of a “based on a true story” story because I like the way the truth bends to the details in those stories, and because these have always been my favorite kinds of stories; and I guess I wanted to feel that all of my research and writing was an effort at intimacy and empathy with a real person who’d suffered real loss.
I eventually realized that it was just my own subjectivity, my own imagination at work. Stephen Haas could only be as real as I made him. He was just a vessel. It was a lot of pressure caring for such a container. Suddenly I felt responsible for making my performance convincing, for creating a whole person out of the ether, a character with a parents and a hometown, a backstory that informs his present existence. I was the only one responsible for telling the story of Haas and Craighead and for keeping them alive.
This only partly explains why I was reading a lot of bear attack stories and eventually found myself thinking about the “Drama in Real Life” sections of Reader’s Digest that I used to consume as a child during visits to my grandparents’ house, many of them recounting dramatic and harrowing tales of animal attacks and narrow escapes. I loved these stories. You can still find them online and in the magazine. They pretty much always end the same way, with hope and survival against great odds. The stories are inevitably a kind of celebration of the indomitability of the human spirit, combined with a graphic portrayal of the savagery of a morally indifferent natural world. And bears. Lots of bears. I figured these “Drama in Real Life” stories were exactly the sort of story I needed to tell if I was going to be convincing as Stephen Haas. It seemed I should be able to answer my own questions, however uncomfortable. The problem, however, became knowing where to begin and where to end.
Q: Mr. Haas, what do you think you learned from your encounter with the bear?
Learned? About what?
Perhaps about yourself or about bears, or maybe about the safety of backpacking and camping in Glacier National Park?
The bear was just being a bear. We were in his territory. We’ d leaped into his cage. And the point of such leaps, I suppose, is fundamentally selfish. I mean, it’s about you, ultimately. It’s about testing oneself. It’s about being humbled.
What do you mean by cage?
Look, think about it this way. How do you define a cage? The only differences between a zoo and a national park are the size of the cage and the consequences of leaping into that cage. In a zoo, the probability of attack is increased exponentially, but the difference between a zoo cage and Glacier National Park is mostly a matter of percentages. You know what I mean?
I’m not sure I do. Are you suggesting that our national parks are essentially very large zoos where we are allowed to climb into the cage with the animals?
Yes. Yes I am.
ATTACK RESPONSE
Though it’s not a pleasant thought, a bear will, more often than not, eat a person it has killed. Stephen Haas spent the night injured in a cave, hiding from the bear; but what did he hear, what did he hide from, and what did he face there in the dark?
The question I don’t want to face: Did the bear eat Janey?
The question I would ask: Did the bear eat Janey?
To put oneself in proximity of bears is not to simply risk bodily harm but bodily consumption, a true kind of communion with the wild. I didn’t know if the bear who’d killed her had eaten Janey, or part of Janey. I wasn’t given that information. But I could imagine the scene. I knew how these stories often went and I was prepared to offer up some grisly details.
Unlike the case of Janey Craighead and Stephen Haas, most bear attacks occur on trails, when a hiker or backpacker surprises a sow grizzly with cubs. It’s even more rare for a bear to attack people in a tent. When a bear does attack, it will often go for the head or neck. A great many people who survive a bear attack report having their scalps ripped off and their skull chewed upon. Often the bear will jump up and down on top of a person, breaking ribs and knocking the wind out of him. Often the bear will break your neck. Sometimes, if you play dead, a grizzly will leave you alone. Sometimes they will kill you and eat you no matter what you try to do.
The hard thing to accept is that most of the time a bear is not hunting for humans, not even killing because he thinks he can eat the human. That comes afterward. Usually a grizzly attacks because it is protecting its young or guarding a recent kill—often a moose calf or caribou or some other ungulate it has run down; grizzlies are rarely predatory toward humans. They simply don’t often see us as food. We’re too much work. Too noisy and weird. We’re all limbs and skin—like brightly colored flightless birds awkwardly shuffling through the brush. We’re hardly worth the effort, so little meat compared to other animals; and besides all that, we often try to shoot them, spray them with pepper spray, or otherwise antagonize them.
Fatal bear attacks are actually extremely rare; but unfortunately such attacks are more common in the lower forty-eight states than in places like Canada and Alaska, mainly because there are more people, and bears have, in some places, learned to associate humans with food. When attacks do occur, bears that kill and partially eat people are typically then killed, sometimes because they hang around the area, protecting their food, sometimes because they can’t get away fast enough.
These bears are killed because they’ve now developed a taste for human flesh and see humans as a food source and could, thus, become predacious; and if an apex predator who lives in proximity to humans decides to hunt them, there is little that can be done to stop it, aside from killing that predator.
Survival is a wild bear’s only imperative; and they’re mostly unconcerned with our reasons for being in their proximity. Bears who attack humans are sometimes killed to confirm identity, necropsied and examined for evidence; and they are killed for revenge, killed because a bear can’t often kill a human without paying for it, even if a bear is just doing what bears do—operating on instinct, or even if it’s just a bear unlucky enough to be in the same area. One attack at Glacier National Park prompted the killing of five bears before it was believed they finally shot the one responsible.
I thought I might ask the student reporters if they knew this. I thought I might ask if they knew whether the bear that killed Janey had been found, and if it had been killed. Sometimes they have to open the bear up and look inside his stomach to be sure they got the right one.
“There’s the answer to your questions,” I’d say. “You have to look inside the bear.”
Q: Mr. Haas, can you describe what you saw when you emerged from the cave?
Shadows mostly. The light seemed like it had been sucked out of the sky. I heard voices.
The hikers who found you?
Sure. The hikers.
Anything else that you remember?
Have you ever seen those Buddhist prayer flags? You know the colorful ones hanging from a rope? The tent looked like that. It was kind of spread out across the alder, all torn up.
Were you able to locate Ms. Craighead?
I like that movie,
