The Bear Man

On a salmon fishing trip to Alaska, Chad Hood basically had to live with bears, big brown bears, and it didn't rattle him at all. You know your behavior and their behavior. If you're in an area where you can't see very far, you're in trees or high grass, make your presence known and so that you don't have those accidental run ins. And I think also reading the bears body language that certainly takes years of experience, lots of encounters. But I've been around those bears for a long time now, and you can tell when they're not happy with you or they're uncomfortable and they'll do things. They may click their teeth, they may posture a certain way. And so you kind of learn how to read those where, OK, it's time we need to give this bear a little more room or we need to leave. It's pretty amazing, really, how well humans and bears can actually cohabitate in the same area. And so on this trip, all the bears we saw, there wasn't one instance where I felt like we were stressing them out. So it was pretty seamless, really, like there was so many fish at that particular time that it was all they could do to eat a few fish and get motivated to do that than it was like we weren't even there. I remember doing a story years ago where I told you about a guy who called himself the bear man and he lived amongst them each and every day. Ultimately, he was eaten by them. If he had taken Chad's advice, that disaster might have been prevented.