Publishers Weekly
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Andrews (Badluck Way), a conservationist and rancher in Montana's Mission Valley, examines dramatic changes in the local bear population, which once "lived a grizzly's solitary life," but now show up regularly near human dwellings searching for food, in his compassionate study. He combines research with experience, paying particular attention to the bears that have recently started frequenting the cornfields near his home in late summer. Becoming hooked on corn intended for cows, the bears fattened up quickly and, "during their hungriest, most aggressive season," started encountering more people, frustrating area farmers to no end. This local story illustrates larger concerns, Andrews says, about how humans and wild animals are increasingly encroaching upon each other's previously separate environments. In the case of the bears, he asks what will happen when they no longer feel the need to forage in the wild. If they encroach even further on local farms and begin to raid backyard chicken coops, "they will almost certainly be shot for doing so in the years that follow." To ensure their survival, Andrews concludes, the bears must modify their behavior to avoid confrontation. Andrews's well-written cautionary tale leaves readers with the sobering message that humans must as well, if they are to be responsible stewards of nature. Agent: Duvall Osteen, Aragi. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Library Journal
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Award-winning author Andrews (People and Carnivores) delves into the lives and habits of grizzly bears in Montana's Mission Valley. Many of these animals have developed a taste for corn, bringing them into close contact with ranchers, farmers, and wildlife biologists in the region resulting in inevitable conflicts between bears and people, and causing bears to abandon their traditional sources of food in the higher mountains. Using private and federal funding, Andrews builds and tests a short electric fence surrounding a local dairy farmer's cornfield to determine if it deters grizzlies. Intertwined with his experiment is the story of Millie, a sow with two cubs, from her birth in the mountains to her death. Andrews attempts to find a home for her two young cubs and follows the federal investigation into the bear's death. With his knowledge of grizzlies, research into bear biology, and Millie's radio collar data, Andrews narrates the story as it might have happened and describes the impact of grizzlies losing their wilderness over time. VERDICT This fascinating, well-researched, and lyrical memoir will appeal to conservationists, those curious about large predators, and readers who relish stories of the West.-Sue O'Brien, Downers Grove, IL © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

As Andrews (Badluck Way, 2014) states near the end of this absorbing tale, the narrative is braided from research, experience, and invention. Coming from a background in ranching, Andrews had a feel for the land and an appreciation for the wild animals sharing the Montana landscape. After growing disenchanted with ranching, he signed on with People and Carnivores, a nonprofit conservation group that mitigates conflicts between people and large predators. It was while he was experimenting with ways to protect a corn field with electric wire that he became aware of Millie, a female grizzly nursing two cubs. What follows is a lyrical exploration of an attempt to accommodate two disparate goals the dairy farmer's need for the corn to feed his cattle and the grizzly's need to eat and fatten up during the short Montana summer. The resulting saga of the fence, the bears, and the cruel tricks fate can play read like a grand Great Plains tragedy in the Faulknerian mode. Andrews' empathic writing turns Millie's story into the embodiment of modern compromise with apex predators.--Nancy Bent Copyright 2019 Booklist

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A thoughtful story of bears, humans, and their tragic interactions."Mouse-brown fur covered their strangely human bodies. Their eyes opened, seeing nothing for a time, then spring's white light." Montana-based conservationist Andrews (Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West, 2013) writes without sentimentality or undue anthropomorphizing of a pair of grizzly cubs whose mother, Millie, was brutally murdered, leaving the cubs orphaned and helpless. "Millie's storybothered everyone who heard about it," writes Andrews, having told an elegant story in which he himself encountered the trio. As a conservationist, he is in full sympathy with the bears; as someone living on the land, he recognizes the perils for all concerned when bears, hungry in a landscape with less and less game on it, come down into the cornfields below the high country. "My father asked what I thought about the farmer growing corn so close to the mountains," writes the author. "I said that it was complicated." Andrews introduces readers to numerous men and women who figure in the quest both to track down the poachers involved and to keep the cubs alive. One, the game warden for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, is a quiet warrior for the bears even as others demand that they be kept away from human settlements. As the author notes, the collision course was set not just by hunger, but also by the ever encroaching human presence, even in vast Montana, and on a changing climate in which spring arrives a full month earlier than it did half a century ago, altering the long-established schedules of bears and people alike. In the end, Andrews writes, dispiritingly, "it seems that I could spend a lifetime building cornfield fences, worrying over cubs, and shipping elk meat to Maryland, and make no headway against our epidemic lack of restraint."A gem of environmental writing fitting alongside the work of Doug Peacock, Roger Caras, and other champions of wildlife and wild land. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.