The cotton woods are in full shed these weeks along the Snake river riffling through Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Some breezy hours it looks like light snowfall over the dried prairie grass of mid-summer. Immense stretches of stone and weed along the river dikes look like the white grizzle of an old man’s cheek. “Unusual,” say the old-timers. “Usually this lasts for a week or so. It’s been going on for weeks now.” Mosquitoes fly, not in the horse-killing swarms of decades ago, hardly worth noticing until the painful welt rises.

From the trailhead to Death Canyon the path rises warmly through spruce and pine with the promise of a lofty view of Phelps Lake. It’s a good afternoon for walking and catching up with family matters, come from across the continent. Thirty minutes and breathing hard we hear a woman’s voice: “There’s a bear!” We stop and scan. There, ten feet ahead and four feet off the trail is a golden brown mat of hair. The head is the end closest to the trail and is buried in brush, pushing and rooting, like a dog frantic after a buried bone. “Thanks” we call and begin to back away, the direction we came from.

“Don’t leave us!” she calls and we realize that her first call was not simply informational. They are on the far side of the bear and afraid to walk the trail home, four feet from its nose. We stop and consider. The bear — still rooting after showing its face once — is too big to be a cub and too small to be full grown. A yearling perhaps. It looks like a brown bear. We scan 360 degrees for a mother. She is the one to fear, not the one before us. We humans talk in loud voices across the distance, hoping that will be enough to send it on its way. Lunch overcomes though. It pays no attention to us.

We consider what to do. We consider again the make and model of this bear. There is an old mountain joke about prepared hikers carrying little bells and small canisters of pepper spray to ward off bears. Being well prepared they will examine the scat that appears on the ground. Brown or black bear scat will have remnants of berries and grubs. Grizzly scat will have remnants of little bells and small canisters of pepper spray.

I find a stout, four foot pointed branch and heft it. It could put an eye out, properly thrust. My brother finds a similar stake. We straddle the trail and grasp our interior hands, lifting them above our heads. We extend our exterior arms with the stakes gripped tightly, making as big and imposing a form as we can. We growl. We growl loudly.

The bear lifts its head and stares, startled and making decisions. The moment of truth has arrived.

We growl again and take a step forward.

The bear turns its head. The body follows, away from the trail. We growl again.

It pauses after ten yards and looks back. Emboldened, we growl several times, waving our sticks. The bear disappears in the thick underbrush.

We drop out sticks and unlink hands. “Come on!” I shout to the trapped hikers. They are still uncertain. We are anxious to leave. Our duty to strangers seems to be satisfied. “Let’s go,” I yell. “It’s gone!” “Are you sure?” “We’re going!” They come pell-mell down the trail and join us. “Thank you! We didn’t know what to do.” We take the next fifty yards in about as many steps and stop to introduce ourselves. “Brown bear,” we think. “Ha ha.”

Next time we’ll carry bells and pepper spray, maybe a klaxon, a hand powered air-raid siren….