Free Pecked to death by ducks by Tim Cahill Page B

him around so that he seemed to be staring directly at us. Some people believe grizzlies don't see well, and in fact,

    6$ A TOOTH AND CLAW
    they may not see as well as humans, but experiments with brown bears proved that they could recognize their keepers at 360 feet. We were crouched down at 750 feet. McNamee, in The Grizzly Bear, warns that "it should not be assumed that a squinting, blinking, head bobbing grizzly bear is having trouble picking you out of some kind of blur." With the binoculars on him, however, I was absolutely certain that he did not see us. I could see his eyes, and I knew he didn't see us.
    The bear began digging in the mound of dirt he was standing on. In less than two minutes he had uncovered the front half of a cow bison carcass. We could hear him snuffling and sneezing in a cloud of dry dust. He reached into the hole and lifted up the head and the front quarters of the bison with a movement that seemed to cost him almost no effort at all. The carcass probably weighed somewhere close to a thousand pounds.
    He could, I saw, use his claws—the same front claws he'd used to dig—very dexterously, almost like fingers. There was a disconcerting sound of breaking bones as the bear gnawed away on the bison's shoulder area. He was standing sideways to us, and I could see that his belly was distended. There was a lot of meat on the bison, and the bear had probably been feeding on it for several days.
    In point of fact, this grizzly didn't seem very hungry at all. He uncovered a bit more of the carcass, flipped it halfway over, and examined the new arrangement. I had an image of a rich guy counting his money: The bear seemed to have a kind of Scrooge McDuck attitude toward the carcass. "Mine, ha-ha-ha, all mine." He scented something in the woods and turned toward the new odor, then dismissed it. Probably the bison in the woods. A second later the bear was back chortling over the carcass.
    After an hour or so he began digging a second hole adjacent to the first. He used the dirt to cover the carcass. Then he lay down in the second hole and took a nap in the sun. He was on his back, and you could just see the tip of his nose sticking out of the ground. It looked silly, and I wanted to laugh, and I knew I shouldn't laugh, so a series of muffled giggles came snorting up through my nose. I felt like a kid in church. The fear that I'd been

    living with for twenty hours had stretched itself to the breaking point and finally snapped. The bear couldn't see us, and now he was taking a nap. With his big-bear nose sticking up out of the ground.
    Tom needed to move in closer now that the bear was asleep. I chose to stay where I was. Murphy would retreat back over the ridge and come back over the top closer to the bear. He didn't want to crawl down into the bowl because the breeze could swirl around down there, and the bear might wind him. Tom began packing up his gear.
    Tired of staring at the bear's nose through my binoculars, I moved behind a small wall of sage and lay on my back, feeling just a tad bearlike. The wind was driving wisps of high cirrus clouds across the sky, and I thought, Storm tomorrow. A dim drowsiness began a slow descent. Couldn't really focus on the sky anymore. Only forty-five minutes of sleep last night. Was I really falling asleep? Now? Two hundred fifty yards from a grizzly bear. In the wild. What was wrong with me?
    Tom whispered, "I'm going now."
    I heard myself mumble, "Bear's got the right idea." And I fell asleep. Went out like a light.
    When I woke, Tom was within one hundred yards of the grizzly. A few minutes later the grizzly woke up—there was a full half hour of stretching and yawning involved in that process— and he uncovered the bison again. We watched him feed for four more hours. Then he took another nap, and it was safe to leave.
    And when we got back to town, the first thing Tom told people is that I took one look at the grizzly and fell asleep. Which is true . . .