We gather firewood. Timberline begins at sea level on the north side of the Brooks Range divide, but there is a scrubby growth of willow, shoulder high, along the crystal river, and little groves of small slender cottonwoods—like baby aspens—tucked in sheltered corners here and there. We garner driftwood, enough for a couple of days, from the gravel bar.

Dana stops, hearing a noise in the willow thicket downstream. A noise like a thump and thud of heavy feet. He faces that way, watching intently. The noise stops. I look the other way, upstream and to both sides, afraid of something fierce creeping upon us from behind.

“It ain’t wilderness,” says my friend Doug Peacock, “unless there’s a critter out there that can kill you and eat you.”

Two pump-action short-barreled shotguns lie on our duffle a hundred feet away, loaded with twelve-gauge slugs. The shotguns have two purposes: one, to frighten away an aggressive bear; two, to stop and kill a charging bear. There are no trees fit to climb on the whole North Slope. A grizzly can run thirty-five miles an hour, uphill or down, with equal facility.

Back at the Barter Island airstrip Dana had explained the shotguns in the following way to one of our passengers: “You fire the first shot in front of the GRIZ, into the ground, to scare him away. If he don’t scare but keeps advancing, you wait until you can’t stand it anymore, then shoot to kill. First a shot to knock him down, next a shot to finish him off.”

The masculine pronoun is a mere convention. The female grizzlies are as unpredictable as the males. There is no sure way anyhow, short of an intimate body examination, for a human to identify the sexes. A female with cubs, of course, is far more dangerous than the male. The males are bigger.

I especially like Dana’s phrase until you can’t stand it anymore. Thoroughly subjective but admirably rational. How close is too close? According to Edward Hoagland in his Notes from the Century Before, a book about British Columbia, survivors of close encounters with the grizzly report that one of the bear’s most objectionable features is its foul breath. Don’t shoot until you can smell the Ursus halitosis. Autopsies reveal that many grizzlies suffer from stomach ulcers. Why? We don’t know. Like us, the bear is omnivorous, will eat anything—even humans—that it can catch. Eats our baggage too. A lone hiker in Glacier National Park was destroyed and mostly consumed (“harvested”) by a bear a few years ago. The victim was a recent convert to the Moral Majority and carried a Bible in his pack. The park rangers’ investigation disclosed that the grizzly had eaten most of the Bible also.

The man had been forewarned, if he’d read his gospel. There is a passage in the Old Testament in which God sics a bear upon a pack of unruly children.

Some people do not approve of carrying firearms in grizzly country. Again I refer to Douglas Peacock, who has lived and worked on close terms with the great bear for twelve years: to carry a gun, he says, distorts the psychology of the situation, makes a man cocky, noisy, overconfident, careless, reducing the opportunity for frequent, close and friendly relations with the grizzly. Doug says that he has been threatened many times and charged several times by nervous GRIZZ. He stands his ground, keeps talking in soft and mollifying tones, keeps on running his movie camera. So far the attacking bear has always turned aside before completing the charge, or soon enough to avoid losing face. “They decide I’m the dominant bear on the ridge,” Doug says, standing over his campfire, smoking himself up in order to diminish the human scent. So far. Once a bear attacked his camp while Doug was away, ate his sleeping bag—a provocative act of inquiry. His study of the grizzly, he admits, is a two-way, mutual investigation. He hopes to finish his movie soon.