Tim Cahill has dined with the headhunting Karowai in Irian Jaya and tracked down Colombian guerillas who are inclined to kidnap Americans. He has written books with titles like Jaguars Ripped My Flesh and A Wolverine is Eating My Leg, and his name has been on the mastheads—high on the mastheads—of Men’s Journal, National Geographic Adventurer, and Outside magazines. What is the “real” life of this professional adventurer like? I decided to find out.

Perpetually scruffy and well over six feel tall, Cahill is a bear of a man. I met him at the elegant Prescott Hotel just off Union Square in San Francisco. He had flown in from Seattle the night before, and I happened to hear him live on KGO as I was driving in to the city. Cahill had a day-old beard and wore wrinkled blue jeans, a wrinkled navy T-shirt, a dark blue long-sleeved shirt—also wrinkled—and running shoes. He drank a diet coke and looked like he had just woken up from a nap. The man takes a perverse pride in having once been described by a reporter as “unattractive to the opposite sex” (I beg to differ).

Killing Machines with Incredible Power

What does Cahill do on his own time? ” I like bears,” he said, looking remarkably like one himself. It didn’t surprise me that he considers the grizzly his totem animal. “There are quite a few black bears, and some grizzlies, around my cabin in Montana. I’m not of the opinion that these are cute little guys we can communicate with—they’re killing machines with incredible power.

“In Yellowstone Park, a bison had died, and this bear had dug a hole for the bison and buried it. Have you ever seen that big lump on their shoulders? It powers incredible digging muscles. They’ll dig a grave and bury the bison there so nobody can eat it at night while they’re sleeping. A full-grown adult male bison weighs 2,000 pounds. I watched this grizzly stick a paw under the dead bison and pull it up out of the hole. Holy God, what kind of power is that?!

“Then I watched him eat. And he ate, and he ate … he ate for hours, until his stomach was distended. It was the middle of the day, and it was hot, so he lay in the hole that he had dug for the bison. It was probably cooler in the hole. All I could see were his nose and the distended belly.”

Cahill likes to appear self-effacing, but he is not above giving himself an occasional backhanded plug. He tells me his “Dumb Tim” story: “I had been so worried about seeing this bear that I hadn’t slept all night. When the bear finally went to sleep, so did I. I fell asleep a hundred yards from a grizzly bear! Slept for an hour or two, and the friend who was with me said, “Tim, you were snoring!”

Grizzlies Run From Me

I wondered whether Cahill had left himself some options, somewhere to hide from the grizzly if things got really dangerous. Did he have to wear camouflaged clothing or disguise his scent?

“No” Cahill said. “You just have to stay downwind of them. It was a tough situation, because the bear was in a basin, on a plain. If the wind swirled around, there was no place to hide—no trees, no place to run.”

“Did you have a Plan B?” I asked, optimistically.

“Just to stay away from the bear! Grizzlies, for the most part, if you don’t startle them … they’re entirely unpredictable … but they run from me. One time I was walking in Yellowstone Park. I had a big pack on my back, and I saw a grizzly bear across a meadow. We were looking at one another, and I thought, ‘It would be a good idea for me to start backing out of here right about now.’ I backed out, and backed out, until I was in the trees—then I turned a little, and suddenly the grizzly just fled. I thought, ‘What the hell was that about?’ Apparently he saw my pack, and thought I was a much bigger animal than he’d ever imagined.

“Last year I was walking in Yellowstone, I was with Tom Murphy, who is an expert tracker. Tom said, “There’s a grizzly track; he’s about a minute ahead of us.” I said, “What makes you think that?” He said, “Well, we just came across a stream, right? Well look there near his track. There’s a drop of water. He’s just ahead of us. Look there, it’s drying right now. He’s probably just about a minute ahead of us. We scared him up out of his day bed, and he fled ahead of us on the trail.”

Did you keep going?

“I did,” Cahill said.

“I did keep going. And I wanted the bear to know I was there, so I sang very loudly. I sang Hang on Sloopy, which has been known to clear out entire rooms full of people. And I sang it for so long that Tom said, ‘I hope this bear comes back and puts you out of your misery.’”

The Risk, and the Effort, and the Suffering

Cahill is a natural athlete. He attended the University of Wisconsin on a swimming scholarship, and set some Big Ten records. He completed what was, at the time, the longest fixed-rope climb of Yosemite’s Half Dome.

And Cahill is no stranger to danger. He nearly killed himself falling from a cliff in the Queen Charlotte Islands, and has a long, thin scar on his head as a constant reminder. He has smuggled caviar in Azerbaijan, sweated his way across desolate salt flats in the Sahara, and mucked through miles of trailless swamps deep in the Congolese jungle. He will never be entirely free from recurring bouts of malarial fever and hallucinations.

In the introduction to A Wolverine is Eating My Leg, Cahill explains his attraction to risk: it provides psychological escape, a sense of control and accomplishment, and an opportunity for transcendent concentration—not to mention endorphin-fueled euphoria. But the guy is facing the far side of sixty; I wondered how long he would continue to risk his life for a story.

“Have you always been intrepid?” I asked. “Are you getting more or less so?”

“I’m getting less intrepid. I have to be honest with myself: As I get older I’m not physically able to do some of the things I could … but I can still experience the same feelings of risk, and I can still overcome obstacles. My world revolves around the writing and the story, not the risk and the effort and the suffering.

It’s All About the Story

“But what if you don’t get a story?”

Cahill explained, “Part of what I’ve said for writers, and for people who want to travel in a more interesting way, is to have a quest. Say for instance you’re interested in narrow gauge railroad. Some people are. You know, railroad buffs.

“Suppose you know there’s a narrow gauge railroad in Argentina. Because it’s you quest to find out about it, you have to get out of the whole tourist atmosphere. You may have to look someone up in a phone book, do some searching. You’ll meet ordinary people who are not involved in tourism and since they will be deeply interested in narrow gauge railroads like you are, you’ll begin to make friends. That’s what a quest does for you.

“You will also run into all kinds of barriers and obstacles in meeting these people, because it isn’t easy to navigate through a country that you’re not familiar with. Every obstacle and barrier will be a story. What kind of a story can you tell about a resort? ‘The sand was really nice, the people were there, the food was pretty good.’ Who wants to hear that?

“But, ‘We were going out to see this narrow gauge railroad, and the guy’s transmission went out, and we had to go over to this transmission shop and met these five guys, and we had to sleep there over night, and we stayed at this guy’s place …’ You can always find a story. If you have even a pretty good quest, you’ll get a story.

Cahill’s Quest

“Do you have a quest in your personal life?”

“I want to be happy,” Cahill said thoughtfully. Then a broad smile, “I happen to have the best job in American journalism. And I’d like to get my relationship working as well as it possibly can. My wife and I are trying to do that.”

He made it sound simple, but I know there’s plenty of history involved. Cahill was recently reunited with the son he had when he was just a teenager himself. The mother suffered from mental illness, and their child was given up for adoption. And Cahill’s first marriage disintegrated during the four years he spent researching Buried Dreams, a true story about a serial killer. His own sanity didn’t fare so well during that time; hence his attraction to risk-sport … and his compassion for other people’s stories.

“What I like is being able to move people with the stories I tell. To move them to greater tolerance for other people, and other people’s cultures and ways. That’s what I like to write about. And I want to be a better writer. I guess that’s the nature of my quest.”

Was there a great storyteller in your childhood?

“No,” Cahill said slowly, “but my mother, who just passed away recently, was … I was thinking about the kinds of gifts she gave her sons. My mother was kind, and she had a certain elegance about her. I didn’t inherit that. She liked spirited conversation:

“Tim, you’ve gotten so heavy. You should exercise.”

All right, let me see … exercise.

“Tim, you’ve lost some weight. You look really good, what are you doing?”

“I’m running.”

“Oh, running, that can’t be good for you.”

You couldn’t win with her, so the only thing you could do was tell a story. I think she just did that … in the Midwest we call it “trying to get a rise out of you.” If she could get a rise out of us, we would end up talking to her, and we could get her interested, or get her laughing.

My family was one of those very held-in-tight midwestern families. We didn’t express emotion very well. As a family we’ve gotten a lot better. I think we all handled my mother’s death in as dignified a manner as possible, and yet, we were able to show that emotion and love and closeness in my family. My mom was, she came out of the coma for two days, saw the family at her bedside … [very long pause].

Extremely long pause. Cahill sat quietly, gazing off into the distance. His eyes grew shiny, and I feared he would cry. I know I will be sent to Reporters’ Hell for this, but it was only the two of us in the room, and the prospect of seeing this heroic man break down was more than I could bear. I wracked my brain for another question. I had come prepared with plenty, but Cahill had—quite generously—let the interview run long, and I was pretty much out of ideas. Desperately, I turned to the one thing that always works in a stressful situation—food.

“What do you want to eat when you come home from a trip? Is there any food you really miss?”

Cahill laughed, “I was in Kuwait after the ‘91 war, covering the oil well fires, and when I came home I wanted pork chops, because that was the one thing that you could not have there. So it’s basically whatever it was that I couldn’t have, that’s what I want when I come home. When I was recently in Thailand—I love Thai cooking, and the food is just superb—but a lot of it’s vegetarian, or very near vegetarian. So I wanted a big piece of meat when I came home.”