Here in Missoula, this month seasons are changing and most animals are busy. The first cold mornings have come and gone with the smell of smoke from fires in the dew. Yellow jackets are getting friendly, instinct telling them the end is near. Chickadees are knocking around the lilacs and plum trees, looking for seeds they stashed earlier under the lips of bark, and arguing with sharp dee dee dee's. Yesterday, two big Pileated Woodpeckers hammered away at deadwood near the top of the 100 year old willow out front, chopping from the left, pausing and then hammering from the right, dropping chunks of wood light as paper.

We've had a few days of what I call thick rain - small misty drops from a cold front, not heavy like a summer thunderstorm. Thick rain means snow up high.

Big piles of bear scat - black bear - jammed with chokecherries are in the trails in the Rattlesnake Valley right now. This year all the wild berry crops were good even if they were a bit late, saved by the good snowpack and early spring rains. Good berry crops mean bears will keep busy in the mountains loading up with natural foods for hibernation, and will come down later into the valleys looking for food. In the North Hills, the open prairie foothills to the Rattlesnakes, there is a Hawthorne Grove in the middle of one slope, and under the trees the scat piles are nearly six inches tall. How the Hawthornes got there is hard to say, but near the grove of a dozen trees is a tiny spring fed pond. And around the acres of the open slope are a few rectangular piles of rocks, low to the ground that look like grave markers. One or more of the trees might have been planted back in homesteading days, and the seeds were scattered in bear scat, the grove slowly growing outward.

Might seem to strange to write about or notice so much bear scat, but that's one of the few ways we know bears are around. And, besides, we can learn lots of scat; there are scientists who spend years studying scats. (Bear scat doesn't usually smell bad; it's the result of a diet mostly of grasses, roots and berries).

Last week, I spotted a black bear running in Cherry Gulch, which is lower down from the Rattlesnakes and inside the city limits. Blue, my Australian-cross scented it before I saw it, as she ran across the bottom and back, pointing into the breeze coming down the gulch, and I could tell what she smelled something other than a deer. There is a red fox in the gulch, and some early mornings she has scented it, and we have stopped and stared at each other, my Blue pointing and wanting to chase, the fox quietly sitting, facing us with her black face, deep red flanks, white tipped tail, watching to see what we do. Usually quietly watching us until we leave.

But this was a small black bear, running the ridge top. When I first saw it up in the pines near the ridge top, I thought the shape was the head and shoulders of another walker. But then it dropped to its front legs and ran, and then I knew it had been sitting on its haunches, watching me and Blue. I went up the slope, called Blue back to walk with me, and saw it galloping down the hill, into the open. It stopped once again before dropping down into the trees at the edge of Duncan Drive. Brown nose, deep black fur; it quickly turned its head out of fear and fell to its front paws to run, hind legs overtaking front paws on the head long rush down the hill to cover.

It's nothing new to observe, but bears look human-like, appear something like us in action and in gait and facial expressions. Maybe that's why people are fascinated by bears; maybe as humans we are species lonely, and we are always looking for other animals to be around us. Every other animal has another close by in terms of species: birds have thousands of species close by, ungulates like deer and elk have others, and other predators like wolves and cats have relatives. We've been species lonely for a hundred thousand years.

Jamie Jonkel, the Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Wildlife Management Specialist for Region 2 (this area) told me that Cherry Gulch has more bear traffic than some parts of Glacier Park, and I can see that. (That's also why he has a culvert trap at the mouth of the gulch where it crosses Duncan Drive.) There are well traveled trails in the brush and cottonwoods of the bottom, wide enough for a bear. Walking along, there are bits of hair on logs the bears step over, bits on branches, scats and small bedding areas like nests. I found one of those plastic honey squeeze containers from the grocery store, shaped like a bear, with tooth marks all the way through it. Must have been a funny sight, seeing a bear carrying a bear shaped honey container away from a garbage can. And, in the leaves next to plastic bear was a light bulb. Dark and burned out, but whole. How did a light bulb - unbroken - get out there? It must have been carried by the bear. What did the bear think? That it was food? A toy?

On a sunny day, Cherry Gulch sees hundreds of people walking and running and dozens of dogs. Once I sat above the trail and watched the fox family across the gulch, and also watched a dozen people and dogs walk right below me, and no one knew the foxes were close by. In Cherry Gulch, bears see far more people than people see them.

Cherry Gulch might be the first place a grizzly is spotted near town. If a grizzly is confirmed on the edge of Missoula, it will be - for better or for worse - big news. Grizzlies follow black bears who follow the food, and grizzlies become habituated to food sources just like black bears, but their shyness keeps them most often out of sight. If a grizzly is spotted on the edge of Missoula, it will more than likely be a sub-adult, kicked off by its mother that spring. It will be trying to find its way in the world, trying to stay out of the way of older bears by looking for new territory, maybe looking for food after a bad summer.

There might already have been grizzlies around the edge of town, feeding on apples and other fruit, ripping into bags of dog food stored on front porches and garages, just no one knew and thought the evidence was from a black bear. There are grizzlies in the Rattlesnake Wilderness, 12 miles north of town. Beyond that are the Mission Mountains Tribal Wilderness to the north with their population of bears, and to the northwest is the North Fork of the Blackfoot, where grizzlies are moving back into their old ranges on the ranches and creeks and bottom-lands.

I don't know what will happen when (not if - I think it will happen in the next few years) a grizzly is confirmed in or around Missoula. Will public response demand it be trapped and relocated, even if it hasn't gotten into trouble? It would be an interesting management issue, in that these days, all bears are managed. Black bears are regularly trapped and relocated and put down when they become habituated to food, become unafraid of people. But as soon as the word grizzly appears in print in the local papers, many people will think of only one thing: danger.

We all are in much more danger from other critters: I've been chased by moose (never climb a tree to get away from a moose - it will keep you up there for days), and Blue once chased aan agressive white tail out of the back yard. It stalked toward her until she charged, barking and chased it to the fence. It came back twice more before it didn't come back. It wasn't afraid of me, either. I was about to get my can of bear spray to do some averse conditioning if it came back again.

People in Missoula remember that a hunter was mauled in the Blackfoot region five years ago. Early on a November morning, a grizzly surprised him as he was gutting an elk. The bear came from behind and he might not have heard it until the last second. According to evidence on the ground, the bear mauled him near the elk, followed him a short distance and attacked again, and then left him alone to crawl toward his truck. His rifle lay near the elk, bolt open. Some yards away he stopped and lay on his back, as if to rest a bit before crawling on, and died.

The bear and her two cubs ate some of the elk, and then she partially buried it to mark it as hers. The bears eventually returned a number of times, and by the next day, bear biologists and wardens has set snares. The female and a cub stepped in snares on the third day, returning to the site even though the elk carcass was gone. It was a case of unusual aggression, very rare. The three bears were killed. The DNA evidence and stomach contents of the female were inconclusive. The investigative committee headed by U.S. Fish and Game felt that the bears were the aggressors as they returned to the site, even after the elk carcass was gone.

It was the first fatality on the Front or in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem since 1957. Ten years before that, a sheep herder was mauled and killed near Augusta. There have been fatalities in Glacier Park, which may be due to the higher concentration of both grizzlies and people and as a result they run into each other more often. But the Blackfoot River runs through Missoula, and the incident was less than 40 miles north of town. (I've drawn on articles from The Missoulian for this information; check the Missoulian archives for the full range of articles.)