Patti Sowka moved to the gate. As she fumbled with the lock, the smell of rotten flesh came on the breeze.

Flies swarmed around a nearby dumpster, placed behind the fence by the city sanitation gang, which goes above and beyond the call of duty each week when emptying the container, dealing with the flies — that smell.

The dumpster is filled with grass, branches and road-kill — heads and hooves and the bloated remains of deer, which died an undignified death on the state’s highways, then paid the post-mortem penitence of being mauled and chewed by a captive grizzly bear.

Moving inside the fence, Sowka, manager of the Montana Wildlife Center, turned the corner and came face to face with a 300 pound grizzly. Only 2 years old, the bear with grizzled fur and a head the size of a wheelbarrow wasn’t fully grown, though it was large and fast enough to command respect — never mind it was locked behind a towering chain-link fence.

Earlier in the week, state bear managers trapped a 7 foot, 6 inch grizzly bear. It tipped the scale at 750 pounds, its neck circumference measuring 4 feet. Twice as big as this bear, I think to myself — and still out there.

I’ve never seen a grizzly in the wild, nor up close, until today. Four years ago, during a solo trip across the Scapegoat and Bob Marshal wilderness areas, I missed an encounter with a giant grizzly by a matter of minutes.

A late night thunderstorm sent trees crashing and rocks tumbling. Lightning peppered the sky and the rain fell in sheets. When that storm passed, the sky still dark, there in the mud I saw the tracks — grizzly tracks as wide as the brim of my cowboy hat, and as deep as the treads on a Goodyear radial.

The bear in the center’s rehab pen used its claws like fingers to hold the fence. It gobbled up grapes one at a time, this massive animal showing the patience to indulge slowly in a snack. It looked kind and curious, like a dog at the pound you can’t quite get a read on.

The grizzly wanted to play. It rolled on its back, sat on its tail, grabbed its feet and stretched, yoga style, before bellowing a resonant call — a sound that would send me up a tree faster than a squirrel if I heard it in the woods, or in the dark.

“He’s a real show-off,” Sowka grinned. “He loves the attention.”

The bear isn’t alone at the wildlife center. Sowka and her staff have their hands full, caring for nine black bears, a swan, and a family of raccoons, among other Montana creatures that hope to return to the wild.

But this bear, a problem bear they say, isn’t going back into the wild. He’s going to the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado Springs, where a new exhibit called Rocky Mountain Wild is set to open.

“The bear will have the run of Grizzly Meadows and will catch fish from a stream,” said Sean England, public relations manager for the zoo. “He’ll be in there with other grizzlies. We’re very excited about getting that Montana grizzly cub.”

For a bear that faced euthanasia after getting into trouble one too many times, life in a state-of-the-art complex with all the food and attention it could want can’t be a bad way to go.

At the same time, it would be nice to give bears like this one more room to roam — more wilderness — so fewer grizzlies would find themselves in trouble.