My friend Frank had been telling me for months that I needed to carve out a weekend to visit Centennial Valley, Montana. He said, “Max, there is no place like it in the entire world.” The trouble with guys like Frank, who love, live, and breathe the outdoors, is that pretty much everything in nature is amazing, which, if one isn’t quite sure of one’s own temperament, can make it difficult to decide whether or not to follow his advice. One’s got to be aware of one’s own limitations, in other words, regardless of whether one abides by them or not. After my first week in the valley, it was hard to recall what exactly kept me from visiting sooner, but I think Frank’s detailed descriptions of the area, which included marauding wolves, moose, and grizzly bears, may have had something to do with it.

I’m not boasting, but I’ve never felt fear at the thought of encountering a wolf or a moose in the wild. I’ve never seen a wolf in the wild, but I’ve read a fair amount about them and seen them in movies. I don’t know if the truth of the books negated the sensationalism of the movies, but if they hadn’t I’d have no explanation for this reaction because the movies should have terrified me. My experience with moose is another matter, although how that experience translates into a lack of fear doesn’t make much sense, either. I’ve had two close encounters with moose in the wild, and neither one of them was during the calving or breeding season, which may explain why, despite my lapse in judgment in the case of at least one encounter, I wasn’t injured or killed.

The first time I had a close encounter of the moose kind was when I was about fifteen years old and staying at my friend Nole’s cabin in Timber Lakes, which in the summer of 1983 had only a handful of cabins spread out over 2.8 square miles and thus made for a wild reprieve for moose and suburban animals like us. Nole’s family kept a three-wheeler at the cabin and one afternoon I slung my dad’s old Nikon camera over my shoulder and rode into the mountains in search of animals. Not long into my ride I saw a cow moose browsing on the side of the road. I stopped and tried to unsling my camera, but the damn strap was so tight that it took me seconds longer than it should have to get it off, and when I did get it off, I forgot to remove the lens caps, which also cost me time and, finally, the photograph of the moose, which by then had walked up the hill and into the trees. I don’t know what possessed me, but I’d be damned if I wasn’t going to get my shot and so I jumped off that three-wheeler and went running after her through the trees.

Much to my frustration, each time I got to within a few feet of “shooting” her, the aspens and pine were so thick that I couldn’t get a clear shot. A couple times she stopped and looked at me like, Just what in the hell do you think you’re doing chasing after me? Don’t you realize I can run you down and kill you with a single blow from my hoof? I must have followed her for ten minutes and one hundred yards before she circled around and headed back toward the road. The difference was she had come out at a beaver pond and was browsing right in the middle of it when I—irritable, scratched and sweating—finally caught up with her. The moment I saw her standing there, the lush green grass hanging and water dripping from her mouth, I had fantasies of taking a photograph of such remarkable quality and artistic vision that wildlife magazines would be clamoring to publish it on their covers. I got the shot, several of them in fact, but somewhere along the way I lost the roll of film. Now my fantasy is finding that roll in some drawer or old box and making good on my boyhood dream photographer stardom.

The second and more significant encounter occurred one morning when I was fly fishing on the Charleston stretch of the Provo River in Utah. This was years ago, long before that stretch of river became the well-known stretch that it is today. My guess is that the moose in that area could go weeks at a time without encountering humans. Or maybe the better way to put is that humans could go weeks at a time without encountering moose. An enraged moose—a bull moose during the breeding season, or a cow with a calf—will likely not think twice about charging out of the willows in pursuit of some unwary human, but otherwise what is more likely is that the moose will slip away so quietly one wouldn’t even know it was ever there. Back in the day the Charleston was a raw and wild section of river with few improvements and even fewer chances of running into other anglers. But the moose’s weeks-long reprieve from human contact was bound to end sometime, and it just so happened that it ended with me.

I think it was late spring or early summer because I remember there were grasshoppers, caddis, and other flies that typically don’t appear in the cooler months. One caddis—actually, an imitation of a caddis—was tied to the end of my line and I was casting to a big brown trout that had been enjoying what the literature calls a feeding station, not just because he was getting fed, but because he was getting fed well. I saw it as my responsibility to keep a good thing going, and so I went through the necessary preparations—doped and fluffed my fly, paid out line—and then cast a few feet above the trout. After a couple flicks of the wrist, the fly was right in the center of the run and I had to look twice to distinguish it from its living counterparts. My jaw tightened and my sphincter clenched, though, because then a real caddis landed about five inches ahead of my fly, which meant that the trout would likely take it instead of mine, however expertly presented.

It’s true: Timing is everything. Had I cast or the real caddis landed a few seconds earlier or later, I would have caught the trout and the real caddis would have lived to see another ten minutes, hour, or however long caddis flies live. I guess that means luck is everything, too, but having good luck is really the same thing as having good timing. In any case, I didn’t even have a chance to see what happened because right after that caddis set down in front of my fly, a bull moose came crashing out of the willows about thirty feet away from me. I put him at around nine hundred pounds and boy was he surprised to see me. An animal that size coming out of the brush at full bore makes quite a commotion. I admit it seems odd that the human body would freeze at a time like this. A person imagining being in this situation might think, Body, why are you standing there you dumb shit? This is the time to make like a white tailed deer, cat, dog, squirrel, lion, chipmunk, and thousands of other animals, and high-tail it out of there. But of course imagining being in this situation is very different from actually being in this situation.

While having and imagining an experience are complementary, each mode involves its own different state of being. Perhaps the most obvious and important difference is that when we imagine encountering a bull moose, we are in an excited, albeit contemplative state that does not involve any danger. We are in effect seeing ourselves from afar, and that (imaginative) distance between us and our proxy or imagined selves (not to mention the proxy of whatever is threatening us) is what mitigates our fear response. In other words, under these conditions we know that the threat is not real and, apart from the possibility of an accelerated heart rate, that we are not going to suffer bodily harm because of it. Why we imagine and why we dream may have a similar explanation in this respect: So far as I know, people generally cannot control what they dream. But dream researchers have hypothesized that dreams may have, among other things, a preparatory and thus an adaptive function, in which case our dreams allow us to rehearse experiences so that, should we actually have them, we will have at least some vicarious experience in handling them. Imaginative acts would seem to have the same value. After all, aren’t dreams just imaginative acts that we cannot control?

The fact that white-tail deer have tails they can raise and we do not points to some important differences between how our two species respond to danger. I had originally wondered if deer lift their tails as a kind of threat display, but then I realized that threat displays are not generally associated with retreating animals. Rather, they are associated with animals that, when threatened, stand their ground unless or until it becomes expedient to do otherwise. According to my biologist friend John Alcock, “the data strongly indicate that the deer is telling you that it has seen you, you bastard, and your chances of chasing it down are nil.” This “advertisement-of-alertness-to-the-predator” hypothesis makes a lot of sense if one is a white-tail deer that can usually outrun predators. Except for athletes, humans are not known for their speed, so it wouldn’t benefit us to have tails that we used for this kind of communication. If something were chasing us, we’d run until we could climb a tree or find some other shelter, and if that didn’t work out, we’d turn and face our attacker, hopefully while having a big rock or stick in hand. Tails are important for other reasons as well, including locomotion, balance, and protection, but none of these uses applies to us either. However different we are from the white-tail deer and many other animals as well, we do share some commonalities, such as the aforementioned seemingly counterintuitive tendency we have to freeze when confronted with danger.

The other day I was fishing Odell Creek above South Valley Road in Centennial Valley when I saw a fox way out in the field to the east of the creek. I just happened to be glassing the area with my binoculars when I saw her poke her head above the grass and look at me. She was well over a hundred yards away, which makes my seeing her all the more fortuitous. Even though I was far away, the moment she saw me she ducked down and slinked south toward the cover of heavy vegetation along the creek. I had been up that way the day before to meet with the Tafts, who are the owners of the land I was fishing on, and who also had four hands in creating the Writer’s Residency that brought me to the valley in the first place. As I watched the fox alternately disappear and appear behind grass that did and did not conceal it, I began to wonder if I wasn’t actually seeing CC, the female fox that Melody Taft named and looks after with the love and care that only a mother can give. But it’s not just CC who she looks after; she also looks after CC’s kittens when she has them. Melody and CC are so comfortable with each other that CC will eat a piece of chicken right out of Melody’s hand.

This relationship would no doubt be unpopular with people who believe that humans should not interfere with the lives of wild animals, that we should let nature run its course, even if doing so means that a female fox and her kittens might starve to death. My guess is that Melody thinks the animals in the valley have had one hell of a time because of us, what with all the hunting and trapping and who knows what other insults, and that all she’s doing is reversing that trend and for once tipping the scales in the fox’s favor. I think of it as a kind of apology, like giving flowers to my wife after an argument, but even that notion is going too far from a wild life management perspective, which shuns subjectivity and human emotion in favor of objectivity and scientific fact. But that’s a tough pill to swallow for people who find nature’s amorality literally unthinkable, and they are legion.