Bear Costume

Tick, tick, tick went the wristwatch found by Willy Fulton.

This is not a story about Willy Fulton, though, or about the wristwatch. Part of it's about the long and westward journey of the wristwatch's owner, a recovering drug addict from Long Island who'd long ago dropped out of college to attain the familiar, and familiarly unattainable, Hollywood dream. Part of the story is about how he failed to make that dream a reality, and instead arrived at stardom in a more roundabout way—that is, sprinting naked along the Alaskan riversides to ward off the floatplanes, which Willy Fulton often flew.

More than anything else, though, this is a story about shapeshifting.

It's also a love story.

It was mid-autumn, 2003. The ice hadn't yet reached Hallo Bay, nestled across from Kodiak Island on Alaska's southeastern coast. But it wouldn't be long. The mass exodus of migrating things was tapering off to a last-minute few, no more blankets of wings rustling over the whole sky. What stayed behind would slide into the long sleep that mimics dying, like the little brown bat in its little snug spaces, and the arctic ground squirrel burrowed three feet deep, and the bears.

It was hard to believe that months earlier, the backdrop to this scene was drenched in a green so loud as to silence all else, and so big that that's what people called it: the Big Green. A solid if uncreative choice, as well as a unique honor—it was just one savannah on the Wales-sized expanse of Katmai National Park, where it was impressive to be named anything at all; many of the mountains had been given no such distinction. Why go to the trouble, and for whom?

The wristwatch, still running, eventually made its way into the hands of a woman named Jewel. "Oh, wow," she said. She fastened the gift around her wrist and admired its refractions of light. Tick, tick, tick. It shone clean as a bone.

There are the stories that begin at beginnings because they might as well, and there are the stories that begin at their chronological endings because we don't know how else to tell them. The ending to this story was written long before most of it even happened, like an earthquake or falling in love, and it was simply a matter of waiting for time to catch up. So said the park rangers and the naturalists and the native people, anyway, whose opinions ranged from the critical to the downright cruel but who all echoed the same basic refrain. David Letterman predicted it, too. On his show, the crowd went wild.

It happened. It did. And maybe the world was right in repeating that it was always going to. But the happening of it took so much longer than most anyone, in the beginning, would have thought—thirteen summers, the defiant authority of each new year snowballing into something resembling heft. Some of the story's fringe followers, like Leonardo DiCaprio and Gisele Bündchen, were beautiful and important enough to lend the story a sense of beauty and importance, too. Letterman hosted an encore special one year after his prediction failed to pass, and two years before it did.

If this story didn't have to begin at the end, those who retold it could weave in suspense like a string pulled taut. They could pluck it like a chord. Who doesn't love a great underdog story, a story that proves the world wrong? Would the owner of the wristwatch succeed in demonstrating, for the experts and the Lettermans and the roaring crowds, that danger is just another word for alien, and that transcending this alienation is the only way to patch a broken world back together? Would the world hear his call for wonder and empathy toward all creatures, be they great or formidable or small?

No. It wouldn't. Because in the end, Timothy Treadwell—that was the man's name, the name he gave himself—was eaten by a bear. His girlfriend...