Free Pecked to death by ducks by Tim Cahill Page A

175 yards from the bear. He dropped to his belly and didn't move for three hours until the grizzly took a nap.
    That evening Tom stopped at my house and asked if I wanted to join him the next day. He was going back armed with his longest lenses. He swore that he was not about to take any chances to get good shots.
    Last year, in Glacier Park, a grizzly killed a photographer who was said to love the bears, to know their habits. Tom had seen the shots.
    "It was a sow, with three cubs," he told me. "I think the guy might have been as close as a hundred yards. And she definitely saw him. You could see she saw him. I think he followed her. This should be a safer situation. It's not a sow with cubs to protect. It's not a young male liable to strike out at anything. This is a big, mature male with plenty to eat. If we're quiet, if we're careful, he'll never even see us. I'm sure he didn't see me yesterday."
    We parked by the side of the road and began walking toward the grizzly. The valley floor was a rolling, treeless plain, punctuated by stands of sage. At one point, three miles in—two miles from the bear—we saw several ravens perched on a ridge ahead of us. Tom thought they might be attracted to some carrion below but were afraid to approach it. He thought the birds on the ridge might mean there was a bear below, feeding on something. We belly-crawled to the top and peeked over. We saw a few bison, grazing peacefully, but there, not too far away, was some grizzly dung.
    Tom broke the scat apart with his boot. It was soft and very black. "He's been eating meat," Tom said.
    "You can tell because it's so dark?"
    "Yeah," Tom said. "And here's another clue." He bent over and picked a porcupine quill from the dung.
    "This bear"—I couldn't believe it—"this bear ate a porcupine, I mean he literally ate a porcupine? And he passed the quills?"
    "Must be a mean motor scooter," Tom said.
    He handed me the quill, and I stood there with the white nee-

    die in my hand, and it scared me just about as badly as anything I'd ever heard or read about grizzly bears, ever. I couldn't imagine any animal—even a grizzly bear—eating a porcupine, quills and all. We walked down a hill and across a marsh that was full of meandering streams and land that moved like stiffened gelatin under the boot. There was a ridge ahead of us, and the bear, if he was there, was on the other side. The wind was brisk, and it came out of the southwest. We crawled to the top of the ridge—on the northeast, downwind side.
    The bear was in a bowl-shaped depression about 250 yards away from us. He was standing on a mound of dirt where he had buried something. The freshly dug mound was perhaps two feet high and ten feet long. I made a mental note to forever avoid mounds of dirt in bear country. The grizzly was black, and he glistened in the sun. In proportion to his massive body, his claws were almost delicate, each as big around and about as long as my little finger. They were bone white: the mark of an older bear. His right ear looked a little ragged, as if it had been bitten and torn in a fight.
    There were trees to the west, as Tom had said, but they were a quarter of a mile away and almost directly upwind. Where we were, there was only sage, and no one plant was over two feet high.
    Tom and I heard, very faintly, the sound of a cracking branch from the stand of trees. There was a dark shape, moving slowly deep in the woods. With the binoculars I could see that it was a bison. The bear stiffened and stared into the trees, like a dog on point.
    It is said that a grizzly's hearing is far more sensitive than a man's, and as proof, scientists point out that a grizzly will begin blindly digging in one spot and come out with a mouse or vole he's located by sound alone.
    The grizzly stood there for some time, visibly sniffing the wind. A raven flew over the bear, and he looked up in what appeared to be annoyance as the bird's shadow passed over him. The movement brought