Humans and bears - Wild encounters

[brotherbear]

Grizzly Years by Doug Peacock - a follow-up from post #11...

I returned to camp and kindled a fire, tending it into the night. I threw a pile of lodgepole twigs on the embers and poked at it with a stick. I thought about my old road map and the huge brown grizzly. In Vietnam the primary predator was man. If I had salvaged a grain of wisdom from the agonies of combat, it had nothing to do with knowledge of killing or of waging war. There was no enlightenment in homicide. What was burned deepest into my consciousness was the little acts of grace, lessons that had lain dormant in memory and now were retrieving themselves from anesthetized corners of my brain. It never mattered why. The granting of quarter itself was a transcendence.

The grizzly radiated potency. He carried the physical strength and thorniness of disposition that allowed him to attack or kill most any time he cared. But, almost always, he choses not to. That was power beyond a bully's swaggering. It was the kind of restraint that commands awe - a muscular act of grace. Reply