The call came just as I was braking to a stop at the crest of the rise. The insanely out-of-place tinkling sound of tweedle-dee, tweedle-dee, dum straight out of Medium.

I get so few phone calls, it took a second or two to figure out what the noise was. I hit the speaker button with a finger on my right hand whilst simultaneously struggling to get the spotting scope mounted on my window with my left.

I was running late. Unlikely there would still be any grouse left on that lek over a mile and a half to the west, but I drove too far too fast to dally now.

They weren't there. Just an empty grassy patch in the sage.

Craaap.

The second half of the morning was wasted.

But the voice on the phone, without identifying himself, asks excitedly, "Guess what I just saw!"

I know, of course, who it is and what he's doing on this fine spring morning. Same thing I am. Checking sage grouse leks. Just in a different place, a couple hundred miles away.

I know what his new country is like, and have a good idea what lives there. And I know what excites him.

A wolf, I make my guess.

"Nope!"

He goes on to explain he's driving in sagebrush country, just like this land around me, many miles from any mountains.

"A grizzly bear! And her three cubs. Not 150 yards away from my truck."

And I envy him. Not only for his close encounter of the grizzly kind, but the whole exciting sense of seeing new things in a new place.

He goes on to describe how the bears' fur rippled in waves as they trotted off away from him, large brown lumps in a flat, greenish-grey world.

No camera with him, 'natch.

And then there wasn't really anything else to say, nothing for us to do but each head for home. Me through a bearless world down familiar roads he and I both drove for over 15 years...

And him down a road he's never seen before.

In a land shared with grizzly bears.