The Grizzly Maze
by Nick Jans
(Dutton) $24.95

Timothy Treadwell was eaten by a bear in October of 2003. This did not come as a surprise to anyone who knew him, and it probably did not, in his final moments, come entirely as a shocker to Treadwell either. For 13 years, he'd been spending his summers on Alaska's Katmai Coast, singing and babytalking to the grizzlies, trying to become accepted as one of their own. He'd become a minor celebrity—pushing his own atrocious book, Among Grizzlies, on the Late Show with David Letterman and other talk shows—so his death inspired a spate of media attention and, now, The Grizzly Maze by Nick Jans, a book that masterfully addresses Treadwell's life and death.

Although The Grizzly Maze is not the first book on the subject to be published (see Stranger Suggests, p. 23), it's by far the best—Jans is a sensible, solid writer. Adventure narratives usually drip with clichés, and while Jans doesn't always avoid the traps—"What were [Treadwell's] hopes, fears, and dreams?"—he generally shuns histrionics and adopts a chatty, unguarded tone that evokes a beer-buzzed nature guide. A reader can feel Jans's jaw clench with vicarious embarrassment as he describes some of Treadwell's antics—for example, the anecdotal sightings of Treadwell wandering the woods in a tuxedo and performing a flamboyant fan dance for an intended audience of none—but the book never lifts its human subject to the role of hero or martyr. Treadwell frequently made claims that he was protecting bears from poachers, and even started a nonprofit to advance this cause, but Jans flatly points out that Treadwell was doing his work on federal park land, in a region where poaching was practically nonexistent.

The book's attention to detail in describing fatal bear attacks is encyclopedic, but rendered intense by the calm journalism. There is no schlocky TV-dramatization cheese here. Jans spends the last chapter of the book explaining how not to get eaten by a bear, a comprehensive guide that seems a little out of place in a narrative that is all about an untrained schmuck who seemingly went out of his way to get eaten. But the information does provide, unwittingly, a sense of empathy with Treadwell: Bear researchers' studies have proven so contradictory (grizzlies are likely to splinter every bone in your body, but not eat you, black bears are likely to kill, but less likely to attack initially, but even so, a grizzly mother is much more likely to kill you than a black bear mother, and so on) that prayer begins to seem like a statistically viable defense against the beasts.

Jans also shows a flair for the literary, especially when facing the true shame of the Treadwell attacks: Treadwell also caused the death of sometime girlfriend Amie Huguenard, and the deaths of the two bears who were shot by rangers and troopers recovering Treadwell and Huguenard's remains. Jans makes his furthest-reaching speculations—and does some of his most touching writing—on the nature of Huguenard's relationship with Treadwell, positing that while she was in love with him, he had only bigger, hairier mammals in mind: Huguenard "is the one fated to meet her end alone," while Treadwell, "in the best 19th-century folk song tradition, will indeed die in the arms of his own true love."

The Grizzly Maze typifies, and perhaps culminates, a genre of nature writing that has increased in popularity over the last decade: the story of the Nature-Loving Idiot. Jon Krakauer made his fortune with these stories, most purely with his Into the Wild, a story of a woefully unprepared young man who died an unnecessarily stupid death in the Alaskan forest. Though the most damning fact of Treadwell's legacy is that he has made the Katmai grizzlies more likely to approach humans (and has made certain humans far more likely to approach bears: the number of bear-sighting tours since Treadwell took up shop in Katmai increased from 20 to 69), he is also, in my mind, the crown prince in the what-could-possibly-go-wrong- in-the-forest genre. Perhaps the biggest shock in Jans's book is that he doesn't take the Krakauer approach of lionizing Treadwell, turning him into a rebel-with-a-fictional-cause.

This book, unlike the inevitable Oscar-spearing biopic that will probably be out in five years starring Owen Wilson in his first "serious" role, does at least give Treadwell the dignity that he never really requested or earned, by respecting him for what he was: an out-of-work actor whose long parade of a death wish ended, unsurprisingly, in the first documented bear-assisted suicide on record. Rather than publishing the cockeyed legend, Jans somehow found the near-pathological liar in the belly of the human beast, and made him flesh and bone again, as brilliant a feat as any I've encountered in the genre for years. ■