Chroniclers of the grizzly Writers Doug, Andrea Peacock say the great bear is essential to our survival

Doug Peacock knows what it's like to be prey.

The former Green Beret medic and Vietnam Vet spent years bushwhacking the outer reaches of Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, getting to know the grizzly, a predator that still stalks our species-memory and stands, in our collective imagination, for all that terrifying wildness we have left behind.

Peacock is a searcher by nature, and his object has more often than not been a kind of peace-giving breed of that wildness, which he believes is crucial to the survival of homo sapiens beyond tomorrow or the next day.

Over the years, through his writing and his living, he has become a kind of legendary figure, owing largely to the generally known fact that the late Edward Abbey used him as a model for the iconic trickster-ruffian Hayduke in the "Monkey Wrench Gang."

Peacock was close to Abbey, and was a member of the surreptitious expedition to bury the writer out in the Cabeza Prieta.

He chronicles his relationship with Abbey and his further adventures with wildness—which we learn were often precipitated by psychic remnants of war—in a 2005 memoir, "Walking It Off: A Veteran's Chronicle of War and Wilderness."

In it, he credits his time with the great bear, and the subsequent writing of his classic "The Grizzly Years," for saving his life: "I wrote a book about grizzly bears in part to disclose why I had declined to slip out life's back door."

Now Doug and his wife, Andrea Peacock, a journalist and author of 2003's "Libby, Montana: Asbestos and the Deadly Silence of an American Corporation," have written together a book about all things grizzly—"The Essential Grizzly: The Mingled Fates of Men and Bears."

The Peacocks spend a few months out of the year in Green Valley, and the rest of the year in a home about 45 miles north of Yellowstone.

They had a "cute meet," as they say in Hollywood: Andrea was writing for a paper in Missoula, Mont. She had just finished reading "The Grizzly Years" when Doug showed up in town.

Doug knew her editor, and the three of them went out for drinks. The next day, Doug arrived at her office with an armload of wild mushrooms with which to bribe the editor, who in turn gave Andrea a week off.

Grizzly-human relationship

By using the title “The Essential Grizzly,” Andrea explains in an interview one recent afternoon in Green Valley, the authors are not just saying that the book holds what is essential to know about the current fate of the grizzly, but also that there is something essential about the grizzly-human bond; that grizzlies and other wild predators, and the lands they need, are essential to human survival.

Primeval memory

Doug says he discovered first-hand during his years among the grizzly how a primeval memory, stimulated by fear, can change the way one thinks about the world.

You begin, he says, to remember what is true, and to recognize what is artifice.

"We like to pretend we are apart from nature," he says. "But we need that organic trepidation that grew out of having animals hunt us."

Doug made a career filming and photographing grizzlies, but "there was always a trade-off," he says. "I decided that I was bugging the bears a little too much, so I quit. I haven't shot a frame since 1982."

That doesn't mean he stays away. Doug and Andrea still seek out the company of bears, to watch and learn. And they watch with humility.

"When you go out in Yellowstone or Glacier with Doug," Andrea says, "it's a good day when the bears don't know that you're there."

The Peacocks will read from and sign their book, and show a short video montage of bear footage from Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks, on Saturday, March 3, 10 a.m., at the Joyner-Green Valley Public Library.

Tim Hull is a freelance writer for the Green Valley News. He is a former reporter and Interim Managing Editor.