What the Bears Know by Steve Searles and Chris Erskine

What the Bears Know: How I Found Truth and Magic in America's Most Misunderstood Creatures
by Steve Searles & Chris Erskine
Pegasus Books 2023

This new book by “bear whisperer” Steve Searles (and Chris Erskine), What the Bears Know: How I Found Truth and Magic in America's Most Misunderstood Creatures, is an odd little construction, at once charming and misleading. Searles is an autodidact expert whose mission is to introduce more compassionate and scientifically informed methods of dealing with the black bear population of Mammoth Lakes, California, striving through a combination of charisma and advocacy to temper the “shoot them all” mentality that seems to have been endemic in California and elsewhere for well over a century. Searles is therefore in a perfect position to share that charisma and advocacy with a broader reading audience.

But What the Bears Know most often prefers to lay on the charisma and stint on the advocacy. True, Searles has some advice for dealing with the bears that are increasingly interacting with human communities. “Tip number 1: Bonfires don't keep bears away; they just provide ambient lighting for their free meal,” he mentions, for instance. “The bears know that campfires indicate that generous humans, with a carload of Twinkies and marshmallows, have arrived to party.”

But mostly Searles wants to regale readers with his stories of being a star. He tells his readers about leading around a camera crew from the Today show, for example:

That night, with the packed into my Land Cruiser, I drive them to a nearby restaurant where the bins have yet to be secured. As they watch with widening eyes, I rev the engine and plow my five-seat Toyota right into the side of a dumpster. Bam! As I sit calmly watching, a bear flies out of the dumpster, as I knew he would, and trampolines off the hood of the vehicle and off to the side.

“The NBC crew is gasping for breath,” he finishes up, “their eyes as big as saucers: Whoa!”

There are a lot of whoa moments in this book, and they get a little annoying, even when they're balanced with the author's very evocative moments, such as when the decision is finally made to kill a problem bear named Blondie. Searles feels a connection with Blondie and tries to guarantee she dies a quick, merciful death. When it doesn't happen, her death cries stay with the author:

The dying cry of a rabbit, a deer, a bear carries a haunting, nearly human anguish. And we hear these death moans with our human ears. Doesn't matter what line of work you're in, whether you're used to it or not, that sorrow goes straight to your gut.

This is effective stuff, and there isn't enough of it in What the Bears Know. But there isn't enough of bears either – this is as far from either a natural history or an ecological account of Ursus americanus as you can get. It's bear-flavored, certainly, but from first to last it's the Steve Searles Show.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News