The Black Grizzly of Whiskey Creek

My initial reservations yielded to admiration as I read this book. Marty wrote this story long after the key events, but with access to many of the key witnesses. He had left the service of Parks Canada before a bear or a couple of different bears began to attack and maul people in the swamps near Banff in August and September 1980.

Marty still has a couple of bugs up his ass on the subject of Parks Canada. He seems to favour the old wardens and their ways of handling things, and sympathizes with them when their practices and hunches were rejected by Parks Canada, without recognizing that they had no great ideas on managing the national Parks in early 80's. At the same time, he writes very well about the problems of managing a park show more among the conflicts - indeed incommensurable - among the goals of tourists, eco-tourists, tourism operators and naturalists.

There is a couple of mysteries at play - was it one bear or more than one? Two bears were shot, and it was a bad year. The problems stopped after the second bear was caught and killed.

He writes about about bears and animal behavior with some authority as a warden and a rancher, who has had access to leading experts like Stephen Herrero. There are some passages in which he imagines the emotions and memories of a grizzly. I see this writing as outside the sentimental tradition of writing about animals as nearly human actors. That tradition encourages sympathy for animals and delusions about being able to understand and interact with animals. Marty himself was impatient with the ways of tourists and their expectations about seeing the bears in Banff. I tend to side with the thinkers who say that such thought experiments are doomed to fail, except as exercises in sentimental literature. Marty falls into some romantic overkill, visualizing the bear as a giant hungry simpleton lured to its own destruction by the scent of food scraps in the garbage outside the Banff restaurants.

Marty succeed best, perhaps in spite of some of his biases and loyalties. at capturing the terrible ironies, ambiguities and conflicts in the lives of wardens. They imagined their lives as an exercise in freedom in wild nature, and they end up having to clean up the problems of a tourist industry serving the fantasies of world tourism. show less