You can’t live close to bears and not get a bit obsessed with them. When you live in grizzly territory, you think about grizzlies all the time. When you go for a walk, when you have a picnic, when you nip outside in the dark to put something in the car…you think about bears.

Grizzlies are beautiful and graceful and amazing …and can kill you without even trying very hard. When you walk around knowing that, when you carry that knowledge in your mind for three or four years, you’ll soon have part of your brain that is always thinking about bears.

I was lucky enough to live in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem for eight summers. Somewhere inside my head, I’d been carrying the thought of bears, ready for Darcy and her story.

Dreaming The Bear will be published by Oxford University Press in February