For thirteen summers an American walked unarmed among the grizzlies of the Alaskan coast, gave them names, told the cameras they were his friends, and in October 2003 a bear ate him and his girlfriend while the camera recorded the sound. Timothy Treadwell had been a failed actor and a drunk in California. The bears, he said, saved him. Every summer from 1990 he flew into Katmai National Park, pitched a tent in the middle of the richest bear ground in the world, and lived among them with a video camera and no gun, no fence, no bear spray. He touched them. He swam with them. He sang to them. He told schoolchildren that bears were misunderstood and that fear of them was a fiction, and he became famous for it, with a book and the chat shows and a foundation. The park rangers warned him every year. The native people of the region said what they had always said: that a bear is a bear, that their grandfathers kept their distance and kept their rifles, and that a man who forgets what he is looking at has already lost the argument. In 2003 he stayed late into October, past the time the fat summer bears move off and the hungry old ones arrive before the snow. A twenty-eight-year-old male with worn teeth came into the camp. The camera lens cap was on. The six-minute audio exists and nobody who has heard it describes it. The rangers shot the bear and found the two of them inside it. He had spent thirteen years telling the world that the wild was gentle if you loved it enough. The wild had been listening politely the whole time.