The Historic Grizzly

[brotherbear]

Continued...
On a late summer afternoon in 1924, a Salish Indian hunting party of two dozen men and women with children rode their horses up a steep mountain trail in western Montana's Swan Range, south of Glacier National Park. The group's leader, Philip Pierre, clad in traditional brown buckskin shirt and leggings, urged his Appaloosa stallion up the rocky path. Deep wrinkles creased his burnished face, and graying hair pulled back in a tight braid attested to his age, but among the Salish there was no equal to his strength and prowess as a hunter. 
The whites had brought his people nothing but misery and hardship, and the heat of anger flared within him for an instant; but he remembered that the boy, named Bud Cheff, had taken a keen interest in the old ways. He fashioned bows and arrows from creekside willows and hunted small game with the Indian boys. And he pestered the Salish elders about stories of the old days, especially about Sumka, the great bear that roamed the high mountains above the Flathead Indian Reservation. A white Indian.... The thought intrigued Pierre and brought the hint of a wry smile to his cracked lips. Reply