Writing about Bears

I'm scared of bears.

With all our travels out west, we've only seen bears on two trips - my daughter and I saw a bear from the window of the train last year - and this past May when we went to the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone we saw several, including this one I'm showing here.

Tom took this picture of a grizzly bear on his way back from a morning hike alone in the brush along the river - did I mention it was bear country?

What you can't tell from this photo is that this bear had two cubs up a pine tree nearby - which makes her one of the most dangerous animals alive. A couple of months after we returned from this trip, a man and his wife were attacked by a mother bear in Yellowstone and the man was killed.

I am writing an essay about Tom and this incident called "Beaver and Bear" (he ran across the beaver on that morning walk) but the whole exercise is colored by my fear of bears in the wild. Luckily all the bears we saw this time we saw from the safety of our car.

Once again we dodged the bullet of coming upon a bear on the trail.