They say grizzlies will eat anything, whatever is available to them: huckleberries torn from the bush, insect larvae pawed from a deep crevice, the carcass of an antelope or wolf. Ferocious, yes, but they don’t necessarily love the hunt. In this way, they are more evolved than many men. 

A bear is born a bear, but a man might become one. His belly rounds. His limbs, supple and dangerous, grow covered in fuzz. For some, his heaviness belies the strength within. Others, more practiced in such wild encounters, feel their desire heighten with each pound of flesh. Do they pursue him, or do they announce themselves as prey ready to be taken? Does one lead the other into desire or might they just meet there, the brambles quaking? 

•

I’ve long been taken by bears. Smokey, Winnie, the one who ate Timothy Treadwell. I love their respective work. Protect the forests from a blaze of thoughtless humans. Lick and scrape the honeypot clean. Show a man the difference between us. As a child, I spent many nights (and days) cuddling my own stuffed teddy bear. A sweet and on-the-nose youngster, I unsurprisingly named him Beary. Did I love him for his bearness? For the light brown fabric that only softened through the years? Or was it, perhaps, that I could touch him, hold him whenever I felt the need. His very presence, his availability made him an object of my affection. 

Keenly aware that I was not the only child to lug and tug and cuddle a teddy bear around, I wonder about this human connection to bears. My brother, too, had a teddy bear—the name of which I cannot recall. Given our family’s creative streak in naming, Teddy would be as good a guess as any. Our bears though, were different. Not quite white, more of a light tan, my brother’s bear donned a red knit sweater and glasses. Beary, on the other hand, bore all his brown softness to the world—completely bare save for a red bowtie stitched to the seam that joined his head and torso. Not much neck to work with. 

Looking back, the manner in which both stuffed animals attempted to humanize the bear seems comical. Which is more ridiculous, a polar bear in a sweater or a grizzly adorned as a Playgirl centerfold? Teddy bears, and stuffed animals more broadly, nourish our young fascination with the more-than-human world, while simultaneously pastoralizing beings we’ve forcibly removed from our urban and suburban communities. For our own part, our respective bears did foreshadow, to an extent, the men we would become. My brother, spectacles and all, lives a more buttoned up and conventionally responsible life with his wife and daughter, working diligently to provide for his family. He has also been known to wear a sweater or two. While I do maintain a diverse array of bowties, more recently I’ve felt my desires and interests turn toward the feral, bestial even. Often, this bear has no clothes. 

•

When we sit down for our orientation the first night at the Taft-Nicholson Center in Lakeview, Montana, they spend the majority of the time discussing bear safety protocols. Do not wander the forest alone. Sign out on the white board and take bear spray with you. Be loud. If you see a bear in the distance, make yourself as small as you can. If you see a bear within 30 feet, deploy the bear spray. Do not turn your back on a bear until it is out of view. 

I was once a louder individual, so sure of my thoughts and humor I assumed anyone would enjoy hearing me. Since my mother died, I settle into silence more frequently. This has little to do with her death, though in some ways when her fire diminished so did a kindred fierceness we shared. Here, in the Centennial Valley, my obsession with bears is long-established, and I do not want to be loud. I want to walk the alpine forests alone, silent except for the creaking of branches, bird calls, paws rustling berry bushes, or furry backs scraped and cleaned against a pine’s trunk. My desire to see a grizzly, to watch it meander along these alpine ridges grows in pronounced conflict with my crippling fear of our shared mortality. I want to find one and not scare him. I want to be close to something real, but not be ripped open or torn apart—in the most literal sense, at least. Where might vulnerability and curiosity meet in this valley, and what would remain at that nexus? 

•

I peruse Oscar Bear’s profile online. A handsome beast of a man, he buries his face and curly black beard into a man’s spread cheeks on his massage table. Thick and burly, hair covers his body, emerging in more dense patches of fur on his chest and belly. He’s eating the fairly smooth-skinned man’s ass with the ferocity of a black bear in hyperphagia—no ripping of flesh, no hunting of prey—just pure gluttonous pleasure. 

Sex—regardless of one’s sexuality—brings with it myriad metaphors of consumption. In considering this language, we might note the distinctions and nuance between some of these feasting metaphors. On the more “civilized” side of the metaphorical spectrum, you might enjoy tossing one’s salad or simply swallowing one’s load. As the language becomes more feral or bestial, you might be inclined to eat one’s ass or to eat one out entirely, and, perhaps, escalate to a slightly more realized and bestial metaphor of sucking one dry. Beyond the mere notion of consumption, we see erotic metaphoric language grounded in animalistic terms, such as breeding, riding, doggy-style, reverse cowgirl, and so forth. This language suffuses human sexual intercourse in the realm of the animal, collapsing the boundary between the human and more-than-human world. 

•

On November 16, 1902, Clifford Berryman (ha!) published a cartoon in The Washington Post. The image depicts then President Theodore Roosevelt in the foreground, donning his famous regalia: wide-rimmed hat, jacket belted at the waist, knee-high boots covering much of his pants. Though in black and white, I imagine the quintessential tan look we often see Roosevelt portrayed in during that period. His right hand holds the barrel of his rifle like a walking stick, the butt of the gun settled into the grass. He raises his left arm shoulder height, lifting his left hand towards a man in the background wearing a cowboy hat. With both hands the man holds a rope of whose noose is wrapped around a small black bear’s neck. The young black bear leans away from the man on all fours, but his face—eyes wide and mouth open in apparent confusion—looks toward Teddy. In the empty grass between Teddy and the man holding the bear, Berryman scrawls the title of the cartoon—“DRAWING THE LINE IN MISSISSIPPI.” In the stillness of the image, the bear remains alive to this day, so, too, does the man holding him, but it is Roosevelt in the foreground, larger than the bear, the man, and even the trees behind them, who stands tall as the savior in the piece. He is a president who knows when to draw the line, who hunts with a strict ethical code, who saves one of the most sought-after beasts from a cruel end. 

Upon viewing the cartoon in The Washington Post, Morris Michtom is inspired. He creates a stuffed animal of a bear, complete with short snout and thin limbs, which he then props in a window of his candy story in Brooklyn. The toy is a hit, and the Teddy Bear is born into the American consciousness. But what happens to the bear beyond the frame of this display as children carry their cub-like counterparts out of the candy shoppe and into their beds? What does this toy actually represent in a nation’s history—both in terms of the Roosevelt affair in Mississippi and the position of the bear in the America’s wilderness? 

•

In Grizzly Man, Timothy Treadwell makes clear he is no bear; he’s simply fascinated with them. He also makes clear he is not gay: 

I’ve always wished I was gay. Would have been a lot easier. You know? You can just bing-bing-bing. Gay guys have no problem. I mean, they go to restrooms and truck stops, and they perform sex. It’s like so easy for ‘em and stuff. But you know what? Alas, Timothy Treadwell is not gay. Bummer! I love girls! And girls, girls need a lot more, need a lot more, you know, finesse and care, and I like that a bit. But when it goes bad and you’re alone, it’s like, well, you know you can’t rebound like you can if you were gay. I’m sure gay people have problems too, but not as much as one goofy straight guy named Timothy Treadwell.               

Given what transpires in the Grizzly Maze along the Alaskan coastline, I think it’s fair to say Treadwell does encounter some problems, perhaps many, though none more precarious than his last. In my first viewing of Werner Herzog’s film, I don’t recall Treadwell’s soliloquy on his heterosexuality. It’s possible I watched and thought, Okay. Beyond the reductive nature of his words, the doth-he-protest-too-much-ness of the commentary, I’m interested in his ideas pertaining to the ease of queer eros and sexual encounters cast against the backdrop of grizzlies on an Alaskan meadow and his own acknowledgment of loneliness and sexual longing. 

I have felt insatiable, driven by desire and want to meet many men seeking similar pleasure. I’ve also been so high I’d truly eat anything. Treadwell misunderstands the act of cruising as ease, while, in fact, gay men were and are driven to parks, restrooms, truck stops, or any number of spaces both public and clandestine because of their position in society, their vilification. Like the grizzlies who starve or struggle to find food due to climate change, loss of habitat, and hunting, queer folk throughout history (and today) have faced danger in a hypermasculine heteronormative world. We have been and continue to be forced to find and meet sexual partners places where our sexuality will not threaten our own survival. Sometimes it is loneliness that drives one to a gloryhole or an anonymous orgy, but many desires can lead one to these spaces. Motivations for seeking out erotic pleasure are as varied as the reasons that arrived Treadwell in the Alaskan wilderness each year. 

•

Stuffed animals were not spared from my own sexual curiosity as a child. Having seen my parents kiss intimately, my inclination to mimic their affectionate behavior drew me closer to Beary: my lips pressed to his stitch of a mouth, whispers of I love you, my body pressed into his softness. This is my earliest memory of desire, perhaps not necessarily for the lifeless plush facsimile that shared my bed, but for touch and pleasure and something like love. 

Sometimes a bedroom is a forest where one feels safe to explore want, swaddled in night, moonlight slipping through the blinds that reach like branches across the window. Darkness then becomes security, freedom from the gaze of others—threatening or not—who might see your desire as anything other than what you feel when your lips press against the red stitch on the brown fur, your chest atop the plush toy. One night, my mother’s eyes float bright and wide in the shadow of my doorway, and that freedom tore itself apart in my chest, dissipating in my belly. I cannot remember if she spoke a word, not that she needed to. At most, she might have said, Go to sleep, Matty. But perhaps it was merely silence and shame that burned in that darkness. 

•

As I sit in the Red Rock Saloon, now known as Rosie’s, on the Taft-Nicholson Center’s campus, I see no fewer than three bear pelts hung on the wall. Behind a small pyramid of three stacked barrels with a beer tap protruding from each hangs the poster of a man in fringed chaps wrestling a grizzly bear. His hat lay on the floor between the two wrestlers and the numerous onlookers—two of whom appear to be American Indians who stand outside the doorway, a single feather rising from each of their heads. A man holds another grizzly whose snout is muzzled tightly and leash held close to the man’s chest, presumably awaiting the next bout. This bear cannot help his kin in this fight. 

The man and the grizzly at the center of the poster wrap one another in a bear hug—the claws of the bear’s right paw digging into the jacket on the man’s left arm while the left paw grabs the middle of the man’s back, pulling his jacket up to reveal a red shirt tucked into the man’s pants and a revolver in a holster on the man’s belt. The man’s left eye looks toward me, as if he knows, even beyond those in the poster’s saloon, he is being watched; this is a performance. The leather fringe along his chaps rises as if mid-dance as he wraps his right leg around the bear’s left knee, suggesting he is about to take the bear down to the dirty wooden floor. 

Below them in blood-red type: WRESTLING FOR WEALTH. And below that we learn the expected outcome of this fantastic depiction of a sadly true spectacle: A DARE-DEVIL COW-BOY TRIUMPHS OVER AN ENORMOUS GRIZZLY. The title of the book at the top of the poster provides head-scratching context for the larger narrative of which this scene is part. The Great Train Robbery, written by Scott Marble. Is this our suspected thief fighting a grizzly? Did the grizzly make the heist with his muzzled accomplice? In the mythos of the American West, your guess is as good as mine, and neither truth nor ecological sovereignty has ever driven these tales, tall as they may be. 

•

I click out of the massage scene and select a video of Oscar Bear riding a man wearing a cowboy hat on a sofa. Save a horse, ride a cowboy. Am I right? The curation of this scene, the minimalistic costuming and prop placement—the cowboy hat is the primary symbol to work with here—tickles me in its inversion of roles on the range or the farm or at the rodeo. The cowboy generally situates himself atop the bull and holds on for dear life as long as he can. He also commands the horse while herding sheep or cattle, or perhaps racing around barrels in a stadium. In this scene, the cowboy becomes the bull or the horse, and, ironically, simply sits there while Oscar Bear bounces up and down upon him. Oscar begins in a squat, his feet on either side of our nameless cowboy, before eventually slipping his feet back and continuing his ride with his knees pressed into the green sofa straddling his bull.

In this excerpt of the scene, our cowboy-filling-in-for-the-bull plays the more submissive role. Oscar seems to enjoy taking on the more dominant role in the encounter. Our hungry bottom of a bear fills himself up and down, forward and back to his roaring contentment. I do not know enough about the top to say if he considers himself a cowboy when he stands up from the sofa and walks out of the frame, or if he merely plays the role in this scene. For Oscar, his bear-ness extends beyond this clip, his other videos, and his online persona. It forms an aspect of his queer identity. He was born a man who becomes a bear. 

•

Berryman’s cartoon depicts a scene from an actual hunting trip Roosevelt took near Onward, Mississippi on November 14, 1902 in which a team of men trapped and beat a black bear whom they tied to a willow tree for the then-President to shoot. As the story goes, Teddy is so disgusted by the treatment of the animal, by the thought of killing a restrained bear in an unsportsmanlike manner, that he refuses to take the shot. But is he, in fact, a savior? Reporters present at the scene wrote that though Roosevelt did not kill the black bear himself, he said to a member of his party, “‘Put it out of its misery’ . . . The latter then ended his life with a knife.” Teddy does not kill the bear, but he will not see him freed either. Do the bears created in his name, found in cribs and children’s bedrooms worldwide, then depict mercy or possession? When I held Beary, did I love him or merely the possibility of holding onto an idea I could never truly retain?

•

Winnie the Pooh knew something about loneliness when he mused, A day without a friend is a like a pot without a single drop of honey left inside. For Winnie, the metaphors are clear: food is companionship; an empty pot is solitude; my friends are sweet. How could we forget Winnie the Pooh, theorist of queer temporality and sexuality, with bops like Yesterday, when it was tomorrow, it was too exciting a day for me and A hug is always the right size. Winnie is no size queen. What’s more, they defy sex and gender. Aside from their red t-shirt, this bear has no clothes, and like the anthropomorphized teddy bear they are, when they let it all hang out, nothing really hangs out at all—just the yellow curve of their belly, their soft, plump legs. In fact, a city council in Poland once banned Winnie’s image from a children’s playground for their nude, asexual, gender-defying presence. 

This arises as merely one aspect of Winnie’s pastoralization, the innocence inherent to an animated toy. But Winnie was a real bear. In 1914, Harry Colebourn purchased a female black bear cub for $20 at a train stop in Ontario, British Columbia from a hunter who likely killed her mother. A soldier from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Colebourn named the cub after his hometown before taking her with him to London where he eventually left Winnie with the ZSL London Zoo when he and his regiment went off to fight in the Great War. It was at this London Zoo that a young boy named Christopher Robin became enamored with the bear and visited her frequently. He even named his own teddy bear after her—Winnie the Pooh—a combination of the bear’s name and a swan at the zoo he was similarly taken by. Christopher Robin’s father, A.A. Milne, immortalized the teddy bear, and Winnie herself, in his stories. Winnie remained at the ZSL London Zoo from 1915 until her death in 1934. 

Through her journey from orphaned black bear cub, to teddy bear namesake, and finally celebrated children’s book character and cartoon star, Winnie is, in fact, both childhood and queer icon. However, it’s the little things that bind them to us, our shared yearnings, our hunger, our poetry. I’m so rumbly in my tumbly, Winnie says. What could be more important than a little something to eat? We all have our priorities. 

•

Oscar Bear lies unmuzzled in a leather sling, each foot raised above his horizonal body in a stirrup of sorts, as a burly man enters him over and over. Do I watch this scene? Is it a memory? Or, have I, perhaps, in my own exploration of a queer animalistic eros, manifested a desire? Another bear comes, then another, and one might call Oscar a courtesy bottom. They all come, and he welcomes them. 

•

Our guide leads us along a trail that traces Odell Creek at the base of Little Sheep Mountain. As the path narrows between dense berry-stripped bushes and tall grasses, they shout Hey, bear! They’ve already informed us of the need to make noise on hikes in the valley so as not to surprise a grizzly or moose, but now on the hike, I both love and fear the address to an unseen entity. My chest tightens as I scour the cacophony of needles, nettles, and leaves flanking the trail. The call reminds me of the danger present in this wilderness, thus triggering my deep anxiety of our shared mortality. As we continue walking and no eight-foot beast emerges from the foliage, my nerves calm and I begin to quietly follow suit. Hey, bear, I offer timidly to Montana’s wilderness. Our guide and the friends in my party chuckle at my volume. They could hardly hear me over the flow of the creek beside us. We follow the creek through thimbleberry and raspberry bushes picked nearly bare, and my understanding of the need for the call meets with a desire to make it my own. Haaaaaayyyyyy, daddyyy. Haaaaaayyyyyy, bear! I call out to no one. 

•

Smokey the Bear is the Grizzly Muscle Daddy of your dreams. When you sleep, you enter a forest of conifers and follow the musk left in small clumps of light brown fur tucked carefully into the bark, like seductive notes slipped into the envelope of long afternoons spent moving his back up and down against each tree. Come find me, they read. There are no fires here, just that need that’s always burning within you. Oh, Smokey! you cry, pressing each strand to your chest. The claw marks feet above your head leave behind grooves deep enough to garner envy from even America’s most famous and tallest drag queen, who more often than not, cannot be bothered to paint or press-on a nail for her own show. And, you know, good for her. But she wants those claws—nailed to her wall, no doubt. We all have our limits and appearance fees. You can’t imagine what you owe her for her brief apparition in this dream, and this essay, to boot. You and America’s most famous drag queen have different priorities in this dreamscape. You are searching for bestial touch or love or something like it, and she’s looking for another well to add to her fracking empire in Wyoming, from which the methane of thirty-five active wells now overwhelms the scent of Smokey’s fur, his pining, and you lose the trail to that thrill. You wake. 

Once a buttoned up, fully-clothed forest ranger himself, now you see comics of Smokey emerging from dense, raging flames carrying flocks of sheep on his back or a whole family of raccoons (which you learn is called a gaze—ha!) stacked on his shoulders. Either the weight of these animals or a certain fetishization causes his pecs to pulse, his biceps to flex voluptuously, his washboard abs to strain to such an extent they are somehow visible through his light brown pelt. Is this Smokey, you wonder, or is this Quarelle shoveling coal in the depths of Le Vengeur under Lieutenant Seblon’s hungry eyes? Smokey’s no stranger to role play, or drag for that matter. You come across a 1973 public service announcement starring Joanna Cassidy. Before her role in Blade Runner, before you wanted to be her in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, she was the darling of the United States Forest Service. Imagine the sultriest voice you can, a tan ranger shirt unbuttoned to reveal the collar bone, and fiery-red, sexed-up hair framing her unnaturally tan face. Don’t blame me; blame the U.S. Forest Service. But she is beautiful, and she’s tilting her head forward and batting her eyes at you. I know a place that’s peaceful and quiet. A place where animals play. It’s called the forest— Reader, I simply cannot. But every year we start forest fires. A careless match or cigarette and POOF—fire. So next time you’re in the forest, be extra careful, okay? During this final request, the camera zooms in tight on her face, her nearly-winked eye until—POOF—a paw belonging to a Smokey the Bear puppet (or Smokey himself) rips off what is ostensibly a Joanna Cassidy skin face mask and then has the audacity to laugh at the audience. HAHA, he bellows deeply. If you knew it was me, would ya have listened? Like any good drag artist, Smokey understands a reveal must serve a purpose; where the shock of the viewer and the careful planning of the queen meet, there is, one hopes, some meaning. The audience, or, in this case, a particular type of audience, just can’t maintain his concentration on anything other than a seventies bombshell—lit either by a red camera light or the suggestion of a fire burning somewhere off-camera, nearby the scene. 

You have questions: Where did Smokey’s roleplay end? Into how many men’s minds did he long to lumber languidly with his bombshell skin suit stretched tight over his broad shoulders, his curvaceous haunches, and for how long? Given the camera angle and the majority of his bear-body out of the shot, did he tuck for this performance? And if he tucked, did he secure his junk with a pair of tan tucking panties, or dark brown duct tape? You imagine the mess of removing the latter, which would leave even the most experienced esthetician either disturbed or impressed by what remained stuck to the adhesive. And what would America’s most famous drag queen have to say of the look? I admire the shock value of the reveal, she might say on the panel, But the make-up reads more direct female impersonation than DRAG to me. You need to elevate, Smokey. America’s most famous drag queen has not done her own make-up since 1994. And though she has a keen smoky eye on each aesthetic detail, was she listening? Was anyone really listening to Joanna’s or Smokey’s plea? 

At a couple’s gender reveal party on September 5, 2020, a smoke-generating pyrotechnic device sparked the El Dorado fire, which burned in and around the San Bernadino National Forest until November 16 of that year. The more than 22,000 acres charred in southern California for those two and a half months are less than one-third the size of America’s most famous drag queen’s ranch in Wyoming, where thirty-five wells release a constant green glow blurring the night sky. When you sleep beneath this verdant sheen of extraction or wander into a gender reveal party of any kind, your nightmare scorches the pastoral, spread blade by blade in the headwind of a hunger for wealth, for ease, for an Insta-memory. How many bears flee the flames and flares? Do they carry their prey on their backs in acts of sheer desperation, shared oblivion? You know a place that’s peaceful and quiet. A place where the animals play.  

•

I’m hiking Bells Canyon along the Wasatch Front with a queer friend, and they do not believe I was once a twink. I say When I was a twink—, and before I can finish my likely pointless anecdote, they say incredulously, You, were a twink? And I reply Yes, it was a long time ago. They say, I just can’t imagine it. I’m not sure I can imagine it anymore either. In any case, I was a hot mess express, I tell them. Oh really? they say. Tell me more. 

Sometimes the physical distance between my past self and my present self grows so wide, I no longer recognize the lithe, bespectacled tennis player in many of the photographs from my youth. Countless moments have changed my body—my mother’s death, violence, thoughtless comments by those I love, a handsy employer, drug abuse, to name a few—and though I carry those memories with me in this heaviness, the body that felt those things, that lost those loves was too light to remain anchored here. I was a bear cub catching salmon after salmon on their journey up river as though my life depended on it, except I was a man and the salmon was Whataburger. I was fully grown, grisly, and without a mother, and all I wanted was to be made soft and stuffed, to feel nothing. 

•

Teddy Roosevelt’s first wife, Alice Hathaway Lee, gives birth to their daughter, Alice Lee, on February 12, 1884. Two days later, Teddy’s wife dies of kidney failure which had not been detected during the pregnancy. Eleven hours earlier in the same house in Manhattan, Teddy’s mother, Martha “Mittie” Roosevelt, dies of typhoid fever. Roosevelt’s diary includes a large “X” on this date, followed by The light has gone out in my life. 

•

We are sitting on one of the porches at the Taft-Nicholson Center talking about how we’d all prefer not to be mauled or consumed by a grizzly, but that we’d like to see one, you know, from a safe distance. A friend says this reminds him of a moment from our Intro to Critical Theory course, and many of us groan. Isn’t that what Anne said? The act of watching a bear eat berries on a mountain meadow from far off, out of danger. That’s the sublime! In terms of bear encounters, I’d like to be somewhere between Kant and Treadwell. When we see the deep incision of claw marks on a pine’s trunk later that day, I look around perilously. Our guide reassures us that these scratches are probably about two years old. How Kantian, I think. They tell us we won’t be going on the hike to the huckleberries this week as the grizzly population has rebounded in that area, and it’s peak hyperphagia for them in these late weeks of summer. Timothy Treadwell would love it! I roar. They are either unamused or don’t know who Timothy Treadwell is or both. That’s fair. 

•

Perhaps Timothy was lonely. Given that he brought his girlfriend, Amy, on his final season with the grizzlies, one can understand a drive grounded in the need for something more than the companionship, intimacy, and love a partner offers. As Herzog notes in the film, Treadwell’s meticulous approach to filming and re-filming his monologues with the Alaskan wilderness as backdrop reveals not only his awareness of his project’s artifice, but the performative nature of his documentation as well. In one clip, Treadwell sets the camera on a vista overlooking what he describes as the grizzly sanctuary or grizzly maze—an area of brush and forest along the shore of Kaflia Bay on Upper Kaflia Lake. The snow-covered mountains of Katmai National Park cap the upper edge of the shot. Treadwell walks into the frame saying, Do another take here. I fucked up the last one. Almost just fell off the cliff. I’m a fucking asshole. Hunched over, his hands on his knees, looking through his black sunglasses into the camera, he rambles on about how is camp is in the sanctuary below, how he must remain incognito from people who come to seek him out, from people who would harm him. He doesn’t want to say his celebrity draws him there, but then he does say that. The first take ends as he says They don’t know where I am. Even I don’t know where I am. He turns away from the camera, looking over the bay below. That was pretty shitty. Let’s do a really short take here. And he does. Then another. Herzog’s voiceover suggests he does as many as fifteen takes for some of these scenes. In this way, I admire Treadwell as artist, ever more committed to revision and repetition until he’s satisfied he has what he needs. Whatever. One more really short, excellent take. Let’s just really sum it up. Here we go. This is gonna be the motherfucker. He looks down towards the grizzly maze once again, then back to the camera. Behind me is the grizzly sanctuary—

Did he love the bears, or was it all roleplay? I traverse my own curiosities regarding his performance as though his motivation is a ridge I must navigate precisely, with care, suspicious of my own inclinations to put a name to his desires—shared or distinct from my own as they may be. Just as he returned to that park each summer, I return to him. Perhaps, in the end, we each understand it’s not always an ease that leads us to one another. Sometimes, it’s fear, or the understanding one’s desire might be out of place. 

•

Don’t poke the bear, especially Mama Bear. I imagine our family dynamic growing up grizzly on Big Sheep Mountain. My father, ever the pacifist, spends long days at work stuffing himself to the brim with strawberries, huckleberries, raspberries, thimbleberries, and the occasional trout. Mama Bear stays with my brother and me. He’s wearing a red-knit sweater and glasses, which looks pretty absurd for a nearly-full grown grizzly, but I can’t say my red bow-tie is in season either. She takes us to the bountiful berry bushes, too, but she’s far more territorial. Sometimes, I’m embarrassed when she goes after a group of hikers that surprise us. I timidly roar Maaamaaa as she opens the belly of a photographer who took pictures of us without asking. The tally of missing hikers hits an all-time high, but we eat well, and their remains are never found because nothing remains. It’s not that she enjoys the hunt, she just loves her babies. Once she’s gone and I’m alone, I feel such guilt for being so sheepish and feeling humiliated at her protection, for not doing more to help keep us all alive. 

I remember the one time I gave her shit for not letting one of the young brats go after she followed him for more than three miles along the creek and brought him back to us for dinner when we were so thin and weak one early spring. She said something like, I know I’ve made mistakes, but I thought I’d at least been a good mother before she howled. Not a ferocious roar, a howl. 

Mama Bear, I miss you. 

•

Sometimes I feel like crooning a new rendition of Britney Spears’s classic “I’m Not a Girl” but with a modern, queer-infused update. I’m not a twink—not yet a daddy. The possibilities are truly endless in this need to find our place on the queer animalia spectrum. I’m not a cub—not yet a grizzly, I roar to no one. 

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Early on in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, Ennis Delmar returns to camp on horseback with a second horse in tow to shepherd much-needed supplies for his and Jack Twist’s summer grazing the sheep in the mountains of Wyoming. The camera follows Ennis, played by Heath Ledger, and the horses up an alpine ridge, conifers obscuring anything lingering off the trail. When Ennis winds around a corner and arrives at a stream, a black bear roars at him from atop a boulder mid-stream. Spooked, the horses flee, spilling the food he’d just collected from their contact in town and throwing Ennis from the horse—a gash on his forehead where he hits the ground. When Ennis returns to camp after nightfall, Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) is pissed. Where the hell have you been? he demands of the shaken Ennis. When Jack sees the gash on Ennis’s face, he pulls a cloth soaking in a pot of water bubbling over the fire and presses it to the wound. Ennis quickly takes the cloth and holds it to his head, at once accepting the tender gesture and refusing any prolonged touch. In my reading of this sequence, the black bear plays the role of matchmaker. Spooking the horses and depriving Ennis and Jack of their precious provisions ultimately drives the two cowboys towards intimacy. In the scene that follows the tender triage by the campfire, Ennis shoots an elk as Jack hoots and hollers in celebration, slapping him on the shoulder. Ennis even smiles. They dry out meat for jerky. They eat well—no beans! Perhaps the bear on the rock was roaring Love him! Fuck him! because,within ten minutes of the on-screen bear encounter at the stream crossing, Ennis and Jack are, indeed, fucking. 

When we think about the American West and its many performances and representations of men, masculinity, and queerness, the bear sits in the center of a triangle bound by hunger, desire, and ferity. He lumbers along the threshold of violence and sexual longing. His mysterious and reclusive nature affords us the opportunity to use him as a symbol through which we signify our own inclinations, sensual and destructive as they may be. For Treadwell, perhaps this frontier construction of the West arises as a queer space—where anything goes, where a man can be a bear or fight one on a poster, where Jack and Ennis can fall in love. Each refuses a certain taxonomy—social and biological alike. The bear is all-consuming, and we all consume the bear. You are right now (sorry!). At least we’re doing it together—opportunistic, omnivorous.

In the penultimate scene of Brokeback Mountain, Ennis visits Jack’s parents after hearing of his death. He stands in Jack’s closet and finds his own white pearl-snap shirt inside Jack’s denim shirt—the right cuff of each shirt splattered with Ennis’s blood from their violent tussle on the final day of that first summer on Brokeback. He clings to the shirts there, raising them to face and breathing in slow and deep. Back in Ennis’s home in the final scene of the film, the shirts hang in his closet next to a photograph of Brokeback Mountain. Here though, the shirts are inverted—Ennis’s plaid pear-snap wrapped around Jack’s denim, a fleck of blood dried near the left shoulder. Two articles of clothing or two costumes we cloak ourselves in to tell one version of a story of a place and the love and brutality that transpired there. The camera pans over to the window through which there are no mountains in sight. 

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The drive from the Taft-Nicholson Center to the Continental Divide Trail reveals the breadth of Upper Red Rock Lake—a marshy oasis fed by Odell Creek lined with willows. The view from the main porch each morning as it catches fire in slow sunrise and in the evenings as it flickers in seemingly endless golden hour betrays the lake’s magnitude in the relatively open valley. A colleague says he’s looked up information about the area and that we are in even grizzlier country all these miles away from Lakeview. He’d like to see a grizzly, as do some others, but everyone in the van agrees we are not in a state of mind to be mauled just yet. We are a fickle bunch. 

I steer the van past the turn-off for Elk Lake. Tomorrow, we’ll make the left off the main dirt road and spend hours canoeing between pine-covered ridges, watching cormorant after cormorant dive beneath the surface for minutes before resurfacing. We’ll come upon cattle drinking the cool water, and watch one particularly large cow evacuate its bowels directly in the water. Very runny, the poor thing will seem to be going through something. Our guide will ask, You sure you want to swim in this? and laugh. We do; we really do. After we return the canoes to the launching point, one of us will slowly walk into the lake, then another, and then me, until nearly our entire group is swimming in Elk Lake’s nippy waters. One friend will remark, I think this is the most Whitman-esque thing I’ve ever done. And I’ll say, There are an alarming number of poets in the water at the moment. 

Today, our journey leads us elsewhere—more Delmore Schwartz than Whitman perhaps. We take the bumpy road towards West Yellowstone, but we don’t go the full forty miles to the park’s entrance. After tracing golden mountainsides dotted with aspen stands, we park the van just on the other side of the Idaho border. As we start hiking the CDT, we startle a small herd of cattle grazing in Targhee National Forest. A few give us a brief deep mooo, more of a snort than a true call, before scampering through the conifers. When we return to the vans, they’ll be lying down, stomachs sated with their afternoon haul, lounging and completely uninterested in our passing. 

We move through the forest and immediately notice grizzly slash marks on a tree trunk with a CDT sign nailed to it. Our guide points out huckleberry bushes, though only one berry hangs ready for the plucking. They snag it from the bush and pass it to one of our group members who promptly tosses it into his mouth. He doesn’t speak, just makes a contented sound—something between a yummm and a mild roar. We pass more trees and more huckleberry bushes. The claw marks etched deep into the trunks greatly outnumber the huckleberries remaining on the bushes. Our guide points out the browning leaves and suggests, perhaps, there’s some disease that’s gotten ahold of them. But they find a berry here and there, and we press forth deeper into the forest for what began as a walk in a different part of the valley and now becomes a foraging expedition. 

When we stop for water, I ask our guide if they know the name of the high mountain peak visible to the southwest through a clearing in the trees. They say it’s Nemesis, and a few of us open our eyes wider at the drama. They laugh with us and say, Yeah, and we passed Hell Roaring Creek on our way out here, so somebody really had some issues with these mountains. Looking at the claw marks on the tree near us, I have some ideas. Sounds like someone was really going through it, I say. I love petty a title. We continue along the CDT as our guide yells Hey, bear! and I simply follow-up with Haaaayyyyy. The Targhee is a wetter forest than what we’re used to along the Wasatch Range, and even greener than the woods surrounding the Taft-Nicholson Center. The fresher smell draws us farther and farther along the trail. We notice it’s getting late, and we need to return for dinner by six, so we hike on for only a few more minutes until our guide spots some more berries for us to enjoy. 

When we stop, we notice there are more than just a few small berries. There are bushes all around the trail dense with plump, purple huckleberries, and though no great hunger leads us off the trail, we become ravenous nonetheless. One colleague drops his Nalgene and picks berry after berry until both if his cupped palms are full of fruit. Others quietly meander through the bushes and pick one berry at a time with such controlled intention. I shoot a few pictures of berries before plucking them from their stems and slowly chewing them—their final portrait. The juices are sweet, though some of the redder berries bring a bit more tartness to the palette. 

There we stayed for what seemed like hours but really only amounted to fifteen or twenty minutes of foraging, the sun beginning to shine at an ever more acute angle through the trees. We ate and we laughed. We chewed for minutes in silence until we finally turned around to follow the Continental Divide Trail back to our vehicles—no sign of the creatures we might not yet believe in if they weren’t written into these trees one claw at a time. Our bellies full of some small sweetness we share with an animal, real and imagined all the same. 

(winner of the Editors’ Prize in Prose for issue 42)