Nick Coleman: Bear attack? Gonna need a bigger world

CODY, WYO. - It was a "bear jam," a common scene in Yellowstone National Park: Cars and RVs slowed and stopped along the highway above the Yellowstone River as plump tourists clutching cameras and pulling their children jumped from vehicles and loped along the road, trying to catch up with a grizzly bear 100 yards up a hillside.

You might almost forget that 36 hours earlier, a hungry grizzly had rampaged through a campsite outside the park boundary, killing and partially eating a 48-year-old camper from Michigan and seriously injuring two others.

We are weird about bears.

Wednesday's unprovoked attack near the northeast corner of Yellowstone, where the number of grizzlies has been growing -- some 600 grizzlies live in the park -- set off a panic, with front-page coverage of the event in the region's newspapers, emergency meetings, and vows from local officials to find and kill the bear. It was a "Jaws"-like tableau: A bloodthirsty monster had to be hunted down and destroyed so that decent people and their kids could go back in the water. Or back in their tents.

Few of us are above feeling the primal pull of such fears. My family and I arrived at Yellowstone simultaneously with reports of the grizzly attack, with our tent on top of the car and plans to camp in the park. We ended up in a motel. It's a dad's duty to stop a bear before it eats the kids, and the better part of valor sometimes comes with free cable.

On our way into the park, we stopped at an information station, where a retired volunteer let the kids pet the claw-studded hide of a demised grizzly and showed us a video guide to avoiding bear trouble (more visitors are struck by the side-view mirrors of a passing RV during a bear jam than are hurt by bears). What did the volunteer think of the fatal attack, the second one this summer in Yellowstone?

"Interesting, ain't it," he said, shrugging his shoulders. "Well, it's the bears' country."

It hasn't been a picnic for the bears, either.

"Please drive slow and safe," the park ranger at the entrance told us. "We've had three rollovers this week after someone hit a bear or a buffalo."

Two grizzlies have been killed by hit-and-run drivers in Yellowstone this year (a third was struck by a speeding car and was never found), and bear researchers say a late spring may have made this a tough year for some bears. But the biggest problem is that, for some reason, humans have a tough time remembering what a bear is.

"Bears are unpredictable and dangerous," says Kevin Sanders, who is known around Yellowstone as "the bearman" and leads trips to view grizzlies (his website is at www.yellowstone-bearman.com). "Attacks like this are rare, but you have to accept some risk and responsibility. Being with bears is part of being in the wild."

Visits to Yellowstone this year may exceed record levels -- Sanders credits, or blames, last winter's PBS series by Ken Burns, "The National Parks: America's Best Idea" -- and people and bears don't always mix. "You increase the number of people, and you increase the chances of something bad happening," he says.

This would be news to the grizzly, the second-largest carnivore in North America after the polar bear -- have you noticed the height of the fences at Como Zoo's new polar bear exhibit? -- whose scientific name includes the word horribilis.

A suspect was captured Thursday, and officials were awaiting the results of DNA tests ("CSI: Montana"?) to see if they had the killer. A rogue male? No, just a Mama Grizzly trying to feed the family, a 300-pound sow trapped with two cubs while a third wailed in the woods nearby, eliciting return cries from the captured mother.

So it is hard to find a "Jaws"-like ending for this sad story. Instead of an evil that has to be hunted down, it may be just a hard thing that has to be lived with. Yes, the national parks are America's best idea. But the bears got there first.