On one night in August 1967, two young women were killed by grizzly bears in Glacier National Park. They were miles apart. They were killed by different bears. Before that night, no grizzly had ever killed anyone in the park.
Lauren Tarshis drops a made up eleven year old into that summer. Melody Vega has come to Glacier with her family every year of her life, except this is the first year without her mother, and the park she loved is now a place full of the wrong memories. Then she meets a bear.
It is book seventeen in the series, it is a short paperback, and it is $4.99.
The science it actually teaches
Here is why it earns a place on the Stealth Science shelf, and it is not "bears are dangerous." It is a chain of cause and effect that took about twenty years to run, and prose is the right shape for a chain.
Start with the nose. A grizzly is run by its sense of smell more than by anything else. It works a valley by odor, and any smell that reliably means food becomes a place on a map the animal will go back to.
Now the distinction the whole event turns on. A habituated bear is one that has stopped reacting to people. It has seen a thousand of them and none of them mattered. A food conditioned bear is something else. It has learned that people mean a meal. The first is a bear that ignores you. The second is a bear that comes looking.
In the 1960s, lodgings in and around the park put their food waste out where bears came to it, night after night, and people gathered to watch them feed. That was considered part of the visit. A generation of bears grew up being paid, every single evening, for walking toward buildings and toward the smell of people.
Underneath that sits the calendar. Late summer is the eating month. Before winter a grizzly spends nearly all its waking hours feeding and puts on an enormous amount of weight, and in a year when the wild food is thin, a bear with a known reliable source will take the known source.
Then the part a child can actually reason with. Two attacks, two bears, two places, one night. Nothing linked those bears to each other. What linked them was how people had been living in that valley, and when two separate events share a cause that large, coincidence is the wrong answer.
The park changed afterward. Dumps closed, food storage got rules, and feeding wildlife stopped being a thing a visitor was allowed to enjoy. In bear country people say that a fed bear is a dead bear, and that is not a slogan about being kind to animals. It is a description of what happens next.
The graphic novel edition of this same story sits on our shelf too, and it teaches the other half of this: what a bear's body is telling you when it is thirty feet away. This note is about the cause. That one is about the encounter.
The child it lands with
A child who asks why. Not the one who wants the frightening part, the one who wants the reason under the frightening part, and who will sit still for a twenty year answer.
A child already moving through this series fast enough that you have started buying them two at a time.
And a child who lives where this matters. Mine do. Food storage is a chore in this house the way taking out the trash is a chore in other houses, and a book that explains the reason for the chore does more than being told again.
Not for a child who is currently frightened of the dark, or of camping, or who has a trip planned in three weeks. Wait until after the trip.
One place to stop and talk
Stop at the garbage. Not at the attack.
The question is not what the bear did. The question is what the bear had learned, and who taught it, and how long the lesson took. Let your child answer that one out loud before the book answers it for them.
What to know going in
Two real people died. Both were nineteen years old, both were named, and the book is built on their deaths even though its main character is invented and survives. Julie Helgeson and Michele Koons. Your child should hear those names from you rather than absorb the night as a monster story.
The attacks are on the page. Tarshis writes them for a nine year old, so they are not gory, but they are frightening on purpose and they are meant to be.
Melody's mother is dead before page one, and the grief is not decoration. It is most of why she behaves the way she does, and if you have a recent loss in your house, read it first.
Two more things. This is fiction wrapped around a real night, and a child will finish it believing they know what happened, so tell them plainly which parts were made up. And do not let a novel be your bear safety training. If you are going into bear country, get the current rules from the people who manage that ground.
Where to get it
It is $4.99 at I Survived the Attack of the Grizzlies, 1967, which is the least expensive book I have written up on this shelf and, for a child who likes animals, one of the easiest yeses.
Numbering does not matter in this series. Seventeen is not a sequel to sixteen and nothing carries over, so this can be the first one your child owns.
The one decision worth making before you click. The same story exists as a graphic novel, at more than twice the price. If your child reads prose willingly, buy this one. Buy the drawn one instead, not as well, if prose is where they stall.
If your child liked this one
Books we have written about that sit close to this one, by reading level and by subject.
California Wildfires, 2018: A Fire Starts Years Early
I Survived the California Wildfires, 2018 (I Survived #20) by Lauren Tarshis
Grade 2 to 5
The Dust Bowl, 1935: Drought Was Not the Disaster
I Survived the Dust Bowl, 1935 (I Survived #25) by Lauren Tarshis
Grade 2 to 5
California Wildfires, 2018 in Panels: How Fire Moves
I Survived the California Wildfires, 2018 (I Survived Graphic Novel #13) by Lauren Tarshis
Grade 2 to 5
Hurricane Katrina, 2005: Why They Could Not Leave
I Survived Hurricane Katrina, 2005 (I Survived Graphic Novel #6) by Lauren Tarshis
Grade 2 to 5
Browse every book we have written about by age, by kind of book and by subject: Find the right book for your child. Or see the whole Stealth Science shelf.
