Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Lookingat Animals in America by Jon Mooallem Page B

friend’s grandmother” in the Midwest. Inside the e-mail were Rosing’s photos of the bear and dog, cuddling in a corner of Ladoon’s dog yard. “It’s hard to believe this polar bear only needed to hug someone!” the e-mail read. “May you always have love to share, health to spare, and friends that care.”
    —
    I T WAS A T HURSDAY —Ladoon had forgotten—and that meant that his hired hands, two young guys named Caleb and Jeremy, had run into town to fetch the week’s dog food: thirty-three hundred pounds of frozen chicken necks and by-products. There were slabs of the stuff, each the size of a small tabletop, stacked in the back of the boys’ pickup. It needed to be transferred to Ladoon’s vehicle. They also had a dog to chain back up with the others.
    It was a high-wire act. At one point, as Jeremy stepped out of the truck cradling the dog to his chest, a polar bear began galloping down the road, attracted to the smell of the food, probably, or of the dog. Or of Jeremy. Ladoon had to jerk our vehicle into reverse to intercept it. As he swung my side of the truck in front of the animal, I saw gelatinous ropes of slobber swinging from its mouth. The bear stopped short, groping for another angle. Ladoon only nodded disapprovingly and said, “He’s off the bear-ometer.”
    When it was all done, we returned to the gate and found a blue SUV idling between Ladoon’s chain posts. The driver had slipped through without paying. The same animal that had made a go at Jeremy now stood a few feet away, perched with all four paws contracted under the fat jumble of its body, like a circus animal posing on a barrel. A white-haired woman in the passenger seat was taking pictures of it. I watched as she began to lean through the open window just slightly, extending her lens, then her face, through that last intangible boundary between her space and the bear’s.
    “Who the hell are these guys?” Ladoon said. He was about to scold them when the polar bear straightened up and took a single, vaulting step toward the woman, instantly cutting the distance between them by half. The woman reacted late—very late. I watched her hands flub around under the window for whatever button or crank would shut it.
    Now the bear skirted around to face the SUV head-on. It stood on its two back legs and raised its front paws. Then it leaned forward and fell, its paws thwacking into the hood. “That’s a rental vehicle,” Ladoon said. His voice was perfectly measured, as though he were thinking about only what a headache this would be for the woman who owned Churchill’s rental-car business. And yet Ladoon was simultaneously revving his engine, cranking his pickup into a shuddering W-shaped turn, and hammering his horn.
    The road was so narrow that he had no room to maneuver and scare the animal away. So he gunned straight ahead and kept driving, slapping his hand against the outside of his door to lure the bear and clear the area. Turning quickly, I saw it and another polar bear clomping after us. Then I heard a thud and felt our truck bobble on its suspension.
    One of the bears had hurled itself onto the back of our truck. It was going for the blocks of frozen chicken in the backseat. “He almost got it.” Jeremy laughed. “He got one tooth on it, but slipped!”
    Ladoon fumed. He clearly wanted to do some hollering. But by the time he drove back to the gate to scold the people, the SUV was gone. “These bears aren’t cute,” he later explained. “Look how big these fuckers are! Everybody wants to get close to the bears. Well, there’s a time to get close to the bears and there’s a time to—you know—maybe stay
far away
from the bears.”
    Eventually, I found out who the older woman in the SUV was: Margie Carroll, an ebullient, retired schoolteacher from Georgia who’d come to Churchill to sell copies of her self-published children’s book
Portia Polar Bear’s Birthday Wish.
I met Carroll later, when I was invited to