Summary
The story of a grizzly bear named Millie: her life, death, and cubs, and what they reveal about the changing character of the American West.
An "ode to wildness and wilderness" (Outside Magazine), Down from the Mountain tells the story of one grizzly in the changing Montana landscape.
Millie was cunning, a fiercely protective mother to her cubs. But raising those cubs in the mountains was hard, as the climate warmed and people crowded the valleys.
There were obvious dangers, like poachers, and subtle ones, like the corn field that drew her into sure trouble. That trouble is where award-winning writer, farmer, and conservationist Bryce Andrews's story intersects with Millie's.
In this "welcome and impressive work" he shows how this drama is "the core of a major problem in the rural American West--the disagreement between large predatory animals and invasive modern settlers"--an entangled collision where the shrinking wilds force human and bear into ever closer proximity (Barry Lopez).
"Andrews's wonderful Down from the Mountain is deeply informed by personal experience and made all the stronger by his compassion and measured thoughts . . . Welcome and impressive work."--Barry Lopez
Author Notes
BRYCE ANDREWS is the author of Badluck Way, winner of the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, the Reading the West Book Award for nonfiction, and a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. He works with the conservation group People and Carnivores and has advocated for our public lands in front of Congress.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Andrews (Badluck Way), a conservationist and rancher in Montana's Mission Valley, examines dramatic changes in the local bear population, which once "lived a grizzly's solitary life," but now show up regularly near human dwellings searching for food, in his compassionate study. He combines research with experience, paying particular attention to the bears that have recently started frequenting the cornfields near his home in late summer. Becoming hooked on corn intended for cows, the bears fattened up quickly and, "during their hungriest, most aggressive season," started encountering more people, frustrating area farmers to no end. This local story illustrates larger concerns, Andrews says, about how humans and wild animals are increasingly encroaching upon each other's previously separate environments. In the case of the bears, he asks what will happen when they no longer feel the need to forage in the wild. If they encroach even further on local farms and begin to raid backyard chicken coops, "they will almost certainly be shot for doing so in the years that follow." To ensure their survival, Andrews concludes, the bears must modify their behavior to avoid confrontation. Andrews's well-written cautionary tale leaves readers with the sobering message that humans must as well, if they are to be responsible stewards of nature. Agent: Duvall Osteen, Aragi. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Library Journal Review
Award-winning author Andrews (People and Carnivores) delves into the lives and habits of grizzly bears in Montana's Mission Valley. Many of these animals have developed a taste for corn, bringing them into close contact with ranchers, farmers, and wildlife biologists in the region resulting in inevitable conflicts between bears and people, and causing bears to abandon their traditional sources of food in the higher mountains. Using private and federal funding, Andrews builds and tests a short electric fence surrounding a local dairy farmer's cornfield to determine if it deters grizzlies. Intertwined with his experiment is the story of Millie, a sow with two cubs, from her birth in the mountains to her death. Andrews attempts to find a home for her two young cubs and follows the federal investigation into the bear's death. With his knowledge of grizzlies, research into bear biology, and Millie's radio collar data, Andrews narrates the story as it might have happened and describes the impact of grizzlies losing their wilderness over time. VERDICT This fascinating, well-researched, and lyrical memoir will appeal to conservationists, those curious about large predators, and readers who relish stories of the West.-Sue O'Brien, Downers Grove, IL © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Sheer peaks mark the eastern edge of Montana's Mission Valley. Gray Wolf, the southernmost, is a fist. East and West Saint Mary's are shoulders without a head between them. Kakashe is a rampart, with higher pinnacles overtopping it from behind like breakers cresting a seawall. All are made of gray stone, with fissures, walls, and drops that give pause to the most intrepid climbers. They are quick to gather snow, slow in losing it through summer. The mountains, which form the eastern margin of the Flathead Indian Reservation, shelter a healthy population of grizzly bears. As fall gives way to winter, these bears climb. Disappearing into well-hidden dens, they wait for spring. Up there in February, it looks like nothing is passing but time, wind, and occasional ravens, but grizzlies are busy underground. In secret, deep-drifted nooks, they breathe and stir. Sows give birth in darkness. Sometime around the year 2000--it might have been a winter or two before--in a den smelling of earth and ursine rancidity, a cub was born. She probably had a sibling or two, as grizzlies are mostly born in pairs or trios. Until spring came, the writhing of her littermates and her mother's warmth were her whole world. Though much is now known about that cub--her life, movements, and the circumstances of her end--no one can say precisely where or when she was born. It is enough to say that she was born in the high country, into a den that no human found or entered. In this, she was like most bears that have been born in the Missions since the recession of Pleistocene ice revealed mountains to the sun. Emerging into spring, she was shown by a careful mother how to get about in the mountains. She learned which things were to be eaten and which were dangerous. In time, she descended with her mother across ridges and avalanche chutes toward the valley floor. Down in that settled, domesticated landscape, she smelled and saw human beings for the first time. She learned to be wary of gravel roads and highways and to move discreetly among farms and the scattered houses of rural subdivisions. She slept one more winter in her mother's den, woke, and made the seasonal round as a yearling. Then, breaking with her family, she went out alone. She grew into adulthood, weighing nearly five hundred pounds and measuring three feet tall at the shoulder. Rising on her hind legs to pluck apples from a tree, she could reach higher than most people. Her forepaws were wide and black padded, and they hardened as she went about mapping the smells, contours, and hazards of her home range. She lived a grizzly's solitary life, and if she was seen at all by the men and women who lived in the valley, it was as a disappearing flash or a shadow against the night. In 2002, in the blue light that follows dusk in late summer, she left off foraging and walked down from the foothills into a tangled aspen grove. Crossing Millie's Woods--the copse for which she'd soon be named--the bear came to a place where she could see farmstead lights spread across the floor of the Mission Valley, glittering like shards of a bottle dropped from a great height. While darkness thickened, she shuffled along a well-worn game trail, giving a generous berth to barnyards and houses. Hearing the faraway barking of dogs, she kept to the low ground of potholes and sloughs. She came in search of ripening apples and the chokecherries weighing down the branches along the banks of irrigation canals. Descending step by cautious step, keeping pace with the night, she left the Mission Range behind. In doing so, she walked out of a wilderness that has remained essentially unchanged since the end of the last ice age, and into an unforgiving arcadia. The primeval valley--the fertile, deep soil that had succored native people and grizzly bears for thousands of years--was hidden by roads, power lines, prefabricated ranch-style houses, tilled fields, and uncountable miles of barbwire fence. Cars and trucks hurtled day and night along Highway 93. Except for the timbered corridors along streams, the land was settled, cleared, and cropped. There were pastures and hayfields, gardens and chicken coops, pigsties, grain bins, and trash piles--all manner of things that could lead a bear into conflict with people or livestock, and therefore to ruin. The farms were small by Montana standards, with most holdings measuring between twenty and eighty acres. The landscape was not paved over or entirely ruined for a grizzly bear's purposes, as parts of the Missoula and Bitterroot valleys are, but it was a difficult, dangerous place to survive. Excerpted from Down from the Mountain: The Life and Death of a Grizzly Bear by Bryce Andrews All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
