My partner looked at me. I looked at her. We turned and sprinted back into the trees the way we’d come.

In the pounding of our footsteps, below the wild panic, I remember a distinct thrill of pleasure. Not in a suicidal sense (I was too frightened to look back, and certainly didn’t want to feel the bear’s jaws on my neck), but as a matter of perspective. The feeling was tied most closely to relief. Every other thing I’d been worrying about that day, from whether I’d worn enough sunscreen to whether my partner really loved me, fell aside. I had one concern: to get us away without being eaten.

Civilization itself is an attempt to protect us from this feeling. From its earliest iterations in fire-starting and cave-dwelling to its current zenith in the construction of megalopolises, as well as the careful documentation of every birth and the methodical laying bare of each strand in every helix, civilization is a way of setting ourselves apart from the prey we once were. Building walls, both physical and informational, to keep out the bears.

Yet even atop the highest tower in the most prestigious university we remain animals, directed by the same base-level needs and emotions that motivate living creatures from bonobos to rats. I’ve seen flashes of our animal selves in the most unlikely places: genius professors reduced to grunting rage, and overweight shut-ins catching a falling object with sudden, instinctive grace.

We were only halfway through the pine stand when a park ranger met us, running full speed from the other direction holding the largest gun I’d ever seen. He told us to get behind him. His neck shone with sweat. We peeked around his shoulders (and gun) at the bear, which was now lingering at the edge of the trees. “She’s almost 12,” he said, catching his breath as we backed along the trail. “It gets harder for them to find food at that age. She’s been displaying increasingly aggressive behavior.” I hardly noticed the fact that he seemed to know this particular bear intimately (I’d later learn that rangers track many of the grizzlies in the park), and instead had the strange image of my own grandmother in her last days, hunting game with desperate, bloody abandon, rather than living in the guest room of our house.