Author Bryce Andrews sees predators from both sides

One might have expected the ghost of Millie the grizzly bear to peer in the window at Ninepipes Lodge. She was a local, after all.

Bryce Andrews brought Millie to life as he spoke at the Ninepipes Museum’s Black Tie Dinner fundraiser last month, and read from his recent book, “Down from the Mountain — The Life and Death of a Grizzly Bear.” The book, and much of Bryce’s life, bring understanding and empathy for the difficulties Mission Mountain grizzlies face as they try to navigate a world increasingly settled by humans. In fact, GPS collars show they roam among us much more than we realize.

“It’s one thing to hear statistics,” Bryce says. “Our grizzly population has increased [in the Northern Continental Divide Ecosystem] to above a thousand animals. We have 50-odd human caused mortalities in the ecosystem per year, and that number is rising.” He wanted his book to look beyond numbers, into the remarkable story of one of those bears who lived between the worlds of wilderness and human settlement for over a decade.

Millie was named for Millie’s Woods, where she was first trapped and collared near Post Creek. She had discovered a cornfield full of sweet, easy pickings to fatten herself for winter, grown by Greg Schock to feed his dairy cows. Eventually as many as 16 bears were known to be feeding there in late summer, forsaking their traditional high-country food sources. This was a huge financial hit for the Schocks, and getting grizzlies too comfortable around human habitation often ends badly for the bears.

“Chickens and pigs have killed a lot of bears,” Bryce quips, referring to the many that have had to be killed due to unresolvable bear-human conflicts.

As northern field director for People and Carnivores, a small Bozeman-based nonprofit, it is Bryce’s job — and passionate pursuit — to help find and teach practical solutions to reduce conflicts between human beings and large carnivores. Schock’s cornfield became a test site for various electric fencing configurations, which People and Carnivores helped pull funding together for.

Bryce was struck by Millie’s compelling story of living and raising cubs in an ever-conflicted world.

“I thought Millie was an exceptional bear. She crossed these mountains, she lived here and nobody really saw her, she never got into trouble, she managed to live this life. She was a heroic figure in that she triumphed over all these odds.”

“But she was not an exception to the rule,” he realized, especially after seeing maps of where bears had travelled with their GPS collars. “All the bears are doing that. The way animals have to live their lives to survive on this landscape that’s getting more crowded every year, that we zoom through in cars at 70 miles an hour — their life stories are becoming pretty crazy stories of near misses with death, temptations, dangers,” roaming from the remote Mission peaks to farms along the Flathead River. “The second you start thinking about that stuff, you have a lot more respect for those animals, what they’re going through, and how difficult it is for them to survive.” He hoped that sharing Millie’s story, compelling and with a tragic end, could help people understand some of the larger issues facing grizzly bears, and what it takes for them to survive in a changing, crowded west.

Bryce’s eyes light up as he describes the Mission Mountains outside his front door on an Arlee farm. “For the most part, we have a world that has been cropped, settled, domesticated. But right here are huge mountains that are ecologically the same as they have been for thousands of years. These are very rare places.”

Bryce grew up in Seattle, but spent a lot of time working on his godparents’ ranch outside of Billings. After college, he spent a decade first as a ranch hand, then a ranch manager, on large cattle operations, mostly on the edges of big wilderness areas outside Yellowstone and in the Deer Lodge Valley. He then started his own cattle operation outside Missoula. He knows what it takes to live with “difficult” wild animals.

“Most of my practical experience,” Bryce says, “was in keeping cattle alive and healthy in places that had packs of wolves and grizzlies and other predators.”

His first book, “Badluck Way,” told of coming to know wolves and the difficult choices a rancher must make to both respect the wildlife — and wildness — of a place, and yet look out for the cattle.

His work with people and carnivores helps him answer the question for himself and many others, “How do we make a living out here in a way that doesn’t destroy the thing that we all love so much?” His experience as a rancher, and his passion for the wild, made him a perfect fit. He has helped many folks throughout Mission Valley find ways to deter predators from chicken coops, fruit orchards, grain storage bins, gardens, campgrounds, and yes, more corn fields.

Bryce still grazes cattle on his property and has fruit trees. Working to protect predators “doesn’t mean I like agriculture any less,” he says. “It means I just have a chance to focus specifically on the wildlife part of the time.” And writing, of course, with a third book in progress.

“Down From the Mountain” is available at Ninepipes Museum as well as online.