As a child, my mother read to me the Tales of Winnie the Pooh with passages like, “Sing Ho! for the life of a
Bear!” And my father read The Truce of the Bear, by Rudyard Kipling which made a more indelible
impression with “Nearer he tottered and nearer, with paws like hands that pray, From brow to jaw that
steel-shod paw, it ripped my face away!”
I read “The Bear's Embrace : A Story of Survival” by Patricia Van Tighem which begins when Van Tighem
encounters a grizzly in an attack she barely survives.
I’ve seen perhaps half a dozen bears in my life outside of zoos, but I’ve been steeped in a culture that has
mythologised bears as either cute and cuddly or cunning and lethal. So “Grizzly Heart: Living Without Fear
Among the Brown Bears of Kamchatka” by Charlie Russell and Maureen Enns was jarring.
Russell and Enns are a couple drawn together by their shared interest in bears. Enns, an artist, anguishes
over the preservation of wildlife and their habitat. She has been invited to present her work in Russia,
France and major Canadian galleries. Russell is the tenacious son of an Albertan hunting guide and
rancher. Russell’s father exchanged his gun for a pen and is now a conservationist and writer. Russell left
school early, but had learned so many skills and acquired such confidence on the ranch that there doesn’t
seem to be anything that he won’t tackle. His interest in bears began when he guided eco-tourists along the
Khutzeymateen Inlet and slowly earned the trust of a grizzly bear.
Russell decided that bears had been miscast as unpredictable, opportunistic, fearfully strong, unfathomably
fast, man-eating predators and he wanted a way to prove it. Enns supported Russell. Neither were wildlife
biologists and both were regarded by the North America scientific community as heretics. Undeterred and
perhaps even encouraged by that assessment, Russell and Enns ploughed on. They learned that the
largest populations of grizzlies were in Kamchatka, an extraordinarily inhospitable peninsula on the Russian
Pacific coast. That’s where Russell and Enns spent five summers beginning in 1996 observing these
incredible animals in their preferred habitat.
While the book is largely about bears, it is also about life in post-Soviet Russia, and the determination of the
authors. Only a kid from a ranch in Alberta would dream of such a cockamamy project and have the
bull-headed temerity to pull it off. It’s a wonderful book with moving descriptions and glorious photographs
of bears that have adapted marvellously to a ferocious environment. The bears, far from simply being
hugely efficient eating machines, have astonishingly complex social lives, play time, distinct personalities
and individual quirks. The authors demystify and enrich our understanding of grizzly bears.
The authors know that the survival of bears depends on our collective understanding and willingness to
coexist with them. As we plunder the remaining wilderness, more species, and especially the great
predators will perish. However, what sadly drew me to this book was a report last spring that when the
authors returned to their cabin in Kamchatka, they found the gruesome remains of a vicious slaughter of
bears that had learned from Russell and Enns that humans weren’t a threat.
When Kipling wrote, “Sudden, silent, and savage, searing as flame the blow – Faceless I fell before his feet,
fifty summers ago. I heard him grunt and chuckle—I heard him pass to his den. He left me blind to the
darkened years and the little mercy of men” was he speaking from the bear’s perspective?