldn't want to use the jugular as a pressure point, cut off the flow of blood to the brain."
    "No," I said, "you wouldn't want to do that. Or worse, use a tourniquet." We laughed—a tourniquet around the neck, wahoo, what a knee-slapper—but the laughter sounded brittle and a little forced in the car.
    "You pretty sure he'll be there?" I asked.
    "He'll be there all right," Tom said. "He had something buried, a bison carcass, I think. The hole was deep. I couldn't see into it from where I was, but he was feeding on it all day."
    "What's the land like where he is?"
    "It's a prairie situation," Tom said. "Rolling hills and sage."
    "No trees to climb in case he, uh ..." I didn't know what he might do. Nobody knows what a grizzly bear might do. They are entirely unpredictable. One grizzly might simply ignore a man on foot, while another one could feel obligated to rip him to shreds. A popular theory holds that because grizzlies evolved on the plains, where there is no place to hide, their flight-or-fight mechanism is heavily weighted toward fight.
    The bear possesses two football-sized slabs of muscle on either side of its head and these power jaws that can, according to Tom McNamee in The Grizzly Bear, "crush a Hereford's head like an eggshell." Additionally, "the large shoulder hump—the grizzly's most distinctive feature and the one which usually distinguishes his appearance from that of the black bear—is ... an enormous wad of muscle, the engine that powers the mighty digging and death-dealing machinery of the front legs." And they're fast, grizzlies. A National Park Service employee once clocked a run-

    ning subadult Alaskan grizzly at thirty-six miles an hour. I didn't like the idea of standing behind a two-foot-high tangle of sage in the middle of the prairie a couple of hundred yards from five hundred pounds or more of thirty-six-mile-per-hour grizzly. There would be no place to run, no place to hide.
    "There're some trees," Tom said, "but they're about a quarter of a mile away."
    "We have binoculars," I said. "We could watch him from the trees. It'd be safer." Grizzlies have long, slim claws that will not hold the weight of a full-grown bear. They can't climb, the big ones anyway.
    "I don't think we want to be in those trees," Tom said. "First, they're directly upwind. The bear is sure to scent us there. Second, this is a big bear, a mature male with a little bit of gray on him. . . ."
    "So?"
    "Well, my guess is that he's the boss bear in that area."
    "Yeah?"
    "You think some other bears haven't winded that carcass?" Grizzlies have been known to scent a carcass—even a newly dead animal, its flesh not yet putrescent—from several miles away. The animal's sense of smell is more acute than that of a bloodhound. More acute by an order of magnitude.
    "So," Tom reasoned, "maybe this bear isn't going to let the other ones in until he's done. And if there are other grizzlies around, where do you suppose they'll be? You think they'll be out in the open? Or hiding in the trees?"
    "Point," I said.
    Tom had almost walked into the bear the day before. He is a photographer and guides people on photographic safaris in and around Yellowstone Park. Some of his Wilderness Photography Expedition clients had written in with their requirements: They wanted a short walk, no more than two miles, on flat land, and they wanted to see lots of big, hairy mammals. Tom knew of several places that would fit the bill, but he wanted to scout them out first, be sure the animals were there. He had gotten a little carried away on his walk and was five miles in when he topped a

    rise and found himself