Introduction

The Falls Creek Grizzly lived for 22 years along a stretch of the Montana Rocky Mountain Front, and within those years and geography are speculations and stories by many people. Grizzly Bear Biologists guess he ranged from south of Falls Creek, a creek drainage near Augusta, north 75 miles to Caribou Peak and the Sun River, and far east into the Scapegoat Wilderness. Little of his travels are really known, because he slipped his radio collar a year after he was trapped that first time in 1984. Ranchers guess he killed maybe $100,000 worth of cattle, and Wildlife Services trappers guess twice that much, but no one knows for sure. Everyone wonders how he learned to swing around downwind before approaching the baited snares intended to catch him, and scent the smallest part of human presence and know not to step into the wire loop and even dig it out as if to show people I now what this is.

No one knows how he made those leaps of perception without the trial and error of being snared, like so many other bears involved in conflicts. The Falls Creek bear lived mostly as number 346 in a database on a computer, as that number in annual reports and depredation logs, and as a bear who left big tracks distinctive as a thumbprint along the Front. He was a 650 pound dark brown grizzly who lived his life mostly in the wilderness, and was seldom spotted by anyone when he did venture along the Front.

I remember reading news articles about the bear in the spring of 2001, and from a gut feeling I've learned to trust I knew right away that this was something I wanted to follow. But following that gut feeling was the question exactly what? Here were stories about a bear, the people involved, and the Front. The threads all seemed obvious, and though the idea needed time, I knew the heart of the story would appear.

I got busy with everything else that summer and fall - work finishing the renovation of a house, walking in the hills around Missoula. When it got cold and I had time off work, that same gut feeling returned, and I started chipping away at the story and my ideas, roughing out some pages, more for myself than anyone else. Then work returned, and other things needed time, and I put the story away for another year.

The Rocky Mountain Front has always fascinated me as the junction of mountains and prairie, as a place of isolation and wind, a place where big bears live almost invisibly, leaving tracks in the mud and scat and little more. The cloudscapes of the Front as much a part of the landscape of the limestone reefs falling away in the distance. The Front has always made me feel...what? Small? Small among the peaks and expansive because of prairie? Someone once wrote that we can't enter into a particular landscape until we've made and told stories about it. Stories became my vector into the Front, the people and the bear.

Quotes in the Choteau Acantha and Great Falls Tribune ran the full spectrum. People said they respected that smart bear. Still, they were glad he was caught - he cost them too much money in dead calves. Still others thought too much crime was pinned on that one bear. He was good, they said, but not that good. He had a good long life, others said. And, there would be something missing with that bear gone.

Then one spring I started phoning people on the Front, explaining that I was after stories. Some ranchers told me they weren't interested; they had said too much already. But they were few, and most everyone said come by, call again. What I said might have been the key: I'm looking for stories, for all the angles of the story, and I wanted to know the place, the people and their work.

The drives to Choteau and Augusta gave me a chance to think while the landscape changed from the valleys of western Montana and Missoula to the openness and wind of the Front. I thought over the story on the way east, and on the way back west I considered what I had heard and seen.

I stopped in at ranches, talked in the cafes, recorded stories in the winter and read history of the Front. The story grew richer and that's what I wanted. I knew from the beginning that what I was getting into was complexity, and I repeated that to myself all along. But I have a feeling that we don't really know complexity until we're in the middle of it. And even when I'm in the midst, I have to keep reminding myself I don't have the last word or definition. Makes you humble, if we are lucky to have enough common sense to be humbled.

History is complexity, and history on the Front is close to the surface. I've stayed at a cabin in the Teton River Canyon, built 70 years ago by a mixed blood Native and French man named Lorman Bruno. That's a heavy, bear sounding name, and it means bear in some languages. Bears walk by his old cabin every spring and fall, and by his nearby grave, too.

History goes back to the ancient rock art father out from the Front, in places with names like Bear Mask Cave, out on the prairie where grizzlies once roamed and where Native Americans traveled the matrix of paths known as the Old North Trail, landmarked with their own stories.

The Falls Creek Grizzly never ventured as far north as the Blackfeet Nation, but Native American stories about bears are older and illuminate a different relationship and history. Grizzlies have many names in the Pikuni language, some unspoken and some metaphorical, reflecting human and beyond human traits, but that is a much more difficult story to find, and requires a trust that isn't granted right away.

Complexities are the different industries on the Front with sometimes conflicting aims - tourism, agriculture, mineral exploration. Bears and livestock will always conflict, though they do less these days than in the past, while oil and gas exploration is still contentious considering bears, their habitat and the landscape.

Multiple government agencies and the Blackfeet Nation have a hand in managing bears on the Front, and right now, the first ever comprehensive population study of grizzly bears is in progress. The results will come in over the next few years, and then more new questions will arise: how many bears are there along the Front? What does this data mean for the future of the grizzly?

Complexities are reality: landowners who like to have grizzlies living on their land but think bears have recovered and should be taken off the endangered species list; political conservatives who are deep conservationists and don't feel those positions are contradictory; hunters who hunt for their annual meat and say they would never hunt a bear, and hunters who want a season for grizzlies in order to reduce conflicts with people; conservationists who want to protect the bear at any cost. And recently, people on the Front have said they recognize the climate has been changing over the last twenty or more years, and this may present the greatest complexity and challenge of all.

Questions always bring more of the same, and I know that questions can sometimes be more important than the answers found. What are the things we can know about bears, and what are the things we can never understand, and can we know the difference? In this age of constant storms of data, definitions and politics, can we be comfortable with things we cannot know?

You might have already guessed: the Falls Creek bear was euthanized in the spring of 2001, captured for the second and last time after taking newborn calves from a ranch outside of Augusta. His mount is in the visitor's center of an educational ranch farther north on the Front, frozen in the act of flipping a rock over with a paw, searching for insects.

But the stories of the Falls Creek Grizzly are still around, and that's where the greater story begins. I've been learning that there are many more well known bears with names and stories all their own. And contained in those stories are the stories many people who care deeply about the Front. I know that the future of the Front depends on the people living there, and those same people are one of the keys to the long term survival of the bear and all that lives on the Front.

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