I'm out in the prime cut of the big green.
Behind me is Ed and Rowdy,
members of an up and coming sub-adult gang.
They're challenging everything including me.
Goes with the territory.
If I show weakness, if I retreat,
I may be hurt, I may be killed.
I must hold my own if I'm gonna stay within this land.
For once there is weakness they will exploit it, they will take me out, they will decapitate me,
they will chop me into bits and pieces.
I'm dead.
But so far I persevere.
Persevere.
Most times I'm a kind warrior out here.
Most times I am gentle, I am like a flower,
I'm like a fly on the wall,
observing, non-committal, non-invasive in any way.
Occasionally I am challenged, and in that case the kind warrior
must, must, must become a samurai,
must become so...
So formidable,
so fearless of death, so strong,
that he will win, he will win.
Even the bears will believe that you are more powerful,
and in a sense you must be
more powerful if you are to survive in this land with the bear.
No one knew that.
No one ever friggin' knew
that there are times when my life is on the precipice of death
and that these bears can bite, they can kill.
And if I am weak I go down.
I love them with all my heart, I will protect them,
I will die for them, but I will not die at their claws and paws.
I will fight, I will be strong. I'll be one of them.
I will be the master.
But still a kind warrior.
Love you, Rowdy.
Give it to me, baby.
That's what I'm talking about. That's what I'm talking about.
I can smell death all over my fingers.
Herzog All these majestic creatures were filmed by Timothy Treadwei!
who lived among wild grizz/Ies for 13 summers.
He went to remote areas of the Alaskan peninsula
believing that he was needed there to protect these animate
and educate the public.
During his fast five years out there,
he took along a video camera and shot over 100 hours of footage.
What Treadwett intended was to show these bears in their natural habitat,.
Having myself filmed in the wilderness of jungles,
I found that beyond a wildlife film,
in his material lay dormant a story of astonishing beauty and depth.
1 discovered a film of human ecstasies and darkest inner turmoil.
As I? there was a desire in him
to leave the confinements of his humanness and bond with the bears,
Treadwefl reached out seeking a primordial encounter.
But in doing so he crossed an invisible borderline.
Go back and play.
Go back. Go back.
Go back.
This is a sub-adult, and this is what happens to them.
They work together and they get really powerful.
As you see, I'm just feet away.
I have now proven myself
as being able to hold my ground and therefore earning their respect.
He's now moving away from me.
This is Rowdy the bear, and he's rowdy.
He's getting bigger and...
Knew him from he was a little, little dot a couple years ago.
He's getting to be a big boy. Anyway, we're doing just fine.
But that was a challenge,
and you have to remain cool in the challenge, in the moment.
If you don't, you're dead.
They can kill, they can bite.
They can decapitate.
Excuse me.
Hey-
Hey!
It's OK. It's OK, ifs OK.
I didn't mean to get in your way.
Wow.
It's OK. You're the boss.
Nice job.
Wow, nice job.
I kind of think he was over 10 feet high, don't you?
Whoo, he's a big bear.
He's a big bear.
A very big bear.
Wow.
Huh. Anyway, he was over here rub-a-dub-dubbing.
He's a big bear!
The excitement Treadwell felt connected him immediately with children.
In his campaign to create awareness
he reached thousands and thousands of school children
who would remember his fabulous story telling
as one of the highlights of their school years.
He took his mission so seriously that he never solicited for a fee.
Over time, he reached the status of a national celebrity.
Man} Timothy Treadwefl is crazy about grizzly bears.
How crazy? Sometimes.“...
It was as if he had become a star by virtue of his own invention.
I would be within the physical presence of bears
24 hours a day for months at a time.
This is crazy.
This is nuts.
These are the most dangerous animals on the face of the earth.
And you want to go and put yourself in harm's way 24 hours a day.
I think they've been misunderstood.
How can I believe that if you are about to be killed by a bear
that you wouldn't say, "Oh, I made a mistake. I'd like to have a gun."
I would never ever kill a bear in the defence of my own life.
I would not go into a bear's home and kill a bear.
One day,
I came home and I was sitting on my patio,
and my wife was in the bedroom with the TV on.
And I heard her scream.
And I thought she'd fallen or something,
and I came in and she was
sitting on the edge of the bed staring at the television.
And I looked at the television,
and I saw Timmy's face.
And I hadn't heard the sound or the news yet, but I knew just by seeing Timmy's face on TV
and hearing my wife's reaction that the worst had happened.
Not necessarily a surprise,
but the worst.
1 never have days when I grieve for Timmy as 1 have with other friends who have died.
They feel dead.
Timmy doesn't feel dead.
This is the last photo of Timothy Treadwe/I.
It was taken at the beginning of his thirteenth summer
in the wilds of Alaska.
With him is Amie Huguenard who would die by his side.
The man who took the photo was VVi/Iy Fulton,
a close friend of Timothy's and the pilot who would bring him
to this remote pan of the Alaskan peninsula.
Treadwe/I saw himself as the guardian of this land
and stylised himself as Prince Valiant,
fighting the bad guys with their schemes to do harm to the bears.
But all this land is a federally protected reserve,
part of Katmai National Park.
This big plain Treadwell called the Sanctuary.
Here he would spend the early summer months
before moving along some 35 miles
to this densely overgrown area which he cal/ed the Grizzly Maze,
where he would observe the late summer salmon run.
It was here that Fulton would pick him up in the fall.
On October 6th last year, this is the spot here
at Kaflia Lake where I pulled in to pick up Tim and Amie.
A typical day out here, rain, foggy, a lot of wind and...
fl was kind of stranger.
Didn't see him, didn't hear anything.
There's no gear on the beach or anything, you know,
so I tied up and I started yelling a little bit.
Tim, you know, Amie and,
no answer, and I caught a little tiny bit of movement up on the hills.
So, I'm like, well, you know, it was windy,
maybe they just couldn't hear me or something,
so I decided I'd go up in the camp,
you know, and see what was going on, and headed off up through the alders.
It's kind of a thick trail up into camp there, and...
Got about three-quarters of the way up the hill
and something just didn't feel right at all, you know?
Something was, something seemed strange.
And I'm yelling and no answer or anything,
so I turned around and started coming back down the trail,
a pretty good clip I guess.
I was kind of trotting along,
and as I got in the thickest part of the alders right here...
As I got near the aeroplane I just happened to turn around,
and I turned around and looked, and...
Pretty nasty-looking bear that I had seen here before
is just sneaking slow with his head down,
just the meanest looking thing, you know, coming through the brush.
And so I jumped on the aeroplane real quick
and untied it and took off, turned around, flew over,
over camp there, and...
Just looked down and saw a human rib cage,
you know, that I knew had to be either Tim or Amie laying there,
and, he was just eating that,
and as I...
So I circled around again, got really low
and tried to run him off just over and over again with the aeroplane.
And every time I would come over,
he'd just start eating faster and faster and crouch over this,
this rib cage there, and,
and, right at that time I...
I just realised, "Wow," you know,
I was pretty close to getting eaten myself, is what I thought,
and this shot of adrenalin like I've never had
just came over me and my throat went,
couldn't breathe, my face went numb, my arms and legs went numb,
and then I called back to the office
and told them what happened out here,
what I thought had happened and that we would need
some assistance out here, that we had some problems.
After the park service arrived,
then I'm leading them up through the alders here.
This is the same trail that I'd come up the first time,
and we got to about right here and we just stopped, you know,
and we stopped just to take a look around
and right then one guy with us just yells, "Bear!"
And they all spin around,
these gun barrels come over the top of my head,
and, boy, they just start firing it off,
and I ducked down cos they hadn't given me a gun.
I'd look up and then they fire over and over again,
and then I look up when they're done firing
and there's just a cloud of smoke here, you know,
and I look over and the bear is laying right there.
They're yelling at me, “Just don't go near the bear."
And I knew he was dead.
He'd been shot in the head and the neck and everywhere,
and he was just laying here pretty much lifeless
and this is right where...
Where the bear... And I told them at the time,
I said this is the bear that killed Tim.
I knew cos that was the same bear that I had seen down here looking at me,
right through the alder bushes there, so I knew this was the bear.
I said, "Yep, that'll be the one," you know,
and that wound up being the bear that they found Tim in.
I'm here on camera with Ollie the big old bear, and the big old grumpy bear.
He just took Cracker out of the creek area.
There's not a lot of fish here,
so you could understand him wanting to have control of the creek,
but he's acting like an alpha male here,
which I guess, for the fact that he is the only male here,
he is the alpha male.
At any rate, he's also, he's a surly bear.
I met him on the path the other day after feeling sorry for him, thinking that he
was a bit thin, a bit gaunt.
And he promptly charged me with the intent to probably strike.
I know the language of the bear.
I was able to deter him from doing that, and I'm fine.
But I will tell you something,
it is the old bear, one who is struggling for survival,
and an aggressive one at that,
who's the one that you must be very careful of,
for these are the bears that on occasion do, for survival, kill and eat humans.
Could Ollie the big old bear possibly kill and eat Timothy Treadwell?
What do you think, Ollie?
I think if you were weak around him,
you're going down his gullet, going down the pipe.
Right up top of the hill here is where we found
what was left of Tim's body, his head and a little bit of backbone
attached, then we found...
A hand, arm, wristwatch still on the arm.
I remember the watch and, shoot, I can remember the watch,
and here's a guy that,
used to dive in the lake down here naked to scare the aeroplanes away
and here now I'm finding his watch and arm on top of the hill.
And then here's about all that's left of the bear that killed him.
A few pieces of rib bone.
This bear was shot
and drug off and eaten by other bears here, right in this area.
The tough thing out of all this is Tim would have never wanted
to see any bears killed.
Even if they had killed him, he would have been happy if
nobody found him, nobody found any remains,
nobody found his camp or anything.
He would have been perfectly content.
He definitely lived on the edge, you know, but he...
He was a little smarter than everyone gave him credit for.
He made it out here a long time before they caught up with him,
and actually the bear that wound up killing him was a...
Just a dirty, rotten bear that he didn't like anyway, you know,
and he wanted to be friends with but never happened.
I want to introduce you to one of the key role players in this year's expedition.
The bear's name is the Grinch.
The Grinch has come onto be one of the more frequent bears here in the Grizzly Maze.
The Grinch is a female of about five years of age.
Oh, hi, Grinch. Hi.
And she has kind of an aggressive attitude.
Hi.
If I turn around too much she'll bite me.
It's OK. Hi, how are you?
How are you?
Don't you do that.
Don't you do that!
Back off.
Don't do it.
It's OK. I love you.
I love you. I love you. I love you.
I love you. I'm sorry.
I'm Sam Egli.
I was called out as a helicopter pilot to assist
on the clean-up after the Treadwell tragedy of last winter.
I was in there the morning the fish and game officers were there
examining the bear that had done the killing.
The bear was all cut open, it was full of people, it was full of clothing.
It was, we hauled away four garbage bags
of people out of that bear.
Um...
Treadwell was, I think, meaning well, trying to do things
to help the resource of the bears,
but to me he was acting like...
Like he was working with people wearing bear costumes out there
instead of wild animals.
Those bears are big and ferocious, and they come equipped to kill you and eat you
and that's just what Treadwell was asking for.
He got what he was asking for, he got what he deserved in my opinion.
The tragedy of it was taking the girl with him.
I think the only reason that Treadwell lasted as long in the game as he did
was that the bears probably thought there was something wrong with him,
like he was mentally retarded or something.
Um...
That bear I think that day decided
that he had either had enough of Tim Treadwell
or that something clicked in that bear's head
that he thought, "Hey, you know, he might be good to eat."
My opinion, t think Treadweh thought these bears
were big, scary-looking, harmless creatures that he could go up and pat
and sing to and they would...
Look at that little bear.
...bond as children of the universe or some odd.
I think he had lost sight of what was really going on.
He wanted to become like the bear.
Perhaps it was religious, but not in the true sense of religion.
I think perhaps he wanted to mutate into a wild animal
as he says in this last letter.
He says, "I have to mutually mutate into a wild animal to handle the life I live out here."
And I think there's a religious sense in that,
in the sense of connecting so deeply that you're no longer human.
And that is a religious experience.
Here's another example.
"There are many times that I feel death is the best option.
“My work would be much more seriously looked at
"and possibly make the difference that, in living, I can't do."
And I think that was sort of a paradox for him,
that he felt not worthy enough to get his message across at times,
and so maybe in the drama of death his message would be more poignant
and reach out to more people.
But his message stirred a lot of controversy.
The Gaedes' have collected thousands of angry letters.
I can read you some of...
I picked out three of these, vitriolic hate mails.
They cover the gamut.
"Stereotypical environmentalist.
"Just as long as the donations keep coming,
"furthering the anti-human eco religion as a noble cause.
“Who cares about reality?"
And the very idea that Timothy made a lot of money
doing what he did is absolutely preposterous,
cos he's one of the poorest people we knew.
Another one.
"A bear diet consists of liberals and dems..." Meaning democrats.
"A bear diet consists of liberals and dems and whacko environmentalists
"that think the spotted owl is the most important thing in the world.
"We need to somehow drastically increase the number of bears in America,
"especially in such key spots as the Berkley campus."
I too would like to step in here in his defence,
not as an ecologist, but as a filmmaker.
He captured such glorious improvised moments,
the likes of which the studio directors with their union crews can never dream of.
OK.
What are you doing up there? That's where you're sitting?
There. Come.
Go.
Come.
Come on, come on.
Come on.
Come on home.
Come on.
Hi.
Hey, you little champion.
Hi.
How are you? You're such a good champion.
Now get up there and guard that tent.
Well, I'm here with one my favourite bears, it's Mr Chocolate.
Hi, Mr Chocolate.
He is the star of many people across the country,
children, people, adults, and we're here in the Grizzly Sanctuary,
but I'm wrapping up my work here in the Grizzly Sanctuary. Why is that?
Because I'm on my way to the Grizzly Maze where bears do not have human protection,
but are under human threat.
Bears like Aunt Melissa, bears like Demon, Hatchet, Downey and Tabitha,
and it's time for me to go to protect them.
I wish I could bring Mr Chocolate with me.
You'd be great protection there.
He's been with me for over a decade, and he's been my good friend,
and I really appreciate it. Thank you, Mr Chocolate.
I'll see you again next year.
No, I'll see him again at expedition.
End of this expedition. I'll be back here to join you again.
Back with Mr Chocolate.
But first, it's off to the exciting and often dangerous Grizzly Maze.
Hence) Now the scene seems to be over,
but as a filmmaker, sometimes things fall into your lap
which you couldn't expect, never even dream of.
Hi, Spirit.
There is something like an inexplicable magic of cinema.
Hi, Spirit.
Well, I'm here with...
With Mr Chocolate and Spirit the fox, and here comes some of her pups, yay.
Comes some of her pups.
Hi.
Hi, Spirit.
Hi, Spirit. Hello, baby.
Coming down.
What are you doing to that hat?
Where's that hat going?
Hey, whds stealing that hat?
Let me see that hat.
Ghost, I want that hat.
Oh, man. Ghost is bad.
Ghost, what are you doing with that hat?
Ghost, that hat is a very important hat.
Drop it. Hey!
Oh, goddammit.
I can't believe this.
Ghost!
Ghost, where's that fucking hat?
That hat is so friggin' valuable for this trip.
Ghost, you come back here with that friggin' hat!
If it's in the den I'm gonna fucking explode.
Ghost, where's that hat?
It's not OK for you to steal it.
Oh, man.
It's a friggin' den.
One of the things that I've heard about Mr Treadwell
and you can see in a lot of his films
is that he tended to want to become a bear.
Some people that I've spoken with would encounter him in the field,
and he would act like a bear.
He would woof at them, he would...
He would act in the same way a bear would when they were surprised.
Why he did this is only known to him.
No one really knows for sure.
But when you spend a lot of time with bears, especially when you're in the field with them
day after day, there's a siren song, there's a calling
that makes you wanna come in and spend more time in the world.
Because it is a simpler world.
It is a wonderful thing, but in fact it's a harsh world.
It's a different world that bears live in than we do.
So there's that desire to get into their world,
but the reality is we never can because we're very different than they are.
The line between bear and human
has apparently always been respected by the native communities of Alaska.
We visited the curator of Kodiak's Alutiiq Museum,
which had recently been raided by tourists out of control.
Somebody wanted it so much they cut the paw off.
They stole it from here, so it was quite tragic for us
because, you know, ifs on loan and they came in and took it.
Mmm-hmm.
And how do you see Timothy Treadwelfs story?
I see it as something that's both...
It's tragic because, yeah, he died
and his girlfriend died, because, you know, he tried to be a bear.
He tried to act like a bear, and for us on the island you don't do that.
You don't invade on their territory.
You, when you're in their territory you know you're there,
and when you're nearby you make sure that they know you're around.
Um...
You know, for him to act like a bear the way he did would be,
I don't know, to me it was the ultimate of disrespecting the bear
and what the bear represents.
But he tried to protect the bears, didn't he?
I think he did more damage to the bears than he did...
Because when you habituate bears to humans they think all humans are safe.
Where I grew up the bears avoid us and we avoid them.
They're not habituated to us.
If I look at it from my culture,
Timothy Treadwefl crossed the boundary that we have lived with for 7,000 years.
R's an unspoken boundary, an unknown boundary,
but when we know we've crossed it, we pay the price.
Jewel, I apologise that this wrist watch is still in an evidence bag,
however, I want you to have this watch.
I think that it is important that you have it.
You knew Timothy for a longtime.
My understanding is that you lived together for three years,
you were very close to him.
Yeah, he was my boyfriend for three years, he was my boss,
he was, he was a lot of things to me in 20 years.
Yeah, I understand that, and that's the reason I want you to have this.
This really should be yours.
This watch is still running.
Oh, wow.
It has been running continuously since the time that I received it.
This was taken off Timothy's wrist.
Wow, there it is.
Oh, it's still running. I can't even believe it.
I can't believe it. I'm gonna wear it.
And I'm gonna remember him.
And I'm gonna remember Arnie.
Can you speak about Amie?
Amie was brave and Amie was strong.
Amie was my friend and she was Timothy's friend.
She was his girlfriend, but most important she was his friend,
and I believe that I'm gonna honour their choice.
I'm always gonna respect them for what they did and for how they did it and for...
For being out there and for protecting bears
and living in wild nature and living, living their life to the fullest.
They truly died doing what they lived for.
Representing Timothy.
- And then I'll fill in the rest. That's... - OK.
-...the specific number, so. - So there it is.
- Circle. Full circle.
- Yeah. Full circle. -I've got it all.
- Yeah.
Hopefully it will continue to run a long time.
- I think it will.
Hmm.
The last thing that's left.
Thanks, Franc.
Jewel Palovak.
You were very close to Timothy Treadwell.
Do you sometimes feel like his widow?
Ha! Do I feel like his widow?
Um...
Yeah, you know, in some ways I do.
I feel like his widow because
everything that he had, everything that he worked for...
ls... He left to me.
I was his girlfriend, I was his employee.
I was the person that figured all the last minute details out.
You also founded a foundation with him?
Yup, we did. We founded Grizzly People
whose mission is to protect and preserve habitat worldwide.
For Treadwe/I, who had a natural tendency towards chaos,
Grizzly People served as his organised platform,
and Jewel was his most trusted co-combatant.
I met him in a restaurant.
We both worked at lhls place called Gulliver's, and it was a prime rib restaurant.
It was huge and theatrical.
Well, Timothy was a squire,
cos it was set in the time, it was based on Gulliver's Travels,
and he had a chintzy felt hat and a cheap, plastic apron and some knickers,
and that blonde hairjust sticking out.
And me, I would be your English serving wench for the evening.
You had to toss the salad with aplomb,
and you had to boil the soup and serve it to the people.
And I had seen Timothy, and he was kind of fun, and I didn't really know who he was.
And one night I just wasn't in the best of moods.
I had a huge table, a family of people
that wanted me to make it the best dining experience of their life.
Do it up big, make the soup big, you know, use the vernacular.
You know, there was grandmas and babies and hairdos and coats,
and so I thought, you know what? I'll make it. I'll make it big for ya.
I'll make it really big. You'll never forget this birthday.
So one of the parts was you'd lake the soup can
and you'd light it up with this gas so that the soup was bubbling and boiling.
You could smell the deliciousness, and
I decided to make it really big,
so I trailed a little bit extra of the lighter fluid around the polyester cloth,
and I kind of miscalculated because the soup exploded,
the people screamed, the fire went everywhere,
so I was called into the office in the next couple days.
And who do I see when I sit down in the office waiting like you're,
you're in the jail or you're in the principal's office,
I see Timothy Treadwell.
I was like, hey, how are you? I know I've seen you, I'm Jewel.
He said, "I'm Tim."
And I said what are you in for?
And he said, "Oh, I'm in for walking funny in the dining room.“
He said, “what did you do?", and I said, "Ah, I lit the soup can on fire.“
And he said, "That was you?"
And, you know, it wasn't love at first sight,
but ii was certainly kindred spirits.
Only Timmy is the boss of all foxes and all bears.
You're the ruler.
Hey, thanks for being my friend.
Does that feel good? Yeah?
We patrol the Grizzly Sanctuary together. How did we meet?
Over a decade ago.
He left his mother and father's side, promptly peed on my shoes, pooped on my clothes.
That was it. He was my friend, Timmy the fox, yup.
And we watch over things, and he's the boss.
Takes care of everything.
Yup, YUP'
I think one of the things that's really important is,
as you can see the bond that
has developed between this very wild animal and this very... Fairly wild person.
And you realise he has this gorgeous fur, and people are trying to kill him for it,
with steel jaw traps and cruel farming practices.
And other people run 'em down on horses for sport, fox hunting.
We want this to end.
Between Timmy the fox, this beautiful fox and me,
we ask the public, please, stop killing and hurting these foxes and torturing them.
- Don't you think? - Yeah.
If they knew how beautiful he was and how sweet he was they would never hurt him.
Thanks, king.
Timothy used his camera as a tool to get his message across.
Sometimes his approach was very Mayfair.
Do another take here. I fucked up the last one, I almost just fell off the cliff.
I'm a fucking asshole.
Behind me is the Grizzly Sanctuary,
and also behind me hidden down below in those trees somewhere is my camp.
I must stay incognito,
I must hide from the authorities, I must hide from people who would harm me.
I must now even hide from people
that seek me out because I've made some sort of...
I don't wanna say celebrity, but,
they come here to Alaska and they hear about Treadwell in the bush
and they wanna go find him.
But they can't. I'm hidden down below.
No one knows where I am. Even I don't even know where I am.
That was pretty shitty.
Let's do one really short take here.
But as a filmmaker he was methodical...
Whatever.
Often repeating takes 15 times.
Do one more really short, excellent take.
Lets just really sum it up. Here we go. This is gonna be the motherfucker.
Behind me is the Grizzly Sanctuary, and also hidden down below is my camp,
for I must now remain hidden from the authorities,
from people who would harm me, from people who'd seek me out as a story.
My future helping the animals depends on it.
I must be a spirit in the wilderness.
With himself as the central character,
he began to craft his own movie,
something way beyond a wildlife film.
There is going to be a number of takes I'm gonna do,
and these are called "Wild Timmy Jungle Scenes."
We're gonna do several takes of each
where I'll do it with a bandana on, maybe a bandana off.
Maybe two different coloured bandanas.
Some without a bandana, some with the camera being held.
I kind of stumbled on that one. Let's do it again.
So the basic deal is too, that this stuff could be cut into a show later on,
but who knows what look I had, whether I had the black bandana or no bandana.
Very rarely the camo one, but I like the camo look.
Both cameras rolling, both cameras rolling, both cameras rolling.
Sexy green bandana, last take of the evening.
I'm on my way to the front creek.
I need to get water and there's a super duper low tide.
Full moon tonight.
And action.
In his action movie mode,
Treadwell probably did not realise
that seemingly empty moments had a strange, secret beauty.
Sometimes images themselves developed their own life,
their own mysterious stardom.
Starsky & Hutch, over.
(Hetzogj Beyond his posings, the camera was his omnipresent companion.
It was his instrument to explore the wilderness around him,
but increasingly it became something more.
He started to scrutinize his kmermost being,
his demons, his exhilarations.
Facing the Sens of a camera took on the quality of a confessional.
Covering various years, the fol/owing samples illustrate this search for himself.
If there... I have no idea if there's a God,
but if there's a God, God would be very, very pleased with me.
If He could just watch me here, how much I love them, how much I adore them,
how respectful I am to them, how I am one of them,
and how the studies they give me, the photographs, the video
and take that around for no charge to people around the world.
It's good work. I feel good about it.
I feel good about myself doing it,
and I wanna continue, and I hope I can.
I really hope I can.
But if not, be warned,
I will die for these animals. I will die for these animals. I will die for these animals.
Thank you so much for letting me do this.
Thank you so much for these animals, for giving me a life.
I had no life.
Now I have a life.
Now, enough of that.
Now, let the expedition continue.
It's off to Timmy the Fox. We've gotta find Banjo. He's missing!
And that's my story here, for me, Timothy Treadwell,
the kind warrior.
Can I take it?
I'm trying.
OK, yeah, I can do it.
Yeah, why not? Why not?
I've crossed the halfway point.
The government's given me all they have, so far.
I've stood up to it.
I've had danger in the boat, almost died, I've almost fallen off a cliff.
Yeah.
The danger factor's about to amp up in the Maze.
The Maze is always the most dangerous.
Lord, I do not want to be hurt by a bear.
I do not.
I always cannot understand why girls don't wanna be with me
for a long lime because I have really a nice personality.
I'm fun. I'm very, very good in the, well I...
You're not supposed to say that when you're a guy, but I know I am.
They know I am.
And...
Um...
I don't fight with them. I'm so passive.
Bit of a patsy,
which, is that a turn-off to girls, to be a patsy?
I mean, it's not...
It's not that I'm a total great guy.
I'm a lot of fun and a good life going.
I don't know what's going on.
I always wished I was gay. Would've been a lot easier.
You know, you can just bing-bing-bing. Gay guys have no problem.
I mean, they go to restrooms and truck stops and they perform sex.
It's like so easy for 'em and stuff, but you know what?
Alas, Timothy Treadwell's not gay, bummer.
I love girls.
And girls...
Girls need a lot more. Need a lot more, you know,
finesse and care and I like that a bit,
but when it goes down bad and you're alone it's like,
well...
You know, you can't rebound like you can if you were gay.
I'm sure gay people have problems too,
but not as much as one goofy straight guy named, Timothy Treadwell.
Anyway, that's my story.
That's my story.
I love you.
Look at you.
You're the best little fox.
But how did I... How did I come into this work, Iris?
Did you ever... Did you ever get the story?
I was troubled. I was troubled.
I drank a lot, did you know that?
Iris, you wouldn't even know what that is, but...
I used to drink to the point of,
that I guess I was either gonna die from it or break free of it.
But nothing, nothing Iris, could get me to stop drinking, nothing.
I went to programs, I tried quitting myself,
I did everything that I could to try not to drink,
and then I did everything I could to drink.
And it was killing me, until I discovered this land of bears,
and I realised that they were in such, such great danger
that they needed a caretaker, they needed someone to look after them,
but not a drunk person, not a person messed up.
So I promised the bears the! If I would look over them,
would they please help me be a better person.
And they become so inspirational,
and living with the foxes too, that I did.
I gave up the drinking. It was a miracle.
It was an absolute miracle, and the miracle was animals.
The miracle was animals.
I live, I live here.
It's very dangerous. It's really dangerous.
I run wild with the bears. I run so wild, so free,
so like a child with these animals.
It's really cool, and it's very serious.
I'm here alone, and when you're here all alone you,
you do get you get lonely.
Well, duh, right, you get pretty lonely.
Oh, no, I'm gonna do all this stuff just because I'm supposed to be alone.
Oh, OK.
Pan.' of the mythical character Treadwell was transforming himself into
required him to be seen as being completely alone.
He was mostly alone,
but he did spend time with women who will here remain anonymous.
The truth is that Amie Huguenard
accompanied him for pans of his last two summers.
A fact which was out of step with his stylisation
as the lone guardian of the grizzlies.
It's July 26th, and I've been dropped off all alone again here in the Grizzly Maze.
And ifs always such a surreal feeling as the plane takes off,
and it doesn't quite sink into you, just how alone you are.
That for the next two months or more, you will be alone in this wild wilderness,
this jungle that the bears have carved tunnels through,
and that's the Grizzly Maze.
It's July 26th. I hope to survive
and to be able to record the secret world of the bears,
and then come September when people might come to harm these animals,
I'll look after them. I'll make sure they're safe.
It is so weird though, when it sinks in how alone you are.
Amie Huguenard remains a great unknown of this film.
Her family declined Io appear on camera,
and Amie herself remains hidden in Treadwe/Fs footage.
In nearly 100 hours of his video,
she appears exactly two times.
Here disembarking from the plane in the year of her death.
We never see her face.
Here it is obscured by her hands and her hair.
Greetings, children of America.
The second shot that we have doesn't show her face either.
She remains a mystery, veiled by a mosquito net, obscured, unknown.
Only through Treadwell's diaries do we know that she was frightened of bears.
The only other hint we have of her presence is this shot here of Treadwetf.
It is handheld, and we can only deduct
it must have been Amie operating the camera.
Timothy Treadwell and Amie Huguenard's remains came in this large metal can.
Inside this metal can was a plastic bag,
one for Timothy and one for Amie.
I mean, these are human beings, and the question I ask is first of all,
“Who are you, Timothy?
“Who are you, Amie?
“And what happened to you?"
In the case of Timothy and Amie, what I had were body parts.
Just the visual input
of seeing a detached human being before my eyes
makes my heart race, makes the hair stand up on the back of my head.
Particularly in combination with the contents of a tape,
an audio tape, that is the sound portion of the video tape.
And when I find out from other investigators
that the shoes neatly placed at the entrance to a tent,
and the cap left on a camera so that the visual part could not be recorded,
yet the tape is running so that we can hear the sounds of Amie screaming
and the sounds of Timothy moaning,
tells me that this event occurred very, very quickly, suddenly and unexpectedly.
I clearly can hear her screaming stop and go away.
Maybe run away.
There's a lot of background noise.
Timothy is moaning,
and I hear Amie beating on the top of this bear's head with a frying pan,
and Timothy is saying, "Run away, let go.
"Run away, run away, Amie. Run away."
Amie had a great deal of conviction.
She had a great deal of conviction in this relationship, we know that.
Although in the past she was more standoffish.
She didn't get as close to the bear as Timothy did.
She was more cautious.
However, I know that at the moment of death,
when one is being tried to the maximum of one's ability to be faithful,
to stick to a situation, to be loyal, if one can say that, to Timothy,
she stayed there and she fought with Timothy.
She did not run away.
Amie, we know, fought back for approximately six minutes.
Amie stayed with her lover,
with her partner, with her mate, and with the bear.
Ultimately, she stayed with the bear in the situation.
This is Timothy's camera.
During the fatal attack there was no time to remove the lens cap.
Jewel Palovak allowed me to listen to the audio.
I hear rain, and I hear Amie, "Get away, get away, go away."
Can you turn it off?
Jewel, you must never listen to this.
I know Werner. I'm never going to.
And you must never look at the photos that I've seen at the coroner's office.
- I will never look at them. - Yeah.
They said it was bad.
Now you know why no one's gonna hear it.
I think you, you should not keep it. You should destroy it.
Yeah?
I think that's what you should do.
OK.
Because it will be the white elephant in your room all your life.
Well, here I am at the scene of the fight.
It looks as if tractors tore the land up, raked it, rode it, tilled it, tossed it about.
There is fur everywhere, and in the camera foreground, excreted waste.
In the middle of the fight so violent,
so upsetting, that Sergeant Brown went to the bathroom,
did a number two during his fight.
Extremely emotional, extremely powerful,
and yet both bears back in pursuit of Saturn,
including Mickey who appears to have gotten the worse for the wear
in the fight between Sergeant Brown and Mickey for the right to court Saturn,
the queen of the Grizzly Sanctuary.
Amazing.
Oh, Mickey, I love you.
And Mickey's now the closest bear to Saturn,
back in like a horse in a race that does not give up.
We love that bear, Mickey. We love him.
We love him, but Mickey, I've been down that street. I've been down that street.
You don't always get the chick you want.
Let me tell you, it doesn't always effing work out.
Hey, he's after my own heart.
He don't give up, even when it looks shitty.
All right, love you, Mickey. Love you, Mickey.
Well, I just wanna discuss that fight with Mickey bear right here.
He's right next to me here in the Grizzly Sanctuary on the tide fly,
Saturn off to camera left.
Mick, you underestimated Sergeant Brown.
You went in for the head, he seemed to be rope-a-doping you like he wasn't that tough,
and then once you banged into him,
man, he turned out to be one heck of a rough bear. A very rough bear.
And I'm telling you, I was so scared I almost got sick to my stomach watching you fight,
and then when he knocked you down and you had him,
and you were down on your back, it was terrible.
It was terrible. I...
I'm not duking it out for any girl like that.
I'm telling you right now, I'm not duking it out for any girl,
but you know, well, I've had my troubles with the girls. Yeah. Yeah.
And I'll tell you something, if Saturn was a female human,
I could just see how beautiful she is as a bear, hoo.
I've always called her the Michelle Pfeiffer of bears out here.
All right, you lay there. I'm gonna go off with your girlfriend.
Don't beat me up over it.
I'm cool, I'm cool. I'm respectful.
Things are bad for me with the human women,
but not so bad that I have to be hitting on bears yet.
OK? OK? Thanks.
Merzog} In his diaries,
Treadwefl speaks often of the human world as something foreign.
He made a clear distinction between the bears and the people's world
which moved further and further into the distance.
Wild, primordial nature was where he felt truly at home.
We explored the glacier in the back country of his Grizzly Sanctuary.
This gigantic complexity of tumbling ice and abysses
separated Treadweil from the world out there.
And more so, it seems to me that this landscape in turmoil
is a metaphor of his soul.
Off there in the distance is his bay and his campsite,
where he battled his demons.
What drove Timothy into the wild?
We visited his parents in Florida.
Timothy grew up with four siblings in Long Nanci
in a solid middle class family where the father worked
as a foreman of a construction team for a telephone company.
Them must have been an urge to escape the safety of his protected environment.
t was moved to find that among at! memorabilia in the house,
his mother was clutching Timothy's favourite bear.
This has been to Alaska many times.
Yeah, I'm sure he loved it to the end, you know?
It's just his childhood toy.
Tim's childhood pointed toward nothing extraordinary.
A normal everyday kid.
Never any trouble in school. Always a good student.
Not an A student, a B student.
And, got along great with kids
and animals.
Tim and I were extremely connected to animals in the house.
I think more so than anybody else.
This squirrel named VVil/ie became Timothy's best friend.
Teddy bears meant a M to him.
He seemed to develop into an All-American boy,
handsome, athletic, full of promise.
He excelled on his high school swim team.
(Sarah He went off to Bradley University,
on his diving scholarship.
I think he started drinking out there
and having, you know, just hanging out with the wrong people,
and then he injured his back, and he ended up
losing his scholarship and coming back home.
Yeah, he did attempt to smoke marijuana in the house.
- Yeah. He did, yeah. - But...
I put the kibosh on that, but obviously he was doing it elsewhere, so.
He really wanted, a new start, a fresh start.
So when he went out to California he was 19 or 20.
He wasn't a young 15 or 16-year-old.
- He was of age. - He'd gotten a job
just to make money on the Queen Mary at the gift shop.
He did hire an agent.
He did change his name to Treadwell to be theatrical.
And it was a family name.
I know he got on the Love Connection with Chuck Woolery.
I think he got on another show.
There were promises made that never came true,
and he tested with the actors
to get the bartender job on Cheers.
And allegedly he came in second to Woody Harrelson.
How close to second I don't know, but that is what really destroyed him,
that he did not get that job on Cheers.
- He spiralled down. - Mmm-hmm.
Timmy used to body surf out here.
He had a boogie board with the Union Jack on it.
And he was totally fearless.
And the amazing thing about Timmy,
he had this Prince Valiant haircut,
and he could surf and go underwater
and yet still that hair would hide his receding hairline.
It was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen.
No matter how rough the surf, you never saw Timmy's forehead.
I don't know how he did that.
How does the hair look?
At some point in Timmy's life he had a near fatal overdose.
How he survived it, I don't know.
He was a tough guy.
But I guess it was an epiphany for him.
After that he was looking for a different persona.
I guess that's when he came up with...
Where he was from and his delightful accent.
And I never questioned it.
Treadwellfis need to Invent a new persona for himself
lead him to elaborate fabrications.
He claimed to be an orphan from Australia
and even checked out details of a small town in the Australian outback
'm order to sound convincing.
His accent, though, remained suspicious.
It almost sounded more Kennedy-esque than Australian.
After Timmy's death,
people said, "Well, don't you feel betrayed
“that he did that?
“That he didn't tell you the truth about his accent or his origins?"
And that never bothered me.
Timmy always amused me.
And there's an old saying on the farm, "If it doesn't scare the cows, who cares."
Well, I don't think Timmy ever scared the cows, so who cares.
He was troubled.
I mean, it...
One time he went to a doctor
and they wanted to put him on some kind of an anti-depressant or something
to keep his mood, cos his moods were so up and down.
And he started taking it for a while and then he stopped,
and he said "I had to stop." And I said, "Why?"
And he said, “Because I can't be...
“I can't have the middle ground. I have to have the highs and the lows.
“It's a part of my life. It's a part of my personality."
And he definitely had a dark side.
I mean, he was mixed up in drugs, which is, makes you mixed up in bad people
and, you know, people with guns,
and Timothy always had a sense of justice that was his own.
So, he got into a lot, a lot of trouble.
- And I think that... - How dangerous?
How dangerous? I mean...
I don't think he would have ever, he couldn't have ever killed anybody,
but he always kept it in check.
One thing that we did every once in a while
which just seems so bizarre by now, but it's...
We would go when we lived in the valley, to the Van Nuys Courthouse
and we would watch when criminals were being sentenced.
We would watch people getting their sentence,
and I think we did it, I did it just for shock value and just they...
You know, cos it's something I'd never done, but he did it, I think,
to remind him of if he went to that dark place,
what his life would be.
I'm in love with my animal friends. I'm in love with my animal friends.
In love with my animal friends.
I'm very, very troubled.
It's very emotional.
It's probably not cool even looking like this.
I'm so in love with them, and they're so effed over, which so sucks.
Do you know you're the star for all the children?
They love you and I love you so much and thank you.
Thank you for being my friend.
Isn't this just so sad?
This is a bumblebee who expired as it was working
at doing the pollen thing on this Alaskan fireweed,
and it just is... Just has really touched me to no end.
It went, it was doing its duty, it was flying around.
It was working, busy as a bee and it died right there.
It's beautiful, it's sad, it's tragic.
I love that bee.
Well, the bee moved.
Was it sleeping?
Here's your poop.
It just came out of her butt.
I can feel it.
I can feel the poop.
It's warm. ltjust came... ltjust came from her butt.
This was just inside of her.
My girl.
I'm touching it.
It's your poop. It's Wendy's poop!
I know it may seem weird that I touched her poop,
but it was inside of her.
It's what... It's her life. It's her!
And she's so precious to me. She gave me Downey.
Downey's... I adore Downey.
Everything about them is perfect.
Herzecg Perfection belonged to the bears,
but once in a while Treadweh came face to face
with the harsh reality of wild nature.
This did not fit into his sentimental/Zed view
that everything out there was good
and the universe in balance and in harmony.
Male bears sometimes kt}! cubs
to stop the females from lactating
and thus have them ready again for fornication.
Oh, God.
I love you,
I love you, and I...
Don't understand.
It's a painful world.
Here, Idiffer with Treadwell.
He seemed to ignore the fact that in nature there are predators.
% bekeve the common denominator of the universe is not harmony,
but chaos, hostility and murder.
He wandered loo far from the den,
and the wolves last night that I heard howling,
screeching in glee and excitement,
it was over the termination of one of the babies.
So expedition 2001 has taken a sad turn, but it is a real turn,
and I mourn the death of this gorgeous baby fox.
- Goodbye, little fox.
Get out of his eye you, frickin' fly. Don't do it when I'm around.
Have some respect, fucker.
Most disturbing for him was to find the skull of a young bean.
In the summer of 2000 came an extended drought.
The creek was so low that for weeks there was no salmon run,
and starving bears simply ate their own.
It has been only five,
not even six days since the baby died,
and this is all
that's left of the little tyke, that's it.
There's nothing else left. They've eaten everything.
It's so sad. She was so cute.
Five days and all's that left is a skull.
Herzocg This salted for desperate measures.
There are fish lining up about to try to make a run,
and now they have a good reason for going, because I have built them a corridor.
Let's have a look at it.
What I have done is, have a look.
I have constructed a runway for them, a navigational trail.
Herzog When interference with nature was not enough,
he had to invoke higher powers.
Oh, the live TV, live on tape.
OK, so here's the deal.
Pull this down a little bit.
It's...
It's September 20th. It's the year 2000.
It's Expedition 2000.
There has not been a substantial rainfall for almost two months.
The fish have not run since about August 2nd, August 3rd.
We are now getting our first rain, but it has just slowed down.
We need at least two inches, I think even three inches of rain.
In the last two hours we're up a little over 0.20 inches of rain.
That is not enough. We're gonna need more rain.
We need more rain!
Downey is hungry!
Tabitha's hungry!
Melissa is eating her babies!
I'm like a fuckin' nut.
We've got to have some rain.
Now I'm not a religious guy, no.
But I'm telling ya, I just, I'm just pissed because...
It just doesn't seem right. It just doesn't seem right.
I know its just weather and crap like that,
and it's, I don't know what, what the variables are,
but we've gotta have some goddamn rain!
So if there's a God, Downey needs to eat!
Dump on us, hurt us!
Come on!
Think rain.
Such a crappy little shower right now!
What kind of crappy... Come on!
I'll tape this again.
Does not make me very, very happy.
I want rain, I want, if there's a God, to kick some ass down here.
Let's have some water, Jesus boy!
Let's have some water, Christ man,
or Allah or Hindu floaty thing.
Let's have some fucking water for these animals!
It is now September 21st, Thursday of the year 2000, Expedition 2000.
I am the Lord's humble servant.
I am Allah's disciple.
I am the floaty thing's... Gopher boy.
There has been a miracle here. There's been an absolute miracle.
It has rained 1.65 inches of rain today.
We have over two inches now in the storm, and it is not stopping.
It may hit three inches of rain.
It went from a trickle to a flood, and it's amazing,
and we have a really, really great chance
of a run of fish for the animals.
And what is even more miraculous, according to my radio
it is not raining much around anywhere else but around here.
Oops.
Well...
It's now after, 2:00 on October 4th,
and the tent has caved in due to the storm.
I'm still here with my little teddy bear.
And I think the storm has actually gotten a little weaker,
but in the course of it getting stronger, it crushed the wall in
and bent some of the poles.
And you really can't do much about it because
once they get like that they just stay kind of bent in,
and you're screwed and all that.
This is my life, this is what I do.
And I love it. I love it.
Even this, I love it.
My tent crushed in, I love it. It's pathetic, but I love it.
♪ Hello, hello, hello. Whoo-hoo!
♪ Hello, hello, hello ♪
Are you scared, little bear?
The storm's gonna go on and on and on.
It doesn't look like I may get out of here for another week or so.
Ahhh.
Oh, look at this.
I put my tripod up to shore up the tent I put a...
I put a pole up there and so now I've got a tent.
That's a pretty good idea, huh? A-ha, pretty good for me.
We have about 35,000 brown grizzly bears here in Alaska.
What we can tell, it's a very healthy population,
it's a stable population.
Of course, you have to be careful with bears because they have unique needs,
especially the grizzly bear.
They need large areas, for the most part.
They have low reproductive rates.
You have to be cautious in the way you utilise those animals.
Bear hunting is an exampie, is a very important aspect of the economy.
Four-and-a-half mil/ion dollars a year is spent on bear hunts.
Here on Kodiak Island we have about 3,000 bears.
Each year we harvest about 160 of those.
Through our research we found that you can harvest
about 6% of the population annually and still have a healthy group of bears.
And poaching?
Poaching is not as big a concern around here
as it has been in Russia, for instance, and some other locations.
There is some poaching that occurs for gall bladders
or some bears that are just killed wantonly,
because people don't like them or because they're afraid of them.
But for the most pan here on Kodiak and on the Alaskan peninsula
it is a very rare occurrence in the last 20 years.
Despite the statistics, Treadwell became increasingly paranoid
about his enemy, the poacher.
And it's gotten to be September near October,
and it's the time of year where poachers could come around,
it's time for me to go in my guerrilla-style camouflage outfit.
Downey still recognises me by talking lo her, don't you?
Yeah, I'm the big crazy guy, or the skinny crazy guy with the,
with the camouflage make-up on.
They're armed with pepper spray and rocks.
In all his video recordings over the years,
this is Treadwe/Vs closest encounter with intruders.
I believe the guide is the person with the camera,
the big camera on the tripod.
There we go. Get a nice close up of him there.
He's the one who threw the rock at Freckles the bear.
It's Quincy.
They're throwing rocks at him.
They're throwing rocks at my Quincy.
They're gonna stone him and then they're gonna photograph him.
Oh, that's it. That's enough of this.
That's it! They hit Quincy.
Oh' oh.
I don't wanna expose myself to them.
I am submitting this as, Sunday August 1st.
It is 4:35 and 18 seconds on this day.
It's hard to say, but ifs a warning of a sort,
and it's obviously hereto upset me.
Phew!
"Hi, Timothy. See you in summer of 2001 ."
Now it doesn't say, "Hi, Timothy, we're gonna fucking kill you."
It doesn't say, “Hi, Timothy, you're fucking dead,
"we're gonna chop your legs off.
"Hey, Timothy, get the fuck out."
ltjust says, "See you in summer of 2001 ."
But it is some sort of a warning.
It is some son of a ha-ha.
I don't think ifs friendly.
Well, it's gotten a little worse here with... There's...
The warning, “Hi, Timothy, see you summer of 2001
Now I found this big stack of rocks
that were, you know, put some labour here.
We're not calling this the building of the pyramids,
but we are saying there's a bit of trouble.
Now, I'm gonna walk back. I'm gonna bring you back here...
Through my camp. Let's come through here, pathway.
Here's where. here's where the...
The sign was here which is where my tent is.
And then we go over where my bear-proof barrels would be
and we find boulders piled up...
Boulders piled up
and a happy face indelibly painted into the rock,
like, looking at me.
Very, very frickin' frightening, huh?
Whoever put it there...
Knew what they were doing.
That it was, ifs a warning.
And the thing is, it's better than a warning
than, it's better than, like, "You're fucking dead" type of thing.
It's creepy, baby, it's creepy.
It's Freddy Krueger creepy.
There were visitors every now and then,
but for Treadwell, they were just intruders.
An encroaching threat upon what he considered his Eden.
Even the park service itself became an enemy because of its restrictions.
I have decided to violate a federal rule which states I must camp one mile...
Every week I must move one mile after staying for seven consecutive days.
If I was to do that here I would not be able to study these bears,
I would not be able to really protect them.
I'd have to actually move out of the bay to get a mile out.
Therefore I have decided to protest the United States government
and guard these bears anyway and stay and I have...
In order to get around the rule of not camping permanently
in one spot, he would camouflage and hide his tent from the park service.
But more than that, he was in constant violation
of another very reasonable park rule,
that you have to maintain at least 100 yards distance from the bears.
Ding.
Hi, go back to your friend. Go back to your friend.
Shh, shh, shh, ifs OK.
It's OK.
You're awfully close.
Hi, oh, hi there.
(Herzog The park restrictions made him increasingly irate.
Well, we're into autumn now.
Expedition 2001 coming to an end.
The bears moving safely towards their winter dens,
the foxes hiding in the woods,
safe from the humans that would come to harm them.
It's been an amazing season. it's been difficult.
But I came, I served, I protected, and I studied.
And I promise I'll be back.
My hair.
Expedition 2001 coming to an end for Grizzly People, for me, Timothy Treadwell.
I came here and protected the animals as best I could.
In fact, I'm the only protection for these animals out here.
The government flying over a grand total of two times in two months.
How dare they! How dare they challenge me!
How dare they smear me with their campaigns.
How dare they!
When they do not look after these animals, and I come here in peace and in love,
neutral in respect.
I will continue to do this. I will fight them. I will be an American dissident if I need be.
There's a patriotic time going on right now,
but as far as this fucking government's concerned,
fuck you, motherfucking park service!
Now Treadwe/I crosses a line with the park service which we will not cross.
He attacks the Individuals with whom he worked for 13 years.
I beat your fucking asses! I protected the animals! I did it!
Fuck you!
Animals rules, Timothy conquered.
Fuck you, park service!
OK.
It is clear to me that the park service is not Treadwelfs real enemy.
There is a larger, more implacable adversary out there,
the people's world and civilisation.
"Oh, Timothy, I'm getting a bad feeling about you."
He only has mockery and contempt for it.
"Well, I saw you on David Letterman, you're fairly entertaining."
His rage is almost incandescent, artistic.
The actor in his film has taken over from the filmmaker.
t have seen this madness before on a film set.
But Weadwefl is not an actor in opposition to a director or a producer.
He is fighting civflisation itself.
It is the same civilisation that cast Thoreau out of Walden
and John Muir into the wild.
Animals rule!
All right, that's my happy stuff.
Let's do a couple of nice takes now.
Oh, man, did I get angry.
Fuck them, right? They do not watch these animals.
They don't care about these animals.
All they ever wanna do is screw people like me around.
It's amazing. Let the fishermen fucking shoot the animals,
let the fucking poachers come in here and fuck 'em,
let the fucking commercial people fuck them around
with their fucking cameras and shit and the tourists.
But we're gonna go screw with Timothy Treadwell
because he loves animals and teaches kids for free.
Lets go, let's do that. That's what we're gonna do.
Well, fuck them. Fuck them. I beat you. I beat you, motherfuckers.
I beat you. Beat you.
So fuck you. I beat you. I beat you.
I'm the champion. I'm the fucking champion.
I beat you. I beat your fucking asses.
Fucking losers! Fucking nobodies!
Fuck!
Fucking fucks!
Well, Expedition 2001 coming to an end.
The bears safely moving into their winter dens,
the foxes hiding in the woods.
I came here, I studied them, protected them,
and I promise you, I promise the Grizzly People I will be back.
I will be back.
And I thank the animals for keeping me safe and for inspiring me.
I thank them so very much.
Goodbye.
This is my favourite.
This is my cowboy.
Always in black, always sunglasses and always a bandana.
I miss you terribly.
He was very dear to my heart, very dear to my heart.
My heart hurts every day for him.
He was a good friend.
Uh...
I've known him 13 years, and he just was a good friend.
He was a distant friend in the winter and a close friend in the summer,
and I helped him do quite a few things here,
and he'd always come back
and I was kind of his confidante here.
And...
But I miss him. I miss his...
His rambunctious personality
and his outgoing, his heart, his, you know, just everything about him, I think.
Kathleen Parker still holds some of Timothy Treadwe/Fs ashes.
She insists that she was a platonic friend only.
She stored his gear in her basement during the winters.
He would set out mm the wilderness from her house.
When he would leave,
he would say at my back door, he says, "I love you.“
He says, "This is going to be the best year of my life out there"
and he says, "If I don't come back, it's what I want.
"This is the way I wanna go."
Now see, his last camp was just right in the right hand edge
o? this slope, patch of trees here.
Right down here in this, very end of these trees here.
This is his ashes,
some of them for me to spread
and some bear hair, fur, and some weeds
and what else is in there?
There's a little bit of lupin, there's a little bit of iris.
- Oh. - There's...
- I think bear fur. - Where did you get the bear fur?
We picked it up off the ground.
Oh cool. Cool.
Kathleen, where are we here?
We are at a campsite where Timothy last camped,
not where he was killed, but over here in Hallo Bay.
And, Willy, you can, cos you brought him over here.
Well, his last campsite was right here in the trees here,
and he camped there because he was right between two fox dens.
Yd been in the camp there, and the fox wouid come
right to the edge of {he tent and go down in their, in their dens right there.
And so I think that's probably the main reason he camped right there.
OK, Timothy.
I love you.
And rest peacefully.
Rest peacefully, my love.
Finally figured a way out to live here forever.
He's here forever.
This is Timothy Treadweiis and Amie Huguenards route
to the site of their death.
There was a certain absurdity in their end.
As usual, the expedition was over by the end of September
and both had returned to Kodiak on their way back to California.
Treadwett writes in his diary that at the airport,
he had an altercation with an obese airline agent
over the validity of his ticket.
"How much K hate the people's world," he writes
and disgusted, decides right then to return to this spot and his bears.
Once back in the Grizzly Maze, Amie had {nixed feelings.
She was afraid of the bears and had a deadline to return for a new job
and spoke openly about leaving him for good.
According to one of the last entries in Treadwe/Fs diary,
Amie called him hell-bent on destruction.
And yet inexplicably, she remained with him here in the Maze.
Normally, Treadwell would not be here this late in the year.
And upon their return,
he discovered that many of his bear friends had gone into hibernation
and scary, unknown and wilder bears from the Interior had moved in.
This is the spot where they set up their last camp.
Let me tell you,
honestly, camping in grizzly country is dangerous.
People who camp in grizzly country should camp out in the open
to let the bears know where the tent is.
My camp is unseen.
It is the most dangerous camping and the most dangerous living
in the history of the world by any human being.
I have lived longer with wild, brown grizzly bears
without weapons, and that's the key, without weapons,
in modern history than any human on Earth, any human.
And I have remained safe.
But every second of every day that I move through thisjungle
or even at the tent,
I am right on the precipice of great bodily harm or even death.
And I am so thankful for every minute of every day
that I found the bears and this place, the Grizzly Maze.
But let me tell you ladies and gentlemen,
there is no, no, no other place in the world
that is more dangerous, more exciting than the Grizzly Maze.
Come here and camp here.
Come here and try to do what I do, you will die.
You will die here. You will frickin' die here.
They will get you. I found a way.
I found a way to survive with them.
Am I a great person? I don't know. I don't know.
We're all great people.
Everyone has something in them that's wonderful.
I'm just different, and I love these bears enough to do it right.
And I'm edgy enough and I'm tough enough,
but mostly I love these bears enough to survive and do it right.
And I'm never giving this up, never giving it up.
Never giving up the Maze. Never.
This is it.
This is my life. This is my land.
Very late in the process of editing this film,
we were given access to TreadweWs last video tape.
Here he may have filmed his murderer.
The kilter bear we know was a male
whom years earlier the park service had anaesthetized.
They extracted a tooth which established him as being 28
a! the time of the attack, quite old for a bear.
They also tagged him by a tattoo on his inner lip.
They had given him a number only, 141.
Bear 141, that's alt we know of him.
And here, could this one be bear 141?
What looks playful could be desperation.
So Sate in the season, the bear is diving deep
for one of the few remaining salmon carcasses at the bottom of the lake.
Treadwefl keeps {liming the bear with a strange persistence.
And a“ of a sudden this...
ts Amie trying to get out of the shot?
Did Treadwell wait till his last tape to put her in his film?
And what haunts me ts that tn all the faces of a?! the bears
that Treadwell ever filmed,
I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy.
I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature.
To me, there is no such thing as a secret world of the bears.
And this blank stare speaks only of a half bored Interest in food.
But for Timothy Treadweli, this bear was a friend, a saviour.
Amie Huguenard was screaming.
All of a sudden the intensity of Amie screaming
reached a new height and became very, very loud.
And she really, now, was screaming at the top of her lungs.
These horrifying screams were punctuated by Timothy saying,
"Go away, leave me, go away, run! Get out of here."
In other words, Timothy is trying now to save Amie's life
because Timothy realises, at this point in time during this attack,
Timothy knows he's gonna die.
He knows that.
My sense of listening to this tape
is that the bear let go, probably let go of the top of his head,
where I found massive lacerations,
that is, tears of the scalp away from his head.
Suddenly though, the bear, after letting go,
grabbed Timothy somewhere in the high leg area
and Timothy, appropriately in my opinion,
as a human being, decided now is the time to save one life, anyway.
If his life was going away, if his life was fading away,
now is the time for Amie to get out.
Well, the expedition coming close to a close, but I'm still of course here.
It's been over four months in the wilderness,
and a hurricane-force storm now building, over 50 mile an hour winds.
Soon over 70.
The bears safely heading for their dens.
The work, the work successful.
I'm over 20 pounds lighter, my clothes are rags.
I've tried hard. I bleed for them. I live for them. I'd die for them.
I love them, I love this!
It's tough work,
but it's the only work I know, and it's the only work I'll ever want.
Take care of these animals, take care of this land.
He seems to hesitate in leaving the last frame of his own film.
It's the only thing I know.
It's the only thing I wanna know.
Merzog) Treadweil is gone.
The argument how wrong or how right he was disappears Into a distance, Into a fog.
What remains is his footage.
And while we watch the animals in their joys of being,
in their grace and ferociousness, a thought becomes more and more clear,
that it is not so much a look at wild nature
as It is an Insight Into ourselves, our nature.
And that, for me, beyond his mission,
gives meaning to his fife and to his death.