Peacock came home from Vietnam a Green Beret medic who couldn’t be around people, drove into the Montana and Wyoming backcountry, and started following grizzlies. No gun. A camera instead, and years of sitting still in the timber watching bears he came to know well enough to name. The book runs those two lives against each other — a bear crossing a meadow, then a village burning, then back — and the argument underneath is that the bears put him back together. He’s clear-eyed about them, too. They aren’t symbols, they’re animals that could kill him and once nearly did. He gave Edward Abbey the model for Hayduke, and you can hear that guy in the prose, but the watching is patient and exact and nothing like a novel.
Grizzly Years: In Search of the American Wilderness