My first pets were a pair of hamsters, sisters from the same litter. I was surprised that such tiny little brains could hold such distinct personalities: Harley, golden and white, was more athletic, more aloof, notably smarter, happy to play by herself; Yankee, a chubby cream-colored meatball, craved human touch—she'd run to the door at the top of her cage and stare up, unable to see much with a hamster's terrible eyesight but secure in the knowledge that I'd soon come to scoop her up. All she wanted was to be held and petted. She was the biggest little sweetie on god's green Earth. The sisters got along grandly in their shared, three-tiered cage. And then one day out of nowhere, and for reasons I never understood and I suspect they didn't either, Yankee starting beating the shit out of Harley every time they'd cross paths—biting her, scratching her, screaming with fury at the mere sight of her previously beloved sister. We separated them, giving each their own cage, and they each lived out their long happy hamster lives in solitary. But it was a good lesson for young me. No matter how fuzzy or friend-shaped, creatures are not simply furry people and can't be viewed or treated as such. Animals are animals.
Brown bears, despite looking an awful lot like thousand-pound hamsters, are ur-predators. They are secretive, unknowable, capable of tremendous acts of strength and violence. Our ancestors knew this: The word "bear" was originally a euphemism, invented by our Germanic-speaking predecessors afraid to use the animal's true name, made taboo out of a superstitious fear that speaking it would cause them to meet one. Our Enlightenment-era men of science were no less intimidated—it was designated Ursus arctos horribilis for a reason. This week in Alaska, nature provided a morbid and useful reminder that bears are bears, with all that entails.
The start of Fat Bear Week, the charming and popular fan-voted competition to crown the grizzly bear who packs on the most weight ahead of hibernation, was delayed because one of the bear competitors murdered another bear.
I shouldn't use the word "murdered." It carries intent and anthropomorphizes something that doggedly resists it. And besides, experts still do not understand what caused Bear 469, nicknamed "Digger" by fans, to kill Bear 402 in a fight Monday morning in the Brooks River, in Katmai National Park:
As stunned viewers watched online, the two bears engaged in a lengthy and violent fight in deep water at the river’s mouth — a clash that eventually ended with one bear dying, and the other dragging her body ashore.
“Very difficult to see. I mean, 402 is a beloved bear by each and every one of us,” Mike Fitz, the resident naturalist with webcam company Explore.org, said in a video in which he and two Katmai Park experts discussed the incident.
“I honestly, you know, I think we're all in a little bit of a loss of words,” Fitz said.
It was not a territorial clash—those are common and recognizable. It instead appeared to be a predator-prey interaction, said Sarah Bruce, a park ranger, with 469 going after the only-slightly smaller 402 as if she were a target. After drowning 402 in the river, 469 dragged her body into the woods and guarded it as he would a food cache. ("Nature, red in tooth and claw" played out there too: the massive and fan-favorite Bear 32, nicknamed "Chunk," chased off 469 and stole 402's carcass.)
Fat Bear Week organizers pushed back the start of the tournament by a day after the incident, instead turning it into a teaching moment by showing the killing in its entirety and having experts discuss it. Note: The video's not graphic—most of the interaction takes place in deep water—but depending on your tolerance it's potentially upsetting.
"If a lion could speak, we could not understand him," the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said, meaning that an animal's inner life and lived experience are so radically different from our own that we would not have a context in which its words and thoughts would make sense to us. Who can know what it is like to be a bear (or a bat, famously, or a beluga)? Who can imagine the primal ache of hyperphagia, the constant, overwhelming hunger that besets a grizzly and drives it to eat everything within reach before winter arrives? Who can picture the red-misted vision through which Bear 469, a perfectly designed and motivated killer, viewed the world before 402 entered his line of sight?
This was, perhaps, not 469's first rodeo. The Fat Bear Week fandom is devoted and thorough, and has been tracking this individual bear's appearances since 2001. They're helpfully collected on a Fat Bear Wiki, which notes that in 2012 Bear 469 was seen near an unidentified bear's remains. The next year he was seen with a serious injury, perhaps collected during a fight with another bear. This does not make him "mean" or "evil," any more than the late and prodigious Bear 402's status as the mother of at least eight litters made her virtuous or loving. Some adjectives, meant for humans, simply can't apply to bears. In nature's cold eyes, 402's death is no more a tragedy than is each individual death of a thousand salmon—it is just a fact.
Fat Bear Week is a delight. Those bears get so fat! But it would be a mistake to think of them solely as charming chunguses, and not only in the unlucky instance you meet one. Appreciating an animal, especially an apex predator in the wild, means appreciating all its behaviors, from the cuddly to the bloody. Bears will be bears, whether we want them to or not.
