Searching For Bear Eyes

Did a grizzly bear kill Melody Applegate? Or was it something else stalking the remote edges of Yellowstone Park? Searching for Bear Eyes is a mystery novel narrated by the enigmatic X. Wenn, Yellowstone Park's Chief Criminal Investigator. A gifted tracker of bear and man, it's up to him to piece together the story of what may be a mauling by Wild Eye, one of the park's most fabled grizzlies, or a perfect murder. As X. inches toward a reality that he cannot accept, slivers of his own past come to the surfacelost love, shadows of an abusive childhood, estrangement from his son. He assembles the evidence with meticulous precision, but can we trust him to face the truth? Set against the Edenic beauty and pure logic of Yellowstone's "Green World," Searching for Bear Eyes explores the evolutionary psychology of human love.

"I like to go out for walks, but it's a little awkward to push the baby stroller and carry a shotgun at the same time." -- housewife from Churchill, Manitoba Yes, welcome to Churchill, Manitoba. Year-round human population: 943. Yet despite the isolation and the searing cold here at the arctic's edge, visitors from around the globe flock to the town every fall, driven by a single purpose: to see polar bears in the wild. Churchill is "The Polar Bear Capital of the World," and for one unforgettable "bear season," Zac Unger, his wife, and his three children moved from Oakland, California, to make it their temporary home. But they soon discovered that it's really the polar bears who are at home in Churchill, roaming past the coffee shop on the main drag, peering into garbage cans, languorously scratching their backs against fence posts and front doorways. Where kids in other towns receive admonitions about talking to strangers, Churchill schoolchildren get "Let's All Be Bear Aware" booklets to bring home. (Lesson number 8: Never explore bad-smelling areas.) Zac Unger takes readers on a spirited and often wildly funny journey to a place as unique as it is remote, a place where natives, tourists, scientists, conservationists, and the most ferocious predators on the planet converge. In the process he becomes embroiled in the controversy surrounding "polar bear science" -- and finds out that some of what we've been led to believe about the bears' imminent extinction may not be quite the case. But mostly what he learns is about human behavior in extreme situations . . . and also why you should never even think of looking a polar bear in the eye.

The black dog is not scratching. He goes back to his sniffing and huffing and then he starts cracking his bone. Stick and I are huddled tight. . . . It is dark and no Daddy or Mommy and after a while I watch the lids of my eyes close down like jaws. Told from the point of view of a six-year-old child, The Bear is the story of Anna and her little brother, Stick--two young children forced to fend for themselves in Algonquin Park after a black bear attacks their parents. A gripping and mesmerizing exploration of the child psyche, this is a survival story unlike any other, one that asks what it takes to survive in the wilderness and what happens when predation comes from within.

After enduring a vicious bear attack in the Russian Far East's Kamchatka Peninsula, a French anthropologist undergoes a physical and spiritual transformation that forces her to confront the tenuous distinction between animal and human. In the Eye of the Wild begins with an account of the French anthropologist Nastassja Martin’s near fatal run-in with a Kamchatka bear in the mountains of Siberia. Martin’s professional interest is animism; she addresses philosophical questions about the relation of humankind to nature, and in her work she seeks to partake as fully as she can in the lives of the indigenous peoples she studies. Her violent encounter with the bear, however, brings her face-to-face with something entirely beyond her ken—the untamed, the nonhuman, the animal, the wild. In the course of that encounter something in the balance of her world shifts. A change takes place that she must somehow reckon with. Left severely mutilated, dazed with pain, Martin undergoes multiple operations in a provincial Russian hospital, while also being grilled by the secret police. Back in France, she finds herself back on the operating table, a source of new trauma. She realizes that the only thing for her to do is to return to Kamchatka. She must discover what it means to have become, as the Even people call it, medka, a person who is half human, half bear. In the Eye of the Wild is a fascinating, mind-altering book about terror, pain, endurance, and self-transformation, comparable in its intensity of perception and originality of style to J. A. Baker’s classic The Peregrine. Here Nastassja Martin takes us to the farthest limits of human being.

Ben and Cassie have just moved into a new home, but it's not quite what they expected as they have to share a room until the builders have finished doing it up. But that's OK. Ben and Cassie can make their own fun. Are the builders really pirates? And is there really a bear living in the garden? Maybe they could catch him...

Sy Montgomery--acclaimed author of The Soul of an Octopus and bestselling memoir The Good Good Pig--has shared with readers her amazing encounters with intelligent octopi, great apes, man-eating tigers, and pink river dolphins, but here her muse is an animal whose name and appearance evoke another world altogether. Southeast Asia's golden moon bear, with its luminous coat, lionlike mane, and Mickey Mouse ears, was unknown to science--until Montgomery and her colleagues got on the trail at the dawn of the new millennium. Search for the Golden Moon Bear recounts Montgomery's quest--fraught with danger and mayhem--to reconstruct an evolutionary record and piece together a living portrait of her littleknown subject. This beautiful animal is not just a scientific eureka! It is also a powerful symbol of conservation. Search for the Golden Moon Bear is a field report from the frontiers of science and the ends of the earth, seamlessly weaving together folklore, natural history, and contemporary research into fantastic travelogue.

Will Cogswell, a woods-wise boy of twelve, is spending the summer with his grandparents deep in the woods of Washington's Cascade Mountains. His grandparents are owners of the resort, "Bridal Veil Falls Lodge." Two lodge guests, Jaime and Petey, challenge Will's abilities as a woodsman in an effort to get him to lead them to the top of Bear Mountain. Will gives in to the visiting boys mocking, and the three set out on what will become a life-changing experience. Bear Mountain lives up to its name, and all three boys find themselves in a frightening highly dangerous situation. The harrowing experience teaches Will some valuable lessons. Don't try to be someone different from who you really are. More importantly, Will is reminded that a person of honor always keeps his word.

Since its founding in 1872, humans and grizzly bears have come into contact in Yellowstone National Park. Most of these encounters have ended peacefully, but many have not. Snow went to the National Park Service archives, collected more than 100 years' worth of hair-raising stories, and tells the stories of those involved in the more deadly incidents.