16 JUNE 2007, Page 25

The picnic is over

Robert Macfarlane IN BEAR COUNTRY: A GLOBAL JOURNEY IN VANISHING WILDERNESS by Brian Payton Old Street Publishing £8.99, pp. 320, ISBN 9781905847 © £7.19 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 Eight species of bear remain in the world, and six of them are on the so-called Red List, which designates those species threatened with extinction. The Sloth Bear, the Spectacled Bear, the Giant Panda, the Sun Bear, the Asiatic Black Bear and (a recent addition to the list) the Polar Bear: all are on or near the brink. Poaching and hunting nip at the edges of bear populations, but it is habitat loss, primarily deforestation, that is the biggest menace. If you go down to the woods today, you're increasingly unlikely to see any bears, or any woods.

Seven years ago, Brian Payton began a series of journeys through bear country. He travelled to Peru, Cambodia, China, northern India, Canada, Italy, the Pyrenees (which has a population of 15 brown bears), and various bear-hunting states of the USA. He met the heroes and the villains of the bear world. And he collected and sorted some of the folklore and legends that the bear has generated about itself.

No other animal, save perhaps the seal, is so disconcertingly humanoid as the bear, and wherever Payton went he found a mythology of metamorphosis: of the human and the ursine slipping into one another. He talks to a Navajo ranger who swears he has seen and chased a `skinwalkef , a creature 'half-human half-bear' that escaped into the desert, killing three dogs as it went. 'A skinned bear looks like a person,' muses Tammi Dade, an American hunter Payton meets in Colorado. So do live bears, though: the bipedal stance of an angry bear, the shaken head of a bear in pain.

Which makes it odd that bears are among the most atrociously treated large animals in the world. In northern India, Payton writes of 'dancing bears': sloth bears (The Jungle Book's Baloo is a sloth bear — remember those long claws, used in the wild for fossicking out termites and ants?) who are captured alive as cubs. After capture, a red-hot poker is 'used to pierce the cub's sensitive snout clear through the skin, cartilage, nasal passage, and the roof of its mouth': a rope is then looped through this hole, and twitched to make the bear 'dance'. In China, Payton researches the treatment of the moon bears, whose bile is 'harvested' for the specious purposes of Chinese medicine. Thousands of these bears are kept for decades, crushed in cages so small they cannot turn round, with wounds kept open in their bellies so that catheters can drain their gall-bladders of the precious bile.

Payton has written a fine and clear-eyed book, born, like so many works of naturewriting, out of a mixture of love and alarm. He comes across as a thoroughly likeable and honestly concerned man, of good heart and strong nerve. There are moments when his prose slackens into melodrama (For a few heart-pounding seconds ...', 'I was fully aware that these bears could tear me apart ...'), but there are also some beautiful passages.

Perhaps most admirably, Payton is alert to the enormous political complications involved in protecting a high-level predator like the bear. A problem for the bear, as he points out, is that our cultural sense of it flickers between two opposites: `the clown of enchanted forests, and the relentless killing-machine that stalks the night'. Mind you, the bear has one of the best PR teams on its side, in the forms of Baloo, Rupert, Paddington, and the romping polar bear cubs of nature documentaries. But as brown bears prepare to vanish from the Pyrenees, and as climate change catastrophically diminishes the range of the polar bear, Payton's book cannot help but sound like an elegy-in-waiting. 'We are failing,' one conservationist tells him glumly, `to translate our sense of love of nature into the way we manage things.'

Dr Robert Macfarlane is Fellow in English at Emmanuel College, Cambridge.