"Boris, how are we going to steal car from moose and squirrel?" - Natasha, The Bullwinkle Show

Guess who's coming for brunch?

Above is yet another moose.

At this time of year, they show up a bit closer to settled areas, looking for food. The ones pictured above are eating some sort of viney thing that grew next to the house last summer. I guess that makes my place the salad bar for today.

The Mrs. took this picture. As it was, she put the dogs out, and they took three steps out, turned around and trotted right back inside. That’s unusual, since it’s morning and normally their internal bodily systems have, shall we say, pressured up.

The Mrs. didn’t think much of it, until she went back into our bedroom and ran the shade up. She was standing staring back at a moose not six inches from her, though separated by a triple pane of glass. It was a cow moose, and it had a calf moose with it.

She then opened the door and snapped a digital picture of the moose in action. And, no, she didn’t let The Boy out, since the moose were stalking our house all day, kinda like a renegade satanic motorcycle gang from a 1970’s made for TV movie starring Robert Wagner. Perhaps they were waiting for more vine to grow. Eventually, the moose left, and our big doofus dog waited until they were out of earshot. Then she barked, as if saying, “Yeah, that’s what I’m sayin’. Come on back if you want a piece of me.” The dog is pretty tough when the moose are a mile away.

But, the above story shows a reasonable, rational way to deal with a wild animal. The moose are not our pets, we don’t feed them, we don’t let our young out near them, and we don’t taunt them when they can hear us. Those moose have a wicked sense of vengeance.

But moose have nothing on grizzly bears. I’ve been waiting for Grizzly Man to show up in the video store, but to my surprise, Discovery Channel picked it up and showed it last weekend. It was like watching a train wreck – you just can’t turn away. In truth, had I not known that the story was a real one, I would have thought I was watching “The Blair Bear Project.”

The movie, appropriately, starts with the death of Timothy Treadwell. Mr. Treadwell was the guy who became Grizzly Chow® after living thirteen summers with various groups of grizzly bears down south. By down south, I mean south of Fairbanks. Oh, I guess that means most places. In this case, he was down south of Anchorage on the island of Kodiak.

I think the movie was fairly well balanced. If you thought Mr. Treadwell was a tireless defender of the bears, or if you believe him to be an utterly gibbering idiot that shouldn’t have been allowed to play with sharp objects, your belief won’t change after watching the movie.

I hadn’t made up my mind, but I’m leaning more towards the gibbering idiot side. As The Mrs. put it, “You don’t go hunting grizzly with a camera.”

As a friend of mine put it, “Down in Kodiak, if you go bear hunting, chances are the bear is hunting you at the same time.”

Yup. I think the fundamental thing Mr. Treadwell missed was that these weren’t critters who would break out into “The Bare Necessities” and then help him along his way. Grizzly bears are wild. If they’re hungry, they don’t really care if you love them. They’re not big furry people: that would be Roseanne, not a bear. Bears will eat you. Mr. Treadwell always left before the bears got too frenzied in preparing to hibernate, until that last year.

Perhaps the greatest disservice Mr. Treadwell did was to the bear themselves. I know it’s hard to imagine anything that could make a ten foot tall, 1100 pound critter with claws and fangs more scary, but there is: they’re comfy around humans, which makes them more dangerous. They should fear us, we should fear them. Breaking that rule makes it more likely that more people may get injured, and more of Mr. Treadwell’s bears will be killed.

Oh, and if you go to a costume party in Alaska, don’t pick the bear suit. Or, the moose suit in September. And avoid the Blair Bear.