Grizzly Seasons Life With the Brown Bears of Kamchatka

When I leaf through the pages of Grizzly Seasons, I am flooded with hundreds of memories. Maureen and I agree that these glimpses of fleeting moments represent the best years of our lives. There were many difficult aspects to living so deep in the wilderness, especially so far from home, in a country like Russia. We suffered through weeks of bad weather, unimaginable bureaucracy, health problems but, come March we could not wait to be back with our bears. Our experiences with them were so wonderful that any hardship was endurable. Reflecting on this, I realize that the most profound thing I learned from Chico, Biscuit and Rosie was that humans are a part of nature. Our only choice is whether our influence is positive or not. They taught us that if we choose to be respectful, living in their world was not about being tough, feeling puny, or about suffering. It is about fitting into the landscape without conflict. It is a realization of when to be afraid, when to laugh and when to find shelter. Most profoundly, it is about the art of how not to be a nuisance to those who are born to be wild. Of course our three cubs lives were extended considerably and the three of them had a lot of fun they otherwise would not have had. But in an ideal world, people would have already known these things we wanted to explore about grizzlies and we would not have had to go to Russia do this study which ended badly for our bears. With a history of hundreds of years of flagrant misunderstanding, someone had to set the record straight though and I am proud of how we have done that. Charlie RussellRussell, Charlie is the author of 'Grizzly Seasons Life With the Brown Bears of Kamchatka' with ISBN 9781552978566 and ISBN 1552978567.