On September 21, 2015, about an hour’s drive northwest of Manhattan in a portion of the New Jersey highlands ringed by small lakes and thick forests, five young men were heading into the Apshawa Preserve when they spotted a bear. It was about three hundred feet away, watching them. Instead of turning back, as they’d been warned to do minutes earlier by a nervous couple exiting the park, the young men pulled out their cell phones and began to photograph the bear. It ambled closer until it was about a hundred feet away. The young men took more pictures. The bear kept coming. Finally the young men turned and started heading back—briskly, one assumes, glancing over their shoulders and muttering nervous profanities.

The bear was still following them.

Contrary to the popular impression of bears as slow, lumbering creatures—which to this point the bear in question had only reinforced—Ursus americanus, the North American black bear, can run at speeds of up to thirty-five miles per hour. That’s as fast as a whippet, jackal, mule deer, or rabbit, and faster than a giraffe, kangaroo, or white-tailed deer, which clock about thirty miles per hour. The fastest human speed on record, by the Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt in 2009, was just shy of twenty-eight miles per hour. The math is irrefutable: bears are faster than people. But these young men didn’t know that, and they were scared. When the bear was about fifteen feet away, they broke into a run, scattering in five directions.

I don’t have to be faster than the bear, goes the old joke. I only have to be faster than you.

In this case the unfortunate you was Darsh Patel, a twenty-two-year-old senior and information technology major at Rutgers University, last seen climbing a rock formation with the bear close behind him. He yelled at his friends to keep running, which they did. Once they were a safe distance away, one of them called 911, using the same phone he’d been taking bear photos with a few minutes earlier.

The police came, and about four hours after the call they found the bear, a 302-pound adult male, circling Patel’s lifeless body in a grassy ravine. For about thirty minutes the bear squared off with the search-and-rescue team, refusing to leave, until the police finally blasted it to death with shotguns.

The most basic details of which ran through my mind about 8 a.m., August 23, 2017, only a minute or two into a hike of my own, on the White Oak Canyon Trail of the Shenandoah National Park. About 150 feet away, across a dry, rocky streambed, was a black bear, watching me. It was big—adult or near-adult size, probably more than 200 pounds.

There was no one else around, no one to outrun if it came to that. It was just me, the bear, and wilderness in every direction.

My sixth-great-grandfather Thomas Meacham knew a thing or two about bears. A history of Franklin County, New York, had this to say about him: “He was not identified at all conspicuously with public affairs, but was notable as a hunter and trapper. His earnings in bounties for noxious animals in the forty years of his activities must have aggregated thousands of dollars, as his obituary, written by a townsman, states that he kept accurate account of the number of the larger animals trapped or shot by him, and that the totals were: Wolves, 214; bears, 210; catamounts, 77; and deer, 2,550.”

One might assume that with men like this running around the backwoods of North America, making a literal killing from animal pelts, the country’s population of black bears would have been eradicated in short order. In fact, it almost was, though it took another hundred years. By the middle of the twentieth century the indiscriminate killing of black bears and the systematic destruction of their habitats, through timber cutting and development, had “nearly extirpated” their population in states like Maryland and made them an endangered species. New protections and regulations, prompted by the activism of conservationists, environmentalists, and concerned outdoorsmen, reversed the tide and have, in recent years, restored the black bear populations to healthier levels.

“By current estimates, more than 900,000 are living today on the continent with 5,000 to 6,000 of those in Virginia,” according to a website maintained by Shenandoah National Park. “We believe that the black bear population within the Park ranges from the low to high hundreds, depending on the availability and distribution of natural forage, particularly mast crops, the degree of annual recruitment and mortality within the population, and seasonal influences such as breeding cycles, juvenile dispersal, and hunting pressure from adjacent lands.”

Among the park’s tips for “Enjoying Bears Safely at Shenandoah” is this advice:

DO NOT run from a bear. Bears will pursue prey
and flight is a signal to them to start pursuit.
If a bear approaches and you have no escape route,
stand tall, wave your arms, yell, clap, and throw rocks to deter the bear.

Further down is this final tip, for when all else fails and a bear attacks:

Fight back!
In rare instances black bears perceive humans as prey—
if you are attacked by a black bear always fight back.
Try to focus your attack on the bear’s eyes and nose.

I hadn’t read any of this before Patel’s tragic death, but I had picked some of it up over the years from articles, documentaries, and word of mouth, which made the New Jersey incident all the more baffling. “Why didn’t they stand together and make a lot of noise?” I asked an older colleague named John over lunch at the Patent and Trademark Office in Alexandria, Virginia. “Maybe wave some big sticks? I’ll bet they could have scared that bear away, or at least better defended themselves.”

John shrugged. “Because they were college kids?”

He had a point. When he was their age, John was getting ready to ship out for Vietnam. When I was their age, I was a veteran of the Persian Gulf War and enrolled in ROTC to become an Army officer. Now, after twenty more years of reserve duty and several wartime deployments, I was thinking about this like a soldier—strength in numbers, form a perimeter, the advantage of a defensive position. But in fairness, Patel was, notably, the first and only known fatality by black bear in the state’s history. It was a fluke event. There was no reason a college kid in the New York metropolitan area would normally have to worry about black bears, much less what to do when threatened by one.

But still, something nagged at me about the incident. I couldn’t quite articulate what it was—only that it seemed to gesture at a larger, more perplexing problem than I was likely to find in the news accounts of Patel’s death or others like it.

A bit closer to the heart of that problem was a photo I first saw online a year or two earlier. In it, three golfers, all men, are moving in various states of undignified haste toward the camera. Beyond them, on the edge of the green with a wall of wild forest behind it, is a roaring grizzly bear. It was and still is hard not to laugh at the photo, given my jaded perception of golf courses as stuffy, sedate country clubs for the rich and powerful. The sight of three such men fleeing a grizzly bear was, I’m ashamed to admit, viscerally satisfying. Naturally I assumed the photo was a fake.

But according to Snopes the photo is quite real, taken by Charles Lindsay at the Yellowstone Club in Big Sky, Montana. It first appeared in the 2005 book Lost Balls: Great Holes, Tough Shots, and Bad Lies, “a humorous and inquisitive foray into the hazards where golf balls are lost—rough, woods, bunkers, and wetlands—as well as unexpected encounters with wildlife on and off the green.”

I showed the photo to another colleague, Chris, a political appointee who also works at the Patent and Trademark Office. Born and raised in Montana, he is a hunter—mainly of deer and elk, though he did once try to hunt a black bear, he told me, only to find that he and his companion were tracking it in circles while the bear hunted them. With snow falling and sunlight fading, they wisely decided to call it a day and hurried home.

“I believe it,” he said of the golf course photo. “I’ve been on that course. It’s up in the mountains and surrounded by wilderness. There are a lot of grizzlies around there.”

Around the same time as this conversation, there was a viral video online in which the largest alligator I have ever seen, perhaps fifteen feet from snout to tail, waddled across a golf course in Florida like something out of the early Cretaceous, while startled golfers gawked in dumbstruck awe. Not that my reaction would have been any different, were I to take up golfing and suddenly stumble across a huge bear or alligator in the course of my game, but why, I found myself wondering, should wildlife encounters like these be “unexpected”? To say that either golf course is surrounded by wilderness is to suggest there is a definitive boundary where civilization ends and wilderness begins. Clearly that’s not the case. During a recent trip to Orlando with my wife and daughter, I spent some of my time walking along the edge of a golf course next to our hotel, photographing ibises, wood storks, and wild turkeys strutting across the green, as oblivious to that supposed boundary between civilization and wilderness as the bear and the alligator—to say nothing of the red foxes, raccoons, possums, and groundhogs that frequent our backyard in the suburbs of northern Virginia.

Which in a roundabout way brings me to the subject of Grizzly Man. If you’ve seen his documentaries, you know that Werner Herzog has an almost unseemly fascination with obsessive people and harsh, remote environments—an eccentric aeronautical engineer flying a teardrop-shaped airship over the rainforests of Guyana, fearless scuba-diving scientists in Antarctica, Siberian hunters and trappers living in Russia’s remote Taiga region. The character at the heart of Grizzly Man was Timothy Treadwell, his obsession was grizzly bears, and the remote environment he inhabited, for at least part of the year, was the “grizzly maze” of Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Preserve.

I say was, because even if you’re not familiar with Herzog, the documentary, or Treadwell, you’ve probably guessed that his obsession didn’t end well. Every summer for thirteen years he lived in the grizzly maze, following the bears, filming them, studying them, even talking to them. He gave them names and considered them his friends. For all these reasons and more, including Treadwell’s childish personality and mannerisms—Treadwell was the stage name he adopted in Los Angeles, hoping but ultimately failing to break into acting—it’s easy to walk away from the documentary thinking he was a naive fool who met an all-too-predictable demise. That, at any rate, has been the reaction of virtually everyone I know who’s seen the film.

But Herzog didn’t dismiss him so casually. During those thirteen summers in the grizzly maze, Treadwell managed to amass some extraordinary footage, which Herzog used extensively throughout the documentary. During the school year Treadwell would travel around the country sharing his work with children and educating them about bears. He’d finally found his calling, and he was good at it. He even had some sensible rules he followed in the grizzly maze, including where he camped, what time of year he went, and how close he would get to the bears. The grizzly that killed him wasn’t one of his “friends.” It was an older, meaner bear looking for food at a time of year when Treadwell was normally on his way back to California and all the grizzlies he knew were heading for the hills to hibernate.

As Herzog himself points out, however, in his paradoxically earnest yet maddeningly monotone German accent, Treadwell was, in a larger sense, dangerously naive about the natural world. There’s a scene in Grizzly Man in which he finds the remains of a young fox, half eaten by wolves—a particularly painful moment for Treadwell, given his affection for the foxes that followed him around the grizzly maze year after year like pets, even lounging on top of his tent and playfully running off with bits of his gear. He of course gave them all names and talked to them, too.

“Oh, God,” says Treadwell softly, in his high-pitched, oddly endearing voice, petting the fox kit’s remains and choking up. “I love you. I love you, and I . . . don’t . . . under . . . stand.”

“Here I differ with Treadwell,” Herzog cuts in, bleakly, with a line that would linger in my memory long after I’d seen the film: “He seemed to ignore the fact that in nature there are predators. I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony but chaos, hostility, and murder.” The Grim Reaper himself could not have said it better.

One can’t help but side with Herzog, though. The universe, while neither sentient nor intent on our murder, is, according to all the lights of science, a fundamentally violent and chaotic place, from its explosive origins to the formation of stars and planets, the geologic forces churning beneath our feet, and the indifferent cruelty of natural selection and “survival of the fittest.” Every living thing on this planet eats some other living thing to survive. In comparison, fatal black bear attacks seem like an almost insignificant anomaly, with only ten in all of North America since 2010. The number of fatal grizzly bear attacks is slightly higher, at seventeen. The majority of both kinds happened out west, in places like Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, Alberta, and British Columbia. The outliers were Patel’s death in New Jersey, a 2011 black bear attack in Arizona, and a 2010 black bear attack in Ohio. That last one involved a captive bear killing its caretaker; the owner of the bear had recently had his exotic pet license revoked.

Personally, I’ve always liked animals and disliked the idea of killing them, unless out of dire necessity—in self-defense, for example, or as a last resort for food if it ever came to that. And in spite of serving twenty-five years in the reserves, my attitude toward firearms and weapons has never been more than indifferent at best. Like 80 percent of everyone else in uniform, I spent most of my military service in non-combat specialties—in my case public affairs, where I felt my affinity for writing and photography could be of more use to the Army than my ability to pull a trigger.

In fact I was on Army business in early 2008 when my interest in photography became more of a full-time obsession. During some time off from an exercise in Miami, I bought my first digital SLR camera, a Nikon D-40, and took it with me on an airboat ride in the Everglades. The photos I came back with that day of alligators, herons, storks, and a variety of other birds were surprisingly good. I was hooked. As I continued to pursue wildlife photography in the years ahead, I came to understand some of the allure of hunting—the pleasure of being outdoors, of tracking “prey,” of coming home with something to show for it. Of proving myself in some mysterious way I couldn’t quite explain. It was exhilarating. I wanted to “shoot” more wildlife, including bears.

The psychologist and sociologist Erich Fromm may have put his finger on it when he wrote, in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness: “In the act of hunting, a man becomes, however briefly, part of nature again. He returns to the natural state, becomes one with the animal, and is freed from the burden of the existential split: to be part of nature and to transcend it by virtue of his consciousness. In stalking the animal he and the animal become equals, even though man eventually shows his superiority by the use of his weapons.”

Finally, that early morning on the White Oak Canyon Trail in 2017, I had my best chance yet to do just that. The irony is I’d come to photograph waterfalls; there are six of them along the 4.5-mile hike uphill, ranging from thirty-five to eighty-three feet high. But I’d also hoped to see a bear. I’d been to Shenandoah National Park maybe twenty times since moving to Virginia in early 2009. I’d seen bear scat, bear tracks, bear claw marks on trees, and plenty of people who had just seen a bear or a family of bears, but I’d never seen one with my own eyes. Not in the wild and not until that moment, just a minute’s hike from the gravel parking lot I’d left behind. I wasn’t scared, but I was unprepared. I had a tripod over one shoulder, and I hadn’t put the telephoto lens on the camera—an inexcusable oversight. I put the tripod down and fumbled in my camera bag for the lens. In the amount of time it would have taken my sixth-great-grandfather to blow it away and get out his skinning knives—or for the bear to charge to within mauling distance—I finally managed to switch lenses and take a few hasty shots.

Victory! I could share the photos online later, “mounting” the bear’s image for all to see. I had, in a sense and to echo Fromm, become the bear’s equal by standing my ground and photographing it, if even from a distance. As if to confirm these delusions, the bear turned and lumbered off deeper into the woods—though in truth it didn’t look humiliated so much as bored or indifferent. The bear was done with me.

But I wasn’t done with the bear. I wanted more photos. I wanted to get closer and shoot it from every possible angle. I knew I was unlikely to see another bear on this hike or any time soon—in fact I haven’t seen one since—and I didn’t want this moment to end. I wanted us to continue this dance, as equals, or even as predator and prey, with me as the predator. Strange as it sounds, my instinct was to follow the bear, to stalk it and keep shooting, as I do all the time with birds and other animals closer to home.

It was only after a few seconds of genuine anguish that I realized how crazy it was that I was even considering such a thing. I thought of Patel and his friends, of their decision to continue on in spite of the couple’s warning, to photograph the bear even as it approached them. And yet here I was on the verge of making an even worse decision. Whatever those young men were guilty of, whatever Treadwell may have been guilty of, it wasn’t just ignorance, I could see now. It was the hubris of being a “civilized” human, born and raised in the midst of a society that believes it has “tamed” and driven back the wilderness and created something else, or other, in its supposed absence. Of assuming that because we are human, or American, or technologically savvy creatures of the modern world, or all of the above, we are not only “better” than the animals but somehow immune to the arbitrary, indifferent violence of nature.

It can’t happen to me.

But there is no separation, no other. The boundaries between civilization and wilderness, people and animals—these are figments of our imagination. We are animals, and as such we don’t exist apart from or above nature; we are in it, always, and it is always in us. Think what you will about the hunter, but he suffers no illusions about this. He more than anyone perceives the true nature of Herzog’s homicidal universe and our precarious place in it—and, within healthy limits, learns to embrace it, even to recognize himself, at times, as an agent of it. Even armed, my colleague Chris and his hunting companion chose to head home when they realized they were being stalked by a bear. Armed with nothing but a camera, I almost chose to stalk one.

In the end, of course, I didn’t. I came to my senses and continued on in search of waterfalls, but for the better part of an hour I kept looking back, kept doubting my decision to hike alone in bear country, sure that I’d just heard a grunt or the snap of a twig, rehearsing in my mind what I’d do if I did see the bear, or another just like it, following me.

Stand your ground, I told myself. Make a lot of noise; hell, roar like a cornered catamount with its hackles up. And if necessary—if all else failed and the bear still came for me, undeterred, unrelenting—swing my tripod with a vengeance and hit that homicidal universe square in the goddamned face.