This book is set in an area six miles north of Grand Marais, Minnesota, a small town on the Gun Flint Trail, or State Highway 61, if you prefer.  The highway parallels the Lake Superior shoreline with a narrow strip of woods and beaches between. It lies some forty miles southwest of the Canadian border, about ninety miles northeast of Duluth. The most striking thing about Grand Marais to most of its tourists and visitors would be the rich solitude of the forested wilderness that extends north, east and west from its cold Lake Superior beaches.

The Grand Marais area holds a few personal memories for me. On a return trip from Canada a few miles from the town one summer evening I was passing a pair of slower automobiles. BANG! A panicked look in the rear view mirror revealed a deer spinning on its side in the lane behind us. She had been attempting to cross from the lake woods to the larger wilderness and had run into the side of our truck. It was two miles farther before we could get off the road to survey the damage (which to the truck was major and to the deer, fatal).

I also remember reading in the national news about the death of a huge legendary bull moose, Elmer I believe the locals called him, killed in that area. The point is that the area is wild, populated with a few people, but with many wolves, moose, deer and bear as well. It took the happy confluence of this type of area with a family like the Becklunds to produce a book like Summers With The Bears.

Soon after moving into their new home there, Jack and Patti Becklund befriended a lone bear cub. They named her “Little Bit,” and over the next several summers, in a sense, "grew up" with her and well more than a dozen of her fellow bears. The people grew to know and love the bears and most of the bears returned the favor. In this book Becklund has documented their relationships with a generous helping of intimate photographs and considerable talent as a journalist and writer.

As explained at the outset of this review, having the room, i.e., expanse of habitat with limited encroachment by non-friendly humans, would be an absolute requisite to making friends with wild bears. And that is certainly not a universally available luxury any more. I have to confess that most of my own encounters with black bears have been of a confrontational nature, although I have often thought that it would be more satisfying to be able to make friends with them. As I read through the book, becoming acquainted with the development of their differing personalities, I experienced an opening up to these animals much as one would to a varied group of family canines in a warmly related story.

Seeing a grown bear sitting with her legs through the railings of the deck, leaning to lovingly nuzzle her human companion, is quite a remarkable sight. It is even more startling when one realizes that this bear and the many others that cavort about the yard have never in their lives been restrained.                      

The revelation of each trait for each individual bear, after the telling, is what I might have expected from that particular bear. In essence, I felt a warm empathy for them and suffice it to say, I probably will never look at black bears in the same way as I did before reading Summers With The Bears.

If you are a nature lover, if you have any fascination for bears, if you wonder if there might be a better relationship between bears and humans, or if you would just like to enjoy a well-written, heart-warming story of affection and adventure, I can heartily recommend this book.    

© 2007 R. Leland Waldrip