“Okay, folks, you want to be real quiet now,” Gary Porter said in a low voice.

Since a grizzly sow and two one-year old cubs were at that moment ten feet away, I wasn’t about to argue.

The sow was in the lead, rolling up the narrow path, dragging the backs of her paws along the ground, long, sharp claws hitting first when she put them down again. Her dark brown fur was thick and wet. Her head, lowered beneath powerful shoulders, was constantly in motion, swiveling between the fish in the creek and the fourteen of us reclining in camp chairs on the bank. Her eyes were little and mean. She didn’t look the least bit cuddly.

Bringing up the rear, looking wet, cold and hungry, the cubs were major whiners. It was one long continuous moan, Mom, I’m hungry, Mom, feed me, Mom, I’m starving, Mom, do I have to stay starved, Mo-oom!

Mom glanced our way. I felt like I’d wandered into the middle of Jurassic Park, and tried not to look like protein.

Gary Porter is the owner and operator of Bald Mountain Air in Homer, Alaska, and was our pilot that day, of a DeHaviland Single Otter, which, Gary said with a grin, used to belong to the Nicaraguan Army. With that grin, you never know if he’s telling the truth or trying you on, but it’s a good story and if you’re like me, that’s partly why you fly with him. It’s guys like Gary who make books like Fire and Ice possible.

Gary’s been flying since he was twelve years old, and flying bear watchers to Katmai National Park for the last seven. Going bear-watching with Gary is not like going bear-watching on McNeil River; you don’t have to try for a permit in the Parks Service lottery and maybe you win and maybe you don’t (and maybe you get to go and maybe you don’t). You just make a reservation at Bald Mountain Air with Gary’s wife, Jeanne, drive to Beluga Lake in Homer, and climb on board. You don’t have to camp out, either, it’s over and back the same day, always a plus for me, since I did my share of moose hunting when I was a kid and have sworn an oath never to sleep beneath a tent fly again.

It’s a ninety-minute flight, and on the way we saw no less than five pods of gray whales. There were spectacular views of the Barren Islands, Cape Douglas, Afognak, Shuyak and Kodiak en route. We landed in a delightful little bay on the southern shore of the Aleutian Peninsula protected by a miniature archipelago and steep mountains still layered with ash from the explosion of Mount Katmai in 1912. Some of those drifts of ash had bear tracks running through them. A double waterfall cascaded down one mountain, and fog played tag with the sun. We ate our lunch on board a sixty-five foot yacht, piled into a skiff and headed for shore.

And bears. Grizzly bears, the undisputed mammoth of the ursine world. Lots of them.

I did kind of wonder what I was getting into. When I was a kid growing up in Alaska, my mother said that bears were cantankerous animals that would just as soon eat you as look at you. Stay away from bears, she said. Okay, Mom, I said, and I did, too.

Now here I was, sitting down so I couldn’t run, in hipboots so I couldn’t run very fast anyway, armed only with a camera. It didn’t help that one bear tracked us from the skiff to where we would sit. He was a young bear, Gary said recently booted out by his mother, and he looked skinny. And hungry.

Another sow with two three-year old cubs could be seen far up the curving beach, steadily approaching. A boar was napping, a mountain of fat and fur sprawling on the sand. Others fished the creek, rearing up on their hind legs and splashing down hard on their front legs, startling the fish into moving so they could see them and catch them. And eat them.

Goldie, the bear who had followed us up the beach, was a pitiful fisher. He chased after everything, never caught anything, the salmon simply snapped their tails in scorn. The collared bear, on the other hand, was so obliging as to catch and eat a fish right in front of us; she ripped that fish apart like it was Kleenex, there were salmon eggs flying everywhere. The seagulls, hovering hopefully nearby, were pleased.

The bears had a routine, a path they walked regularly, up the creek in front of us and down the dry creekbed in back of us. Sometimes we were surrounded by bears, few of which I am relieved to report paid us much mind. “If you’re in the same place at the same time every day, acting the same way,” Gary said, “pretty soon you’re part of the scenery.”

Of course he also told stories about boars tearing into cubs the moment a sow’s back was turned. “Why do they do that?” someone asked. Gary replied, a thoughtful crease in his brow, “Well, you know, I think the boars just think the cubs taste good.”

Right.

There were eight bears converging on the creek mouth as we left. It was an experience like no other I have ever had, and I wouldn’t have missed it for anything, but I wasn’t sorry to go. Lessons learned young are the ones that stick. Stay away from bears, Mom said.

Okay, Mom.