Yogi the Instructor

Driving through Yellowstone, I watch a black bear stand on her hind legs at the roadside, teaching her cubs to beg. She rises, sways slightly, forepaws lifted in a gesture that tourists find irresistible. This is her curriculum: stand tall, look needy, wait for the windows to roll down.

The cubs aren’t interested. They scramble up a lodgepole pine or dig furiously at the ground, noses pressed to earth, hunting for the pulse of ground squirrels beneath the soil. They’re terrible students, or maybe the only ones paying attention to what the forest is still trying to teach.

The mother has learned what works. Tourists love feeding a large, dangerous animal that acts almost human, almost harmless. Standing upright solves the problem of hunger, at least while the cars keep coming. It’s hard to blame her for accepting terms the road offered. But in her practiced posture I can already see the shape of what happens when the season changes, when the cars thin out, when a body trained to beg must remember how to hunt.

The cubs’ resistance is a small rebellion. They’re rehearsing a different future, one where the forest doesn’t have to perform for us, where wildness doesn’t echo back our expectations. What’s happening here isn’t dramatic. No bulldozers, no fires. Just a roadside lesson, a posture rewarded, an appetite slowly redirected. We’re colonizing their behavior without meaning to, teaching them to see us as a resource instead of a threat.

A bear rising on command. The image tourists take home isn’t an encounter with wildness. It’s evidence of wildness being revised into something easier, cheaper.