"At 74," the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel reported last month, "Donna Munson showed signs of dementia, suffered from congestive heart failure and shuffled around her 40-acre property near Ouray using a walker."
Given the freakish and morbid circumstances surrounding her death, this was all that was needed for her biography in the popular press for the few days her story was around as news. If you bothered to dig a little deeper, though, it was possible to find more: Mother of five, trained nurse, faithful churchgoer, Humane Society booster, and by all indications a friend to many, both four-legged and two.
"Sweet old lady" might seem a more accurate description than "confused whack job."
"You had to know her,'' Jennifer Brown told the Denver Post. "She was a very loving woman. So much into animals."
I never knew Munson, but I've known more than a few like her in more than 30 years in Alaska, and most weren't suffering any signs of dementia.
They just had some strange urge to make pets of bears or foxes or other wild animals in the way people reading this are friends with dogs or cats. Legendary Lake Clark National Park mountain man Dick Proenneke, for crying out loud, tried to befriend a wolverine, and no one called him nuts. The park service even made something of a monument of his cabin at Twin Lakes after his death.
The people who manage wildlife, understandably, don't like all of these attempts to walk with the animals, talk with the animals and, most dangerously, get all cuddly with the animals.
After a black bear bigger than a North Slope grizzly dragged Munson out of the fenced-in bear-feeding cage at her home in the mountains down the road from Grand Junction, wildlife authorities there issued the standard warning that people shouldn't feed the bears and lamented how they'd been trying for years to get Munson to stop putting out dog food for the bruins, but just couldn't catch her in the act of feeding the animals.
Some of it sounded awfully familiar. Much the same was said in Alaska about 70-year-old Charlie Vandergaw.
Until this spring, when Vandergaw's high profile as a "bear whisperer" finally embarrassed the Alaska State Troopers and the Alaska Department of Law into action, the retired Anchorage science teacher had spent 20 summers feeding tons of dog food to bears at his homestead in the Yentna River Valley north of Alexander Creek with law enforcement authorities unwilling to do much about it.
They complained that the state law against feeding bears was just too hard to enforce. It probably didn't hurt that old Vandergaw had at least one retired employee of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game sometimes hanging out at "Bear Haven," as Vandergaw called his place, along with some other Alaskans with political connections.
In defense of Vandergaw, too, and of the state, it must be noted that he wasn't and isn't demented. Not even close.
Vandergaw knows bears as well as anyone I've ever met, and over the course of a lot of years of writing about wildlife and the environment in Alaska, I've met plenty of people who know bears or have known bears in all sorts of ways. Dozens of these were people mauled by bears. Tens of them were scientists who spent their lives observing, tracking and handling hundreds, if not thousands, of bears.
Then there are the big-game guides, the "white hunters," as their counterparts are called in Africa, the people who make their living getting hunters in close to bears, usually grizzlies, so they can kill them. Sometimes these guides end up doing the killing themselves when a shaky client lets off a bad shot and wounds a bear.
When that happens, things can get ugly fast. There is no animal in Alaska more dangerous than a grizzly bear in the seconds and minutes after it is wounded. That bear is as likely to look around for someone or something to attack as it is to flee.
What guides know about bears is one of those things that's undervalued in this state. The best of the bunch are professionals who know bears and their behavior as well as the professionals who work with bears at Fish and Game do.
None of them ever expressed a thought that Vandergaw, who himself happened to be a guide back in the day, was demented. More than a few guides and state biologists even admitted a certain admiration, grudging or otherwise, for what he was doing out at Bear Haven.
Vandergaw was a lion tamer.
That was the part that always worried me. I've known too many people dead in Alaska from Lion Tamer Syndrome, though most of them never worked with animals. Most of them were climbers or pilots or skiers or snowmachiners who could do things few others could do.
That sort of ability is intoxicating.
People get hooked on always taking it one step farther to prove what they can do, and to get that adrenaline rush that comes from putting your life out there on the edge.
This is a form of craziness, though none of the Lion Tamers I knew are or were crazy. OK, maybe a couple -- like late and legendary climbers John Waterman (not to be confused with still-living climber and author Jon Waterman) and Chuck Comstock. But in general the rest aren't or weren't any crazier than your average Alaskan.
Then again, a little craziness isn't out of place in this state.
At this point, given that the subject is bears, I probably need to confess that I was a little crazy about bears and people at one point, too. I pretty well convinced myself that all bear charges, be the bears blacks or grizzlies, were bluffs, and that if people simply had the courage to stand in and hold their ground, the bears would always back down.
This conclusion probably had as much to do with personal observations that a lot of people are just plain scared shitless around bears as it had to do with the animals themselves. Yeah, bears can be dangerous. They do kill and, in certain rare cases, eat people, but they're not like land mines or tigers. They don't go off every time you step on them. Trust me, I've nearly stepped on a few bears. And they simply don't hunt people the way tigers do.
So I went along for years believing all charges were sure to be bluffs, and I stood down a few charging bears, including at least one grizzly that turned only a feet short of a friend and me on Kodiak Island when we all had a little disagreement over who was entitled to the remains of a dead Sitka blacktail deer.
All of that changed, however, when a grizzly bear finally ran over me. Then she grabbed my leg in her mouth. I still have the scars from where she had hold of me just above the ankle when I shot her.
My views on grizzly bears and bluff charges have not been the same since. I still believe most charges are bluffs, but I also recognize that you'd better be prepared to deal with the one grizzly in 10, or one in 50, or one in 100 that isn't bluffing.
