One evening, I set out from Hawk’s Nest for a walk. The snow was pretty deep so I put on my snowshoes. I hadn’t planned on staying very long because I could tell it was going to start to snow again soon. Just as I got inside the forest, I saw deer tracks. There was just enough light to see them. A hundred or so metres in, there were wolf tracks – one big and the other small, running parallel with the deer. The wolves were probably the partners a friend of mine and I had seen a few days back. The tracks said that they had started running and were following the deer by sight. I had to find out what happened. All of a sudden, there was this drama. I had to sort it all out to see if the wolves had gotten the deer or the deer had gotten away. I also needed to decide whether to follow the deer or the wolves. I chose the deer.” Charlie paused a minute, savouring the memory of the night.

“You could tell that the deer knew the area really well by the way she crossed the creek to get an advantage. She then leapt a good 20 feet over a deadfall. This was really intelligent. It stopped the wolves because they had to go around the downed tree and it gave the deer a good lead. Although they had lost time, the wolves made it up and were gaining on her. She dodged them again by going down the hill where there was another deadfall, a huge one. Since I couldn’t jump the deadfall any more than the wolves could, I took their route and snowshoed up and around. At this point, the deer didn’t have any choice but to jump. Otherwise the wolves would have been able to catch and take her down. If she made one small miscalculation it would have been all over. She jumped and made it. There was this one tiny open spot and she landed right on it. She dropped down and got away. It was amazing. I wasn’t favouring or cheering the deer. I was enthralled at how she had thought it all out.”

Charlie was ecstatic. His voice carried the effervescence of triumph, not, as he stressed, because he was taking the deer’s side, but because he was in awe of her elegant finesse. The doe did it all on her own. No one told her what to do. She depended solely on her judgment. It reflected a presence of mind perfectly connected to body and surroundings. He admired that. The story wasn’t over. There was one more piece that gave the night the finishing touch. After the mystery was solved, Charlie turned to go home. Caught up in the unfolding deer-wolf drama, he had not noticed how much snow had come down. “I had stayed out much longer than planned and had lost track of time. By now, the snow was coming down hard. It was a real blizzard and I couldn’t see more than ten feet ahead. I had to turn on my headlamp because it was pitch black. It helped some, but not much. The visibility was so poor that I couldn’t look around casually to see where I was going. My abilities were really taxed. I was in bliss. Here I was, seeing what the deer had done and now being in the same position having to sort things out for myself. It was fantastic!”

That night was an example of what Charlie tried to describe when, after one of his nature walks or lectures, someone inevitably asked if he could teach them how to connect with nature. “This question has always confused me. The label ‘nature’ is not even correct. Nature is indescribable because it is everything. But there is this urge to label because labelling gives the feeling of control and that’s what humans want. I think it is too scary otherwise because nature is so enveloping. You don’t need to try to control nature – you can’t. We can just do what we can as part of nature. This is why I tell people who ask how to connect with nature, ‘You are connected to nature!’ The difference is feeling the connection and acting respectfully on the understanding that it exists. People like to go ‘out in nature,’ be in the mountains or desert, but they often treat it as simply a pretty spot – like being on a movie set. Racing up a mountain or kayaking a big river is a kind of relationship, but being in a relationship where you are trying to get the better of someone is not very nice.”

Relationship was definitive. Charlie saw life implicitly in tandem. Yet he found it difficult to convince bear researchers and managers of its essentiality. “Scientists say that their data isn’t any good if they have a relationship with whoever they’re studying. The whole of ecology is based on the idea of relationships, but when it comes to wildlife, relationships are ignored – the study has to remain ‘objective,’ meaning that the researcher is invisible, not having any effect on the bear. That’s impossible. Trying to do this is like standing in a room full of people with your eyes shut and saying you’re alone.”

He lobbied for a relational approach to policy, pointing out how present-day methods make matters worse. “Bears are treated like checkers on a board. Biologists think that the answer to a ‘problem bear’ is to scare, move or kill her. This does not solve anything – it causes more problems because it damages relationships with bears. The bear is confused by the drugs, taken from her home and planted in a strange place. The other bears see that all of a sudden, out of nowhere, a new bear appears, and this causes issues in bear relationships. When a mother bear is killed, her cubs are damaged. They are terrified and learn that humans are dangerous and not trustworthy. Her cubs inherit all the pain. Vitaly told me that he thought bears inherited fear from their mothers” – an observation that matches perfectly with what neuroscience and psychology predict.

Charlie was admired and respected, but his ideas found little traction among bear scientists and wildlife managers. Their unwillingness to put to use his understanding, derived from historical fact and made rigorous by the number of years of assiduous observations he had made, was a source of frustration. “They really fuel the fire. People look for guidance from biologists and managers on how to behave around bears and what they hear is that grizzlies are ferocious and unpredictable and, given the chance, will attack. Since most people have never lived around bears or even seen one in the wild, they believe what these so called ‘experts’ say, which is totally untrue. It would be so much better if biologists would learn how to have good relationships with bears and make that the focus of their research. Wildlife managers could really change things if they managed humans by teaching them how to be respectful in nature. When people listen to my lectures and see me with bears, it helps. It opens a door, but it isn’t enough. You have to make time to really get to understand a bear. You have to change yourself and listen to bears. Not many people are willing to do that. Most people are interested in getting things done instead of understanding. Understanding takes too much time.” Time was Charlie’s most precious commodity and he gave it to the bears full-heartedly. Time was never parsed into coins of hours, days and months, but spent in the currency of unconditional care, which doesn’t run by the clock. “When I’m with a bear, I’m learning about him on his time. I’m not just seeing him or staring at him – staring usually makes animals nervous. I am trying to understand what is going on with him. You call it ‘listening with your eyes,’ and I guess that’s a good way to put it because listening usually means taking in a lot of things. A bear is part of the entire landscape like we are. That’s why it’s important to be attentive.”

Brandy contradicted the many myths surrounding female bears and their cubs.

Being “attentive” is the quality that provides stretch to depth of concentration in paying attention, a kind of peripheral vision. “I’m actually easily distracted. I don’t really have a plan. Okay, well, I may start off saying I am going to hike up this hill, but, unless I’m with someone else, I usually end up going in all sorts of directions. It doesn’t mean that I’m careless, only that I don’t ignore anything that catches my attention. I tend to take more time because of this.”

Being attentive increases the aperture of awareness, readying the eye, without preconception, to see what or who appears. “When I am out in the woods, I’m not thinking of something else. I’m not usually looking for something in particular, just being with whoever is around me. If I see an old tree that has fallen down and almost rotted, I wonder about when it germinated and how long it’s lain there. I try to figure out its history, although it is kind of silly because there is no way to really know a tree’s entire life. But it gives me some kind of understanding of the tree and the place. You appreciate what the animal you meet up with has been experiencing. It is being respectful when you pay attention to where you are and who is around and are completely present with them. That’s what animals do.”

While Charlie maintained that he “doesn’t ignore anything,” some discernment is exercised; otherwise the eye dances distractedly across the landscape without stopping to absorb the meaning of what is observed. Attentiveness broadens the scope of awareness without diminishing attention to the present. Similar to how a grizzly’s search for food in a summer’s moment is connected to the past – the deficit accumulated from the previous hibernation – and future – a year-long frame to fatten up for the coming winter – being present in the woods is not detached from what has come to pass and what will come. Both occur in the moment. There is another facet to attentive presence: the implicit dimension of space in time. This was a central reason for using the Kolb.

Charlie insisted that one has to be on the ground with bears to understand what they were doing and feeling, but he made an exception in Russia for the purpose of gathering a more synoptic bear-view of the world. Flying was a means to expand his lexicon by providing a lens that substituted space for time. “I could not know all of what the bears did because of my human limitations. That’s why flying was so helpful. I really got to know the area in Kamchatka, better than even around Hawk’s Nest, because I flew so much. Being able to see from the air really connected everything that was going on with the bears living around the cabin and the lake. I could see what the bears already knew and this helped me understand them better.” Nonetheless, the Kolb was only supplemental for how Charlie kept in touch. Walking among bears was when and where all life happened.

There were also intrinsic time constraints. The span of his tenure in Russia was a snapshot capable of revealing only the tip of the brown bear iceberg. Relative to the expanse of bear experience, human-calibrated windows of sight and time afforded mere glimpses into the bear world. “I was only in Kamchatka for a few months of the year for each of the ten years. There’s so much about bears we don’t or can’t know. A lot of this is caused by the myths around them. For instance, bears are considered to be solitary or not very social. In a sense, that is true because they don’t move around in a herd like elk or wolves. That is because being in a group doesn’t help them survive. It doesn’t mean they aren’t paying attention to each other and caring, because they are. For one thing, they have to, but most of them are open to each other – just not in the way people expect, and so that’s how the mistruths get started, because people judge bears by human values.”

While bears may appear as free agents with independent agendas, from the vantage of unbroken time and space, they move with the intricate coordination of a choreographed ballet. “There are distinct patterns to bear life. They may spend a lot of time on their own, but they are aware of each other and connected. Bears use marked trails and rub trees for this. Every bear will put his feet in the same place, in the steps of another bear. After centuries of bears doing that, the tundra becomes riddled with deep depressions and tracks. Bears go up to rub trees to see who is around. Someone identifies a tree and bites into it and then they turn their head sideways while they rub. When bears approach a rub tree, they do the cowboy walk, walking bowlegged for about ten steps. It is done with intention and attention. Rub trees must be a kind of post office, or a log book where guests sign in to keep track of each other. I watched the cubs do this. They try to put their feet in the tracks of the other bears.”

There are other bear customs that maintain bear society coherence. While aesthetic sense is usually thought of as confined to human arts, Charlie saw how bears appreciate things beyond the strictly utilitarian. “Bears have a history and culture. Tree rings of one tree I saw showed that bears had been using it for more than 150 years. You can predict where a rub tree will be in a certain area. On the coast, along salmon streams or at the mouth of a creek where it meets the ocean, is one popular place. In Kamchatka, it was automatic that there would be a rubbing spot at a big rock. You could spot a rock, especially near a thoroughfare going up to a pass, and you knew there was a rub tree or a marked trail. One time, I made a rub tree. I saw this tree and thought it was perfect for a rub tree. But it had these ugly branches so I sawed them off and cleaned up one side about 12 feet up. Within a couple of days, the bears were using it. When I went back eight or nine years later, there was a big trail leading up to it and bear hair on the tree. It confirmed my hypothesis that there was also an aesthetic aspect to choosing a particular tree. Bears make their day nests in nice, appealing places, too.” Bear appreciation extends to the ambience of time and place. “The bears didn’t enjoy certain weather, if it was bad weather, for instance. They really love a nice day – you can tell by their spirit. They love calm, glassy water. Bears like reflections. The cubs played differently on those days compared with times when we took walks on a drizzly day or windy day.”

Charlie underscored that attentiveness should not turn into a “spectator sport.” Attentiveness is reflexive, including being aware of oneself. “When you aren’t paying attention and recognizing how you are having an effect, then being out in the woods is not much different than watching a movie.” Being aware of one’s state of mind and presence has to be wielded with care and precision in the wild because they carry such a weighty message. “I came across a herd of elk standing in the stream. I wasn’t sure what their plan was, which shore they were going to come to, so I nosed up behind a big old driftwood log and waited to see. After a few minutes, a coyote came by and did the same thing I was doing. He just sat there, quite close, and while he was looking and listening to the elk, kept a watch on me out of the corner of his eye. We were fully aware of each other while paying attention to what the elk were doing. We watched a couple of female elk wade out and go for a swim and heard them bugle every so often. They didn’t see either of us for a long time. Then, when they did, they looked for a moment and then kept on. Eventually, the elk waded to shore and left. Right after, the coyote got up and left and so did I.”

Nothing is without meaning or goes unnoticed in the wild. Since neither Charlie nor the coyote intended to catch and kill an elk, they kept their cards of presence close to their vests to avoid spooking them. Despite Charlie and the coyote’s attention, the elk understood this and remained undisturbed. Man and coyote observed the elk with a kind of diffuse presence, absent any predatory intention. “They could tell by our attitudes that we were not stalking them. This kind of nonchalance is important; otherwise, animals think that you are too interested in them, which usually means they think you want to harm or kill them. Most harm done is out of fear and so you don’t want to make an animal feel uncomfortable. When I am out in the woods, I don’t approach animals without paying attention to myself as well as them. After a lot of years doing this, it comes naturally. We are always sending out messages whether we are aware of it or not. I assess if an animal is afraid of me. You can do this pretty easily if you are attentive. If they don’t want to be around you, they show that they would rather you leave. If they do, I let it be. I am there to be around the animals only if they let me.”

Charlie’s daily forays were his lifeline to connection. This routine was imperative because nature and the bear world are constantly changing. Aside from broad brush seasonal changes, a landscape may seem static to the inattentive eye. But it is far from that. It is a busy universe of transformation in constant motion that can go unseen without attentive care. On every walk, even if he had traversed it hundreds of times, Charlie saw something different – an uprooted tree, a fallen elk picked clean by birds and insects, a creek’s flow broken by a crumbling hillside. Walks were an antidote to the continuous demands of the human-centric, nature-excluding world. “Some days I can feel pretty dark with all that is going on in the world and what is being done to bears. I can easily lose sight and get caught up in all this human business if I spend too much time away from the woods. Once I step out the door and begin walking, I forget all that and I am back in this fantastic world. It reminds me of what reality really is. Nature is just so much vaster and important than our human dramas. It puts things in perspective. When you realize, really understand, deep down, that you are no different than the crocus that blooms, then in a few days dies, or the sparrow who sings then dies after a couple of years, you lose all sense of being better than nature. I like that feeling of smallness and not being very significant. It’s nice to feel out of control.”

“Feeling out of control” did not refer to any edge of chaos coveted by adrenalin seekers – far from it. Any risks that Charlie took were well studied and deemed necessary. Out of control meant “being with someone you deeply trust and not having to feel or even being able to be in charge.” Charlie’s concept of “being out of control” related to fitting in, the relational foundation of all life. It was recognition that we are all just one among the billions of beings, with no greater importance than a bear, salmon or aspen. “Not only are we not more important than bears, we are actually a lot less because we have lost so much of nature’s responsive intelligence and we have made life so hard on bears and other animals. To get back on track, we need to work for nature and feel humble.”

If there was one individual who made sure that Charlie knew he was not in control, it was Brandy. Unbeknownst to Charlie, the female brown bear began sizing him up his first year in Kamchatka, before the cubs came on the scene. She was the one who decided to initiate their friendship. Brandy assumed the role of éminence grise in matters of Charlie’s education. The mother brown bear set ground rules of the relationship. “She was in charge and never made any bones about it. Brandy was an amazing female bear and the crankiest bear I ever met. What I mean is that she was very intolerant of my stupid human mistakes and had no qualms about telling me so. She was not very tolerant of other bears either. If you heard a bear roaring in the valley, it would be Brandy. She was loudest when chasing a male, and she’d go after him for miles throughout the valley and over the mountain. I’d hear her and laugh, thinking she’s after some poor soul who happened to wander into her area.” Charlie was also one of those “poor soul” recipients of Brandy’s pique.

Not all interactions with the formidable female were harmonious. “When I first came across Brandy with with my cubs, she came charging down. She wasn’t going after me, but the cubs. None of the other mother bears reacted like this. I think she was making it clear that she was the one who decided what was her domain and not to get any grand ideas. She was really intelligent in anticipating that the cubs would grow up and might start to infringe.”

Charlie was decidedly taken aback when Brandy spoke like this. “Another time, I came across her while she was hunting for salmon. I wasn’t careful and walked with the cubs below her and so messed up her fishing. She came down the slope at me like she did when she was hunting a salmon – sliding down full force. It scared the hell out of me. She slid to a stop just ten metres above, spraying and pelting me with rocks. She never made contact and didn’t roar. Instead, she showed her displeasure by hissing loudly. Obviously, I wasn’t worth a roar. She was very stern and yelled at me, ‘DON’T GET IN MY WAY WHEN I’M DOING SERIOUS WORK!’”

It took another lesson before the message sank in. “The next time this happened, it was by the lake. Brandy was walking topside of the beach next to the tundra. It was a long stretch and because the water was very low, there was plenty of room along the beach for me and the cubs to walk. Once again, Brandy came charging down, huge and hissing.” Charlie realized that he had made two mistakes, one more of a misdemeanour, the other closer to a felony. “The first mistake was that I was paying more attention to the cubs than to what she was doing. It might have been entertaining for me and the cubs, but I was being disrespectful and ignoring the importance of her work. The other mistake was that I failed to fit in. I wasn’t keeping track of what she was doing. I got all caught up with what was interesting to me and wasn’t taking into consideration what was going on with Brandy. Implicitly, I was thinking that I, and what I was doing, was more important than her and her work.”

When Charlie met up with the mother bear, he had finally encountered someone as keen on accountability and nature’s rules as he was. “Brandy would never let me get away with not following the rules. I really appreciated how much care and time she took with me-that she even bothered to teach me. She didn’t just tell me things, she schooled me. I felt pretty uneducated around her, and most of the time I felt that she felt sorry for me, being a clumsy human. In this way, she included me as a friend, someone junior to her, but a friend. I was her apprentice.”

Brandy was one of Charlie’s most influential teachers. He learned tremendously from his cubs, but the mother bear was different. “She was important for a bunch of reasons. For one, she wasn’t one of the bears I rescued. My relationhip with the cubs began with their dependence on me. Brandy was a wild bear who approached me for no other reason than to be friends. I think she taught me so I could be a better bear mother and so I would fit in.” As a card-carrying member, Brandy made Charlie privy to insider knowledge of wild brown bear society, including his initiation into the most sacrosanct role of all – being a minder of her cubs.

It happened one day, seeming out of the blue. Brandy worldlessly left her cubs with Charlie, tacitly signaling that he would be in charge while she was off doing adult bear business. “When Brandy hired me to care for her subs, it was all her idea. She was in control and I was taking her cue.” In the wake of their mother’s departure, ,watching her disappear from view, the cubs began to whimper despondently. Charlie reacted  intuitively, without thinking. He fell to the ground on his back and kicked his arms and legs like a mother bear would. It worked. The cubs rushed over and began to play with their surrogate bear mother.

At times, Brandy would be absent for hours. Charlie and the cubs could hear her bellows echoing in the mountains as she chased off an unwanted male. When she returned, the cubs would run to her joyously, ready to nurse. This meant that Charlie could punch out and go about his business. Their arrangement was no one-time stint. Charlie’s tenure as nanny lasted for three sets of cubs over seven years. “Eventually, her cubs realized that it was more fun to be with me than cranky old mom, and as soon as they saw me, they would come running. I knew she was taking advantage of me and I liked being taken advantage of in this way.”

Brandy contradicted the many myths surrounding female bears and their cubs. “Everything I had heard about females and cubs was turned on its head. I found that females were generally far more reliable to be around than males, and the reason is they give you the message of total trust. People say never get between a female and their cubs, they are the most dangerous in this situation, but this was never an issue with Brandy as long as you were not interrupting what she was doing, like hunting.” Charlie linked interrupting Brandy while she was hunted fish to walking between Michelangelo and his canvas. “She was an amazing hunter and it was fantastic to watch her.” Brandy easily out-competed Charlie’s pole and line. While her skills may have been conferred through a particular brown bear lineage, it was obvious that she had refined her inheritance to a fine art. “Her favourite place to fish was right where the shore fell into the lake. It was a bench made from a moraine, which made it a perfect place for salmon fishing. There were three or four places from where she would hunt. They were about halfway down the slope, about 20 metres up. The waves would wash in the shallows where salmon would spawn. Brandy would sit there by a boulder, overlooking the shallows, waiting for the fish to come in. While she was doing this, when I wasn’t babysitting, she kept the cubs right by her.”

Brandy detected even the tiniest shift in light and water. “When a salmon came from a certain direction, she knew exactly the optimal angle, light and distance needed to catch fish. She would slide down from the bench at high speed and peel out 30 feet, hit the water and grab the fish. It was all conducted in one motion and she kept her eye on her prey the whole time on the way down from the bench to the water. There might have been a split second or two when she lost track of the fish because of a change in the water’s reflection, but that didn’t matter. Brandy had it all worked out. It was amazing.” A sock-eye, weighing up to 15 pounds, was a good catch, but only a drop in the bucket that needed to be filled by winter. In addition to skill, efficiency and persistence are fundamental qualities for good living. “It was amazing how hard bears work in the summer. Brandy worked really hard,  but she made it look easy.”

Long summer days and successive years together erased vertigial barriers between bear and man. “I really learned so much with the first cubs, so by the second set, Brandy and I had pretty much figured each other out. Over time, I knew exactly where Brandy and her cubs would be. I knew their routes and I could find them that way. When I did, I knew what to expect. It felt like this beautiful community in the US where I visited in my twenties, Nantucket. Everyone’s property was connected by an escarpment. There were no fences and no walls. All the neighbours could walk through the front yard of everyone else. It was accepted. People would be on their porch and you could talk with them. This was the way it felt with bears. I could sit on my cabin porch and have this same feeling. The world I lived in in Russia with the bears was so amazing, so wonderful, that I resented sleeping. I wanted to experience every second.”

The mother bear was nothing short of awe-inspiring. “Brandy was a clear example of wrong thinking that humans are so smart and bears are stupid. She showed me something really important. She taught me that humans have a kind of privileged existence around grizzlies. She did not chase us, although she could have. Neither did the other bears. They were benign to us humans. You see the same with orcas. Humans are very hard on both orcas and bears and yet they don’t go after us. Orcas seem to have made a pact not to hurt humans. Bears and orcas have what most humans have lost, the ability to restrain and respect. That’s what Brandy taught me. It shows a real deep intelligence and a consciousness far more advanced than humans. Any sense that I was on top of things was because she and the other bears allowed me that. She was so generous. She took previous time from survival to help me. Brandy wasn’t only a great teacher, she was my very good friend.”