incaster arming, Common sense, respect needed in coping with wild enimel attacks WEST THUMB, Wyo. - High on a ridge in Wyoming’s Yellowstone National Park, a hiker crosses the timberline and enters a subalpine meadow of waist-high grasses. Up ahead, something moves. It’s a grizzly bear about 100 feet away. The bear rises nine feet tall onto its hind legs, waves its nose in the air, drops onto four legs, and begins to run straight at the hiker. There is no tree to climb; nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, and the hiker has no gun. What should he do? This desperate thought has run through the minds of many people. “When I saw that bear come smoking down on me,” says Montana hunting guide Bill Hill, “I didn’t have any trouble deciding who was the endangered species. ’ ’ Sometimes Both Die Every summer, from Wyoming to Alaska, humans and bears have fatal encounters. Sometimes the human dies, sometimes the bear, sometimes both. Visits to U.S. national parks have nearlyu tripled in the last 10 years. More people are hiking the trails and meeting not just bears, but other potentially dangerous wildlife species. A young boy trying to feed a deer in California’s Yosemite National Park was suddenly gored and killed. A photographer in Yellowstone was fatally attacked when he tried to pet a bison. A moose trampled a sled-dog musher and his dogs when they surprised it on a snowy trail in cental Alaska. A well-meaning woman found an injured heron in Louisiana and, as she reached out to help the frightened bird, it whipped around its dagger-like beak and impaled her through the neck. She died instantly.