You had to be there

As I watched a brown bear dive into the water of the Brooks River in Katmai National Park, Alaska, creating a splash so big it obscured most of its 1,000-pound body, I briefly acknowledged that I was lucky to witness what most wildlife photographers come here to see.

It is an experience to behold. There’s silence as the bear works to identify a salmon it hopes to catch, then a sudden burst of activity as it launches after it. The splashes grow larger and louder. The bear soon disappears behind a curtain of water, its sharp claws the last to vanish. There’s now a moment of suspense. We must wait a few seconds for the water to settle to see if the bear caught its fish.

But there is so much more to the bears. These moments of drama made up but a few minutes of my week with them, yet these displays of raw power are typically what we think of when we think of them.

Two months earlier and more than 3,000 miles away I had a chance to view wildlife paintings created by artists who worked more than a hundred years ago. The exhibit at the Nelson-Atkins in Kansas City concentrated on four painters — Richard Friese, Wilhelm Kuhnert, Bruno Liljefors, and Carl Rungius — and largely presented each of their bodies of work in chronological order. There was a striking difference between their earliest and latest works.

Where their earliest works were often dramatic and rich in detail, the later works had soul. Those early works were of zoo animals that were painted into environments that the artists imagined were appropriate for the species. Over time, the artists decided they needed to see and depict the animals as they lived. That experience gave them something to depict beyond the texture of the fur and the sharpness of the teeth.

My time with the bears also involved discovery, my view of them evolving as the trip progressed. I started in perhaps the busiest part of Katmai National Park: Brooks Falls. At the peak of the salmon run, dozens of bears may line the top of the falls, catching leaping fish with their open mouths. The salmon run, however, was early this year as well as especially large. In a typical year, my mid-September arrival would have coincided with the action slowing down. This year, there wasn’t much action.

There were bears and they were plenty fat. (This is the same park responsible for “Fat Bear Week.”) With some bars I saw already in the neighborhood of 1,000 pounds or more, they weren’t particularly motivated to hunt. I saw a few charge at salmon, but mostly they were just sitting around, casually grabbing a fish every now and then.

The remainder of my time was split between neighboring river systems and the tundra. In both places, I largely felt a sense of peace. We were never once threatened by a bear — nor did we invade their personal space — and it was fascinating to watch them work.

The bears repeatedly demonstrated intelligence. Even when the central channel of the river was full of fish, they would often work the banks. They would find a spot where a branch or small shrub grew into the river and position themselves just upstream from that. They would dip their paws into the water and pull out any fish caught in the natural net.

Up on the tundra, some of the bears have found ways to use people to their advantage. While brown bears are apex predators, their young cubs are very much at risk. Males are driven to reproduce. Sometimes they kill young cubs so their mothers will be able to mate sooner.

The mothers, however, have figured out that the male bears largely want solitude and don’t want to be in the company of people. There were numerous times on the tundra when we would come upon a female with young cubs and you could sense how relaxed they became. Sometimes they stopped walking across the tundra and would take a break a few hundred feet from us in a patch rich with ripe berries.

In one encounter that lasted two hours, the mother and cubs took naps, using large rocks as pillows. Another time, a mother with three young cubs ran toward me and a few of my friends to get away from an aggressive male. Our time with her was cut short only by fading light and a need to get back to our lodge before it was too dark to fly.

It's our nature to glamorize the strong and powerful. That’s true of much of the wildlife kingdom, too. But even apex predators have more to offer than their occasional feats of strength. It’s thrilling to watch them charge after a salmon. But I found it much more captivating to spend time with them and realize that they are truly complex souls.

Kevin’s book, Five Minutes in Nature, collects images and stories about his experiences in the wilderness, curated to help you have deeper encounters of your own. Preview and order it here. Prints of his images are available through LivingWilderness.com. Learn about new work by joining his mailing list.)