Bad thoughts

The old woman was in the middle of the road bending over to pick up something. She was fat and had a crook in her back and a white shawl on. I thought she was a cripple, or maybe she was just plain dumb.

I mean, what is a fat old woman with a shawl on doing in the middle of the road just before dark in Glacier National Park? What's with these tourists? Do they feed them stupid pills when they come through the entrance?

I was in my truck thinking these bad things about this fat old woman, and as I came closer and closer, my fat old woman with the dirty white shawl on dropped down to all fours and ran off into the woods.

My fat old woman was no woman at all. She was a big old silver-tipped grizzly bear.

Zoom!

The illusion dissolved, and I think I might have laughed out loud.

I stopped the truck where the bear went into the woods, hoping to get a picture. Bears will often stop just inside the trees and look back, but maybe this bear got wind of my insults, because there was no sign of her.

She was my first grizzly sighting of 2005 - a fun way to start the bear sighting season.

The second grizzly of this year came on Sunday. Boy Wonder and I were hiking out to a favorite North Fork meadow, and I saw wolf tracks in the trail and then bear tracks.

Big bear tracks. My foot fit inside its hind foot.

When you see a track that big, you take notice.

"Hey bear," I yelled out, just for good measure.

They say that's a good thing to yell out in Glacier. Just to let the bears know you're around.

Heaven save me from the day when one answers back.

At any rate, we followed the bear and the wolf tracks through the woods, and when the woods opened up to the meadow, there it was.

Not a bear, but a great gray owl. Great grays are a rare sight in Glacier, and I just about wet my pants. Here was an owl in great late day light looking straight at me.

The griz must have heard my cry of joy because it ran across the far end of the meadow into the woods - a good 150 yards away. I never saw it again and didn't care to. Really- I don't like running into grizzlies outside my vehicle. There is always the fear of being had for supper.

The owl just watched.

Great grays aren't very camera shy - they live on the premise that they are gray and the trees are gray, and so if they sit still you won't see them.

That works 99 percent of the time for the owl, but in this case, it just meant I had a bird on a branch that wasn't going to fly away.

I shot roll after roll of film.

Some gray jays came over and harassed the owl for a short while, and so did a yellow-shafted flicker. I thought I would see a battle or something get eaten, but it didn't happen. The smaller birds knew better and kept their distance.

Eventually the owl flew off to another branch on another tree deeper into the woods. I had seen enough and didn't follow. The brush was thick in there, and I saw the grizzly once that day.

I didn't want to see him again.

Chris Peterson is the editor of the Hungry Horse News.