An Exclusive Guest Post from Bryce Andrews, Author of Down from the Mountain—Our June Nonfiction Pick.

This spring, going into town for groceries feels riskier than my day job. That’s saying something, since my job is keeping grizzly bears away from western Montana’s corn fields, calves, chicken coops, and garbage cans.
My last town trip was on a cold, overcast morning. A gray inversion sat on Missoula like a broody hen, and it was easy to imagine that cloud of tailpipe emissions and breath as the virus currently wracking us.
I did not want to enter the city and found it strange to fear my own people—those wilderness-loving, flannelled, hearty pint-glass clinkers. Of course, they meant me no harm. They hadn’t changed. It was just that now, without meaning to, we could lay each other low.
This got me thinking about grizzlies, and how they survive in today’s West. Everywhere in the mountains around here, bears are waking from miraculous five-month slumbers, emerging from black-mouthed dens as if regurgitated by the earth, stepping hardily into spring’s pale light.
Their world has changed much more over the course of the past century than ours has in the last few months. Because we’ve inhabited and cultivated so much of this region, the modern grizzly’s hardest task is avoiding humans: keeping away from our livestock and crops; staying out of the paths of speeding cars and bullets. Put simply, grizzlies survive by steering clear of us. And though the bears are good at such distancing, humans still kill more of them than anything else does.
A grizzly’s life—the subject of Down from the Mountain—isn’t easy. It’s built of staggering effort and contains too much tragedy. The amazing thing is that bears often manage it. With caution, they can thrive. Up here in the Northern Rockies, grizzlies are slowly returning to places from which we exterminated them in the twentieth century.
I find this heartening. Right now, all around us, the natural world is quickening toward spring. Sap is rising and geese are beating up from the south. Bears are rousing to their busy season. And though none of this makes the virus less fearsome, it stands as a testament to the hunger and strength in living creatures—that burning desire to persist, adapt, and find our way on.