“Andrews’s wonderful Down from the Mountain is deeply informed by personal experience and made all the stronger by his compassion and measured thoughts . . . Welcome and impressive work.” –Barry Lopez The story of a grizzly bear named Millie: her life, death, and cubs, and what they reveal about the changing character of the American West An “ode to wildness and wilderness” (Outside Magazine…
An “ode to wildness and wilderness” (Outside Magazine), Down from the Mountain tells the story of one grizzly in the changing Montana landscape. Millie was cunning, a fiercely protective mother to her cubs. But raising those cubs in the mountains was hard, as the climate warmed and people crowded the valleys. There were obvious dangers, like poachers, and subtle ones, like the corn field that drew her into sure trouble.
That trouble is where award-winning writer, farmer, and conservationist Bryce Andrews’s story intersects with Millie’s. In this “welcome and impressive work” he shows how this drama is “the core of a major problem in the rural American West–the disagreement between large predatory animals and invasive modern settlers”–an entangled collision where the shrinking wilds force human and bear into ever closer proximity (Barry Lopez).
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The fluidity of Andrews’ imagination and the reality of his time on the ground with people and bears make this book a piece of true history. He is not a journalist, but a participant with skin in the game, who happens to be an excellent writer. Putting up fence along the porous line between humans and big, foraging bears, Andrews is the one you’d want telling this story.
I admire (and envy) author Bryce Andrews for where he lives, the work he does, the tenacity he displays, and the way he seems to follow both his dreams and his conscience. The conservation work he describes in this book (creating an innovative fence at a Montana cornfield to prevent grizzlies from entering and becoming dependent on the crops) is important for both bears and humans.
However, I still found “Down From the Mountain” to be a bit underwhelming. While the final 125 or so pages are quite engrossing, the first 150 tend to be tedious. The book’s subtitle is “The Life and Death of a Grizzly Bear,” and having recently read “American Wolf,” I went in to this expecting the same in-depth treatment of a grizzly family.
But Millie — the mother bear in question — and her two cubs seem to be an afterthought through the first seven chapters. What you get instead is largely the author’s memoir of a summer spent building his electric cornfield barrier.
And again, this is important work, and interesting too — but the focus of the book caught me off-guard. Further, Andrews can be so verbose that powering through the pages tends to become a chore. With better editing focused more on concision, the page count could have been likely trimmed by a quarter or a third.
Still, I read on, and was heartened by the successes Andrews had with his fence; regarding it, I was left with the sense that his trial run has (hopefully) led to further adjustments to his prototype and adoption of it by neighboring farms in Montana’s bear country.
When focusing on Millie and her two cubs, the book is far more compelling. But other than Millie’s sad end and the fate of her two cubs, very little action is based on direct observation by Andrews. It’s hard to fault him for this — grizzlies are difficult to track in the wild. Besides, her day-to-day life in the wild is not the story here. Rather, it is her fate and the implications of humans living in grizzly territory and all the conflicts and conservation issues that arise that make the story. Andrews himself states in the afterword that “‘Down From the Mountain’ is braided from research, experience, and invention. All three strands were necessary to make the story whole.”
A more honest title and subtitle of this book would indicate to the prospective reader the contents of this book. Because really, it’s a good book, and I’m glad I read it. If you love Montana and care about bears, it’s worth picking up. If you have an interest in agriculture and/or conservation, pick it up. But if you want a truly in-depth, first-hand story of the life and death of grizzly bears, grab a book by Doug Peacock.
Bryce Andrews’ wonderful Down From the Mountain is deeply informed by personal experience and made all the stronger by his compassion and measured thoughts. He outlines clearly the core of a major problem in the rural American West — the disagreement between large predatory animals and invasive modern settlers — without disrespect and without sentimentality. His book is welcome and impressive work.
In some of the clearest prose the state of Montana has produced, this high-octane story captures the marvel that is a grizzly giving birth in the high wild, follows her down into the human interface, and floods us with the heightened awareness and humbling unease we feel in the presence of Ursus arctos. When the hubris of man-unkind then threatens his protagonists, Andrews lays his life on the line in a sustained attempt to protect them, and the suspense of the telling comes to rival a great crime thriller. Rife with lyrical precision, first-hand know-how, ursine charisma, and a narrative jujitsu flip that places all empathy with his bears, Down from the Mountain is a one-of-a-kind triumph even here in the home of Doug Peacock and Douglas Chadwick.
In Down from the Mountain, Bryce Andrews walks the harrowing line between wilderness and civilization — as in literally walks it, recounting his own efforts to keep a space in the world for the untamed creatures that remind us who we are in the first place. Writing with a keen empathy for both the great grizzlies of Montana’s Mission Mountains, and the farmers and wildlife officers coping in the valley below, this book is by turns heartbreaking and hopeful, even while it zings along with the high-stakes pace of a thriller. It’s as true as it gets.
In stunning prose, as powerful as the grizzly itself, Andrews’s draws the reader into the mysterious lives of these bears. From deep in their pungent winter dens we emerge with them into the spring light, pad along forest trails, smell every molecule of wild and human. We are also the farmer, sweat-soaked, protecting the sweet corn. When these two worlds — bear and human — collide, all is unpredictable and precarious. Down from the Mountain will sear its beauty and sorrow into your soul. Required reading for all Homo sapiens.