A vignette from my Yellowstone trip (with
my parents) last year:
At one point along the North Loop Road,
we came upon another backlog of cars—elk jam, I guessed. With so
many tourists gawking and aiming cameras, we too decided to scoot our
station wagon barely off the road, and join them. Some place in the
woods, to which all the cameras pointed. One could imagine lines
projecting from the cameras, all to converge at a point—on the nose
of a small
black bear. A young one. He attacked a shrub, probably
fruited with currants, from every angle. He reached munched and
picked, berries, leaves and all, first from one side of the bush then
the other, then above and then below. From any available clearing in
the vegetation by the road, the binoculars and cameras pointed and
clicked. As thorough as a kid with a bag of M and M's, the bear ate
for every last berry, and then shuffled on to find another bush. My
mother remarked that when she visited Yellowstone as a child, the
tourists would gather by the road to feed the bears bread and candy
and turn them into overweight beggars. What an amazing shift between
now and then, that we now capture and light up our computer screens
with pictures of bears practicing their natural habits in their
natural habitats! The young bear is probably out shuffling through
the woods somewhere today, with pine smell in his nostrils and food
on his mind.
(I don't know the bear's gender, so my
male pronouns have a 50% chance of being correct.)
