Griz At First Sight

The first griz I see is a flash of bulk and a panned face looking in my eyes and then nothing remains. My eyes search and search, questioning tree stumps and sagebrush for confirmation. Nothing. It is outside of Yellowstone, ten miles east, and all the air is silver with coming darkness. It is their time. At four times my weight it is always their place, their time.
Montana is alot of hard roads to choose to walk through. Beautiful, but a dangerous place to back-country alone week after week after.... Studying a new map, unmarred by camps noted and kindnesses given or roads that grilled me, the mountains and the thick islands of forest of Montana that I will be hooking left through make me sweat in an air conditioned library. Offered by several people real firepower with it's burden of weight and the lightness of peace of mind, I consider both the anvil and the cost and walk away with nothing to fill the void. Men that live in these mountains, hunt these lands, know and share all the stories before the facts are scrubbed by government agenda and an often overly opinionated press against gun ownership, tell me to choose a caliber. "Do not choose between packing or not or we will find your bones." In the end I will not type everything until the row is hoed and I am beyond harms way with loan returned. All that I will put down for all to read now is this is partly why we have the Bill or Rights; the right to bear arms. Personally, it is part of what I fought for in the military; the right to freely choose, outside of any ruling government's good intentions and bad laws. Yes I have the pepper spray that should become a stone wall, a spear that has dispatched lions in Africa, and nearly seven thousand miles of hard training and near misses with man and beast rattling in my head and harness, but-an eight hundred pound grizzly unzipping my tent with it's claws has not been part of the equation until now. I have yet to meet anyone (except for the dim witted) that would take my yoke without packing authority...or should I call it a last chance just this side of prayer before dying.
One book after another I have studied breaking down bear attacks, and FEEDINGS. From the protective sow with cubs that can be two years old and wander anywhere around you so you can't help but be trapped between mother and offspring, to the predator bear that hunts man as a food source, my fingers have turned neatly typed pages to search for windows, hopes, answers and tactics to surviving. As in war, preparation is survival. I love bears too for they are the wild places, but I have also grown to like my funny looking face as it is, and have grown accustomed to breathing in and out without air vents in my ribs and my inner noodles dangling out. In the gravest extreme....I begin a new kind of walking, of sleepin in clothes rich with patina, of once again filtering water while doing a 'Where's Waldo' across the ridgeline. Through the land of Lewis and Clark I make camp and wish I did not mill alone by the fire.