Two dark eyes, black as coal, stared at me from the tall grass we had anchored beside of. Nothing but knee deep water and 20 meters of air separated me from a very large animal that had the necessary tools to swap places with me on the food chain – the same food chain which I had taken for granted when I ate my breakfast that morning. I briefly pondered my options, which included finishing my half-eaten sandwich, succumbing to the bear-fear and crying like a baby, or grabbing my camera and hoping for the best.

I chose to take pictures. It seems that most famous artists never saw success until they were dead anyway, so maybe this was my big break. Maybe I would even be lucky enough to make it all over the internet with my Eee PC if I captured enough gruesome footage. My brother and buddy from Alaska weren't so glass-is-half-full about our given situation. I could almost see the headlines “Idiot tourist insults grizzly and gets devoured”.

Yes, I was in Alaska, surrounded by some of the most beautiful and untouched scenery still left on the planet. Yes, we had somehow managed to ring a grizzly's doorbell and it now stood staring at us curiously. Oops.

Thirty minutes earlier, we had been fishing the famous Kenai River in Alaska. It was early July, but the bluish glacier water was still frigid. As we waded and fished, we spotted an area where the grass growing on the banks had been mashed flat. My sensibility had been numbed by a cold night of camping on the lake and the lack of fish, so we decided to explore. I hopped out of the water onto the muddy bank and made a brief foray down the trail. Along the way were huge piles of scat. (That's “bear poo” for us non-biologists). A smarter mammal would have probably recognized that as an immediate threat, yet we forged on.

The trail ended back in the river, but also at the favorite fishing spot of a young brown bear. With my heart pounding, I low-crawled through the grass like a marine sniper and began taking pictures. The wind shifted and the instant I felt it on the back of my neck, the bear stood up, did a perfect about-face, and locked his black eyes with mine. He gave me a surprised look that screamed, “What the heck are you guys doing here?”

I am not a bear expert, nor do I want to be. As alluring as it sounds, spending my life freezing in the wild, looking for a gigantic and reclusive animal that could kill me in 200 creative and messy ways just doesn't have a nice ring to it.

However, it did not take an expert to know that we were probably in trouble. We quickly made a retreat back to the boat with my buddy Skipper in the lead. Before breaking into the open, he stopped dead in his tracks, turned around with wide eyes, and said “Go back! Go back!”.

It was another bear.

First of all, anyone telling you to run in the same direction that you just saw a grizzly bear is frightening. When an experienced Alaskan sportsman is telling you to do it, things really cannot be good. A second bear now stood between us and the boat - an interesting situation to find yourself in on holiday.

After waiting an eternity, and making a wide circle, we made it back to our raft, where we slowly came down from our adrenaline high, laughed hysterically, and accused everyone of being more scared than the other. We had already begun exaggerating our stories for the women at home.

I'm still not sure what it was that made me turn around, but there he was, less than 20 meters away. Like amateurs, we had been followed. For almost a minute, the only sounds were that of my Canon shutter clicking, three hearts pounding, and the bear sniffing. I watched through my viewfinder as he inched closer with curiosity.

Convinced that we looked fatty and that our screams would probably frighten the salmon too much, the young brown bear (with fully developed teeth and claws I'm sure) turned around and lumbered off into the grass. If he had been a little older, a little grumpier, or had not just eaten his fill of salmon for the day, things might have turned out a little differently....this story would probably be written by someone else.