THE GRIZZLY IN THE DRIVEWAY

A well-written, learned exploration of the world of a charismatic and sometimes troublesome animal.

Montana native and journalist Chaney has been around grizzly bears for decades and, unlike most folks, has encountered them “outside the safety of a zoo enclosure or a car window.” Encounters of just about any sort evoke fear and/or reverence, and any closer knowledge of Ursus arctos horribilis requires a heady degree of risk. Early on, the author marvels at the skill and luck of a backwoods explorer in Glacier National Park who managed to bring down a charging grizzly with a .22 pistol, far less firepower than the .45s and .357s that other backwoods types typically pack. Those real-life encounters are ever more likely for humans who live in the New Hampshire–sized grizzly heartland, taking in portions of Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho. As Chaney notes, when the bear was first listed as endangered, “the Cray 1 Supercomputer set world records with a memory of eight megabytes,” a fraction of the computing power that we carry in our pockets. Just so, things change in the natural world, and the grizzly now turns up on porches and in driveways, not as afraid of us as it should be even as we prove ourselves to be its most dangerous foe. “The grizzly bear needs space: Hundreds of square miles per animal,” writes the author. “It needs food: Forty thousand calories a day. It needs tolerance, for the days it decides to take what we think rightfully belongs to us. It needs to be left alone.” Can we do so? Chaney is a writer in the Peter Matthiessen school, deftly weaving anecdotes and human history with ursine natural history and bringing in memorable characters. These include Doug Peacock and Chuck Jonkel, both of whom have done much to prove, as does this lucid book, that grizzlies lie somewhere between the vicious creatures of legend and the cuddly critters of our imagination.

Fans of bears—and of hearty nature writing—will take pleasure in Chaney’s paean.