I Choose the Bear (But Not for the Reasons You Might Think)
I live in Alaska. I hike. The bear vs man debate–where women theorize whether they would rather meet a man or a bear while hiking alone–is not a theoretical question for me. I choose the bear, but not for the reasons you might think.
Every full moon, I post an essay that digs for our cultural assumptions and holds them up for comparison with what I observe in the world around me. This essay includes the following sensitive topics: animal violence, human violence, hunting.
“They say the day is coming—it may already be here—when there will be no wild creatures. That is, when no species on the planet will be able to further itself without reference or negotiation with us. When our intervention or restraint will be a factor in their continued existence. Every creature: salmon, sand martins, seals, flies.” Kathleen Jamie, Findings
I live in Alaska. I hike. The bear vs man debate–where women theorize whether they would rather meet a man or a bear while hiking alone–is not a theoretical question for me. I choose the bear, but not for the reasons you might think.
All Alaskan hikers have bear stories. I have several, mostly uneventful. I’ll share the most dramatic story with you. It was 2017, a year of unprecedented bear encounters, with two people killed by black bears in rare predatory attacks. For context, there have been only 67 fatal black bear attacks in North America since 1900. 2017 was a weird year, and Alaskans were on edge. Bears were on my mind as I took a late-evening bike ride near a popular lake. I hadn’t seen a soul on the trail for over an hour as I approached a bridge across a noisy stream. The thought popped into my mind that bears would hear the noise of my bike on the gravel trail most of the time, but the stream drowned out the sound. As I rounded the corner, there they were, as if my thoughts summoned them–a mama bear and two cubs on the other side of the bridge, working their claws and teeth on a signpost.
I stopped and got off my bike. I didn’t want to seem threatening. When mama bears attack, it is usually to defend their cubs. I waited on the far side of the bridge. If she decided I was a threat, at least I would see her coming. I waited. After a few heartbeats, they wandered off into the woods. I can’t tell you how much time passed, but I decided I still needed to get to my car, so I inched across the bridge, walking my bike, singing a nonsense song to be heard over the stream. I’d gone another 50 feet or so when they crossed the trail right in front of me, not more than 20 feet away. I paused again. The cubs clambered up a tree, and mama raised herself up on her hind legs, sniffing.
If you know about bears, you know she was standing tall to figure out what I was about. My heart was pounding, but I couldn’t imagine she’d bring her clubs so close if she genuinely thought I was a threat. I stood still, barely breathing, bear spray in one hand, air horn in the other, waiting. She dropped to all fours and ambled off into the woods, followed by her cubs. I started on my way, still walking my bike, when I heard her huffing, crashing through the brush toward me. I blasted my air horn and yelled and waved my arms. The crashing and huffing stopped. I hopped on my bike and took off faster than I dreamed possible, although certainly not fast enough to outrun a bear. I was lucky. If she had wanted to, she could have caught up with me easily and snagged me off the bike with one swoop of her massive paw.
It took me a few years to feel comfortable enough to head out on the trail by myself again. When I did, I knew the risk I was taking, and I embraced it. After 2020, I found work I could do at home that would let me be outdoors for hours during the best part of the day. No more evening hikes—I usually go after lunch. I tell myself that bears probably take a siesta in the early afternoon. I know I take risks, but I would much rather be on the trail than hide in my house.
The risks aren’t just from bears, of course. 2024 was another year of unprecedented trail attacks, but this time from humans. There was a string of assaults on the trail system I frequent, with the perpetrator arrested and then released not long after. Not to mention a few unsolved murders in the area from the previous year. Later in 2024, a man would lure people into the woods near my favorite dog park with cries for help and then shoot at them. I’m always wary, but the sum of the events that year put me on edge again.
After the murders and assaults but before the dog park shooting, I was wandering the urban end of my trail system, within sight of a major road, scoping berry picking opportunities for the next month. I saw a man approaching from about a mile away who looked… off. There was something about his gait that didn’t seem right. Maybe he was high. I ducked off the trail to stay out of his way and check out the berry bushes.
He arrived near me, and I could see he was carrying an unsheathed machete. My heart raced, and I pulled out my trusty air horn, the same one I’d used with the bear. I was near a bench, and he sat down on it, facing me, his machete on his lap. My dog rarely barks at people, but he caught the vibe and barked furiously at the man, who promptly pointed a GoPro at the dog and started complaining loudly, “Why don’t you make him stop? Don’t you have control over your dog?” His machete was, of course, outside of the camera’s eye.
“He only barks when he thinks I’m in danger!” I snapped back, and the man unleashed a torrent of verbal abuse on me and my dog that I don’t honestly remember. I was afraid, and he knew it. He was using it to get under my skin even more and taking video footage of the whole thing. I couldn’t imagine what he wanted from it or why he would record it. I still don’t know. But I knew it wasn’t anything good for me, not if it required him to threaten me with a weapon. I calmed my dog enough for us to hightail it out of there, followed by threats and cussing from the machete man.
So, when the question comes up: would you rather encounter a bear or a man on a trail, both are scenarios I plan for and ponder, and I have experience to back me up. I always have the question “why?” in the forefront of my thoughts. Not that I think we can know the motive of a bear in a specific scenario. People still puzzle over the 2017 attacks that seemed unprovoked. But that is precisely why I ask the “why” question in a more general sense—because we have no way to know in the specific situation. We don’t know what the animal experienced immediately before seeing us. Or what experiences it has had with people previously in its life. I will never know the specifics, but I am getting a picture of the general reasons.
We often treat wildlife encounters as if the encounter itself is a blank slate. I think that is the illusion of “wildness,” this naive assumption that I should act as if I am the first human this bear has ever encountered. Or that most of its interactions with humans have been benign. In fact, almost 1% of the bear population in Alaska is killed in hunting every year. For every bear killed, how many experience the hunt and successfully evade the hunter? And those are the official numbers. It is hard to say what happens out of the public eye, although the increasing presence of cameras in the “wilderness” gives us some indication. A few years ago, a man and his son poached a mama bear in her den and dispatched with the cubs. The only reason the world ever found out was because the den was equipped with a wildlife camera. Last year, a garbage truck driver was disciplined after someone caught him harassing a moose on camera. How often do these provocations happen out of the public eye, under the cover of wilderness?
I know that violence against women is reported to authorities less than half the time. Bears and moose have no means of reporting violence against them. The likelihood of a bear's den being equipped with a camera to protect the bears is… very low. So I have to wonder, how often is this sort of thing happening? Almost every woman experiences some sort of harassment or violence in a lifetime, and we have a voice and legal recourse. How many times has someone illegally poached a mama bear and her cubs in their den or chased one with a vehicle? Even in this sparsely populated state, there are two people for every bear. How many of those bears have encountered humans at least once? Probably most, if not all of them. How many have had at least one adverse encounter with a human being? If most women have been harassed and assaulted, despite the legal risks… I cannot imagine the statistics for bears. How often do the bears experience harassment and violence, when they have nothing but claws and teeth to defend themselves, when they have no way of telling us what happened to them? Well, no way of telling us except a display of force when a human comes near their cubs….
My bear awareness training would have me treat that bear as if it doesn’t know or understand how to deal with people. Or that it thinks people are benign until we demonstrate otherwise. And yet, when I see the actions of men in civilization, I can’t help but think they must be 10x worse under the cover of “wilderness.” I can’t know the context that bear is coming from, but I can extrapolate from what I do know. I imagine that if my dog can learn from a handful of interactions that he should expect a walk at 1 pm and a salmon treat at 4:30 pm every day, bears probably learn from interactions with humans and shape their future responses accordingly.
This understanding of animals doesn’t make them less intimidating. I will always be cautious around bears and other megafauna. You’ll never catch me turning into grizzly man and cozying up to wild animals. But I am coming to believe that the scary predator-like behavior and instinct likely have more to do with HOW they behave than WHY. WE are often the why. Human interactions over time have made them wary of us. To put a finer point on it, since 80% of registered Alaska hunters are male, MEN are usually the why.
Yes, I am afraid of encountering a bear on the trail. And I am afraid of encountering men on the trail. But I have much more reason to be afraid of bears BECAUSE men have made them reactive to human beings. The bear and I are both afraid. We have both experienced threats and violence from men that put us on edge. And if the enemy of my enemy is my friend, well, I choose the bear.
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