This is not to say that bears are not dangerous. On average, one person is killed by a bear in Alaska every year, and five or six more are injured. Two thirds of the victims are hunters who surprised a bear in thick brush. Such “defensive” attacks occur when a startled bear responds to something it perceives as a threat, or a female bear feels her cubs are at risk, or an animal is defending a source of food such as a moose kill. The victims of defensive attacks are often clawed or bitten badly, but the attack usually ceases when the bear believes the threat has been eliminated. “Playing dead” by not resisting can be an effective method of surviving a defensive onslaught. attacks, when a bear actively targets a human as prey. Predacious attacks seldom occur spontaneously and are usually presaged by escalating aggression; the bear may circle, move in, retreat, then return again, as if probing its target or working up the nerve to attack. A bear’s becoming increasingly less responsive to the shouts, pot banging, gunshots, or other loud noises that would usually repel it is a hallmark of an impending predatory event. In the past ten years I had lost two friends to grizzlies, but in spite of this I knew that predatory attacks are in truth extremely rare; after forty years in Alaska, I could count the number of purely predacious attacks I knew of on the fingers of one hand. As a spokesman for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game once noted, with thirty thousand brown bears roaming the state and more than a hundred thousand black bears, “if bears really wanted to eat people, they would . . . We’d lose somebody every day.” Nonetheless, I kicked the rudder to the side and dipped the paddle to swing the kayak back alongside the boat, then grabbed the bowline and hoisted myself out to retrieve the bear spray.