How to appreciate the bear on his own terms | book reviews

If you want to see a bear in Alaska, it’s not difficult. Go hiking and sooner or later you will. You may not even need to go that far. I’ve seen countless bears in the Alaskan wilderness since arriving in 1990, but one of the most memorable sightings was the largest black bear I’ve ever seen, indiscriminately feeding near a sidewalk along Tudor Road in Anchorage as I ran the Mayor’s Marathon. year. Like my fellow runners, I was dressed in shorts and a t-shirt with nothing handy to protect myself. Fortunately, the bear appeared oblivious to the presence of dozens of people nearby.

Like all my encounters with bears, this was memorable for me. For the bear, however, my presence probably went unnoticed. As Paul Schullery writes in “The Bear Doesn’t Know,” “It all means so much to you, but the bear almost immediately ignores it; forgetting where the meeting took place, but hardly as thrilled or impressed as you were.

David James is a freelance writer living in Fairbanks. It can be emailed to nobugsinak@gmail.com.

Alycia R. Lindley