ALONG THE WAY

The phone rings. It's still an hour before dawn, but my city editor, already at work, is telling me to throw on a coat and go cover a story. "There's a bear in a tree, and it's just a few blocks from your house," he says. A bear in a tree? This is the desert.

There is indeed a mediumsized black bear treed in a nearby Tucson backyard, and in the light of a slivered winter moon it looks like a formless lump clamped to a large branch 25 feet overhead. A posse of cops, reporters, and neighbors mills underneath in a motley siege. At last a man from the Arizona Game and Fish Department arrives with tranquilizer darts, and the lump topples out of the tree.

The game and fish people recognize the bear from a tear in its ear: they themselves had taken it recently from the Huachuca Mountains 50 miles southeast of Tucson, where it had raided a farmer's apple crop, and "transplanted" it to the Santa Catalinas on Tucson's north side. The bear had been trying to cross town and go home when a vigilant Doberman scared it into the tree.

The account I write makes the front page it's a slow news day with this headline: "Problem bear found in a tree on East Side." The narrow straits of newspaper journalism being what they are, I do not manage to write what I think, which is this: we trap an animal, exile it to a foreign environment, chase it up a tree, knock it to the ground, then haul it to yet another mountain - and we're calling this a matter of a problem bear? It's several years later. Jeff Stensrud is leading a few of us problem humans on a "bear awareness walk" in the Catalinas. An articulate middleaged high school history teacher, Stensrud is vice president of the Southern Arizona Chapter of the Arizona Bear Society. His passion is protecting what's left of Arizona's black bear population and I'm here because I've been doing more and more mountain hiking, often alone, and now and then this worry parks on my nerve endings and won't go away: what if I blunder across a bear?

"Most any bear is interested mainly in trying to stay away from people," Stensrud explains. "However, they are individual creatures, and a bear may approach you out of curiosity."

If that happens, he continues, we probably have our own species to blame. "Some people want to see a bear come closer to them, and they'll throw it a cookie. One cookie," he continues deliberately, to let us chew on his words, "is enough to condition that bear. Next time it sees a human, it expects to get something."

He thinks that the handful of bears left in the Catalinas may be so conditioned. Some residents and visitors to the mountain have been feeding the "darling" bears, and there have been some incidents. A man was bitten in 1989, though not seriously, and the same year a cub died after being trapped for relocation along with its mother. In 1990 another bear was found shot to death for unknown reasons; possibly it had approached a human out of conditioning.

Describing the incidents, Stensrud looks visibly pained. "Whenever there's interaction between humans and bears," he says, "the bears almost always lose out."

Still too true. The scattered incidents around these mountains make it clear that the bears face far more danger from us than we from them. The same is true of a long list of native Arizona animals, including our 11 species of rattlesnakes, which are frequently killed for no higher reason than they are rattlesnakes.

Still, I want Stensrud's bear advice. What about the chance mountain trail encounter? One human, one bear, eyeball to eyeball? He says it's mostly a matter of remembering what not to do: