Hunters in Montana have long cherished and celebrated the five-week duration of rifle season, with all its drama of varying weather conditions. The difference between late October and late November is almost always significant.

Other differences? There are more of us in the hills, and more of us in the state, as some might have noticed, these last couple of years. Maybe a fifth of a million more. It’s unclear how many more will be carrying firearms, but being a lover of wild places, I find myself considering the likelihood that some not-insignificant number of those will be going up into Montana’s mountains for the first time. For such hunters — as well as for long-experienced hunters — the most dangerous moment will be in a car or truck. The second-most dangerous element, the weather. But a negative encounter with a bear makes news, as do encounters with lightning and other extreme statistical anomalies.

Living in a valley — the Yaak — with, according to U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service’s (USFWS) 10-year rolling average, only three remaining female grizzlies-with-cubs, I’m deeply aware that even a single instance of a hunter killing a bear is enough to tip this population (classified by USFWS as the “least resilient” in North America) into certain extinction.

This is the time of year when grizzlies — vulnerable already in these days of climate change — face their greatest risks yet. Mistaken identity by legal hunters, as well as by legions of “road hunters,” can create a congested matrix through which bears (ironically attracted to roadside gut piles that are the residue of roadhunting) must pass during these last weeks before they enter, in theory, the refugia of hibernation.

Other mortalities among grizzlies include conflicts with hunters who may not yet understand that grizzlies and other animals, in addition to possessing extremely sophisticated sense of smell, realize full well the dinner-bell implications of a rifleshot.

Perhaps most tragic of all unnecessary grizzly bear losses are those shot by a hiker or hunter who, despite having availability to bear spray, chooses to discharge a firearm into a bear that has frightened the hiker or hunter. Bear spray — co-developed over 40 years ago by Missoula’s Dr. Chuck Jonkel — protects people as well as grizzlies. (It’s frankly repulsive to come across recreationists on a mid-summer or hunting-season hike, wearing camo shorts and t-shirts and carrying a 9mm Beretta in a sports bra, clearly itching to be able to use it. And the disparity between the countenance of bristling bravado and the true fear factor in those individuals is a divide so vast as to be almost incomprehensible. Gone, it seems, is the courage of Victorian grandmother-hikers in Glacier Park in the 1800s who went for walks armed with but an umbrella.)

One of the great delights of hunting season is the heightened sense of awareness experienced by hunters. One is mindful of wind direction, background creek sound, and every other factor the body can screen. More than one grizzly has been shot by a hunter for the mere transgression of standing up. A standing bear is not a threat. For one thing, it’s not running, is simply taking in more information; has quite possibly decided already it wants to leave, and with dignity, but just wants to see what’s what. To happen upon a standing bear is essentially to have already been handed a get-out-of-jail-free card. Like ancient old and mature forests in places like the Yaak — carbon-storing miracles across the centuries — an upright bear, like a giant tree, is worth more standing.

Carry bear spray this year, whether newcomer to the woods or old mountain man. It’s a Montana tradition.

Rick Bass is interim director of the Yaak Valley Forest Council and a board member of Save the Yellowstone Grizzly.

Photo courtesy of Brad Orsted