ANCHORAGE, Alaska – The short, heartless version of the story was simply: “The Doofus Dies.” At least, that’s how some Alaskans saw it, says Nick Jans, the Juneau-based author of a new book, “The Grizzly Maze,” about Timothy Treadwell’s fatal obsession with Alaska’s huge coastal bears.

Two years ago, he might not have argued, knowing only the earliest details of how a big grizzly had just killed Treadwell and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard, in a bear-haunted thicket of Katmai National Park.

Treadwell, it was thought, had only himself to blame, having invited such danger by fashioning himself as a “bear whisperer” who could walk within a few feet of a lounging Katmai brown bear, turn his back and calmly smile into his camcorder. He gave the bears names like Booble and Mr. Chocolate. Sometimes he touched them with his hand.

Soon after his death, federal wildlife officials disputed Treadwell’s assertion that he was somehow protecting the grizzlies from poachers. The bears in Katmai were already protected, the officials said. They lived in a national park.

Others called Treadwell a California con man, someone who’d changed his name and once even invented a new country of origin (along with a fake Australian accent) while drifting from job to job.

And yet, says Jans, some of the most knowledgeable bear biologists and wildlife photographers in Southwest Alaska still found reasons to admire Treadwell. No one disputed his commitment to the bears. Often he was alone at Katmai for 13 long summers.

How did he do it – and why? And who was he, really?

“It was like that line in ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’ – ‘Who ARE those guys?!’” Jans told an audience at the University of Alaska Anchorage. “Well, who is this guy anyway?

“He was charismatic, irritating, bright, stupid, brave, foolhardy – a mixture of all these things,” he said. “And the more I learned about Timothy Treadwell, the more I came across a person who was incredibly complex and contradictory.”

So the short version was no longer operative.

While German filmmaker Werner Herzog, in his critically acclaimed documentary “Grizzly Man,” appropriated more than a hundred hours of Treadwell’s films to paint a vivid portrait of his volatile persona, Jans used his own knowledge of the Alaska Bush – as a nature writer and longtime teacher in northwest Alaska – to analyze Treadwell’s special relationship with bears.

In fact, his book is as much about bears as Treadwell, Jans said.

“Timothy Treadwell is just the lens. Timothy Treadwell is dead as a doornail on Page 111, and the book is 274 pages long,” he said. “The book is dedicated to bears, and I think he would have liked that.”

It begins in early October 2003, with Jans, on assignment for Alaska magazine, flying to Upper Kaflia Lake near the southeastern coast of Katmai National Park to inspect Treadwell’s last camp just five days after the fatal attack.

“If there was one place the National Park Service could tell you ‘don’t camp here!’ – it would be Kaflia Lake,” Jans said. In late summer, the alder-choked maze of bear trails that extend from the lake to the nearby coastline are usually packed with grizzlies.

Treadwell knew that maze as well as anyone, sometimes crawling down its well-worn channels on all fours to slip beneath the brush. He also knew a lot about bear behavior, having published a book on the subject – though some of its content wasn’t original, Jans said.

“After reading all the bear books I did, I’d have to mark him down at least three grades because he lifted a lot of his information from real bear biologists, then parroted it back as something he discovered.”

What Jans discovered on his own were local reports of “some weird things going on at Katmai” the season that Treadwell and Huguenard died.

Bear biologist and wildlife photographer Matthias Breiter told him that he’d led a party of about a half dozen photographers to a creek in an adjoining bay the previous week and been surprised by what he found. Where normally he might see a dozen grizzlies, this time there were 60 – and a lot of bear fights in the mix.

What was going on?

Apparently, Jans said, the Katmai coast berry crop had failed that fall. Breiter surmised that the loss of the berries had forced the bears to focus their feeding more exclusively on fish. Hence the traffic jam at the creek and the cranky dispositions. Later, some of the same bears journeyed over the ridge to Kaflia in search of greener pastures.

“That doesn’t mean it’s an army of killer bears descending (into Kaflia),” Jans said. “But it does mean that there are even more bears jammed into a finite resource. And Timothy’s journals – which were read by the investigators – demonstrated there were all sorts of fights breaking out there in a volatile environment.

“So it wasn’t usual.”

Unusual too was the fact that Treadwell was still lingering at Katmai as late as early October. Usually he checked out a month earlier before the bears became stressed.

In summer, grizzlies that cluster together to feed on the plentiful salmon runs along the Katmai coast are naturally more tolerant of each other than their cousins, the smaller and far more dispersed inland brown bears, Jans said. They have to be.

And they’re more tolerant of the occasional human as well, especially in a national park, where they seldom get shot at. That, he said, was part of the whole “card trick” that explained how Treadwell got away with standing in their midst so much. Usually the bears there were too preoccupied to care.

Moreover, Treadwell undoubtedly “habituated” several of the coastal bears to his presence after 13 years of visiting Katmai. But contrary to some press reports, Jans said, the bear that biologists believe attacked the couple wasn’t a stranger.

No one knows for certain, but park officials believe it was the same bear that was seen feeding on Treadwell’s and Huguenard’s bodies the next day: a distinctively scarred 1,000-pound male that biologists knew simply as “Bear 141,” having tattooed that number on its lip six years earlier – but that Treadwell called “Mr. Vicious.” Which is kind of an odd name coming from a bear lover, Jans said.

“He actually told a bear-hunting friend of (bush pilot) Willie Fulton: ‘If you ever want to shoot a bear, that’s the one you should shoot.’ And he gave him a picture of this bear.”

On the other hand, he’d crossed paths with the same large male on many occasions at Katmai, and there’d never been an attack, Jans adds. So why this time?

“Who the hell knows?”

Hearing the bear outside his tent, Treadwell probably stepped outside to confront it, Jans said. Investigators later determined that it didn’t tear into the tent, and an audio tape from a camcorder that was left running throughout the attack provided additional clues, though a cap covered the lens.

Jans wasn’t allowed to hear the tape – authorities concluded it was too personal and graphic to be made public – but a ranger was willing to summarize some of what was heard and said.

It begins with Treadwell screaming for Huguenard to help him outside the tent: “Come out here, I’m being killed out here!” he said. “Play dead!” she shouted back.

Jans thinks the bear probably smashed Treadwell to the ground with its initial charge.

“A bear of any size is capable of holding him in its mouth and literally shaking him to death the way a terrier would a cat,” he writes. “But Timothy Treadwell doesn’t die quickly. The tape runs roughly six minutes, and his cries can be heard two-thirds of that time.”

The bear seems to have retreated briefly, leaving Treadwell on the ground, the investigators told Jans. Then it returned, and there was the sound of something being thrown. Treadwell begged Huguenard to hit the bear with a pan. Huguenard urged Treadwell to fight back. Then she started screaming in an eerie, rhythmic way. There was a dragging sound as Treadwell’s voice trailed away, as if his body was being pulled into the brush.

Near the end, there was no movement, the investigator said. Just the sound of Huguenard screaming.

“And I won’t put you through his imitation of it,” Jans said. “It was just this repeated, very high-pitched, rhythmic, animal-like, totally melted-down scream, over and over. … And then the bear comes back.”