The Historic Grizzly

[brotherbear]

Continued...
Seventy-seven years later, I sat across the kitchen table from Bud Cheff in his rustic ranch house nestled among massive ponderosa pine trees at the base of the Mission Mountains. I felt thoroughly humbled and awed to be in the presence of a man whose life spanned an implausible stretch of time: from a time when the last free-roaming Indians clung to the old ways to our present high-tech cyber generation. I had grown to admire the historic Native-American ways by reading books. Now I sat in the presence of a man who'd walked the Indian path, who'd been taken in as one of their own, and whose tongue still tumbled out an occasional Salish word. As a testament to the bridge that Cheff had built between Indians and white men by using trust and respect, the Salish speak of him today with the reverence and respect afforded a tribal leader.
Though Cheff and I found common ground in our admiration for the Native American culture, our passions also included the grizzly bear. Cheff had formed a kinship with the great bear by learning from the Indians how to live peacefully with this massive, lumbering beast they called Sumka. Through the years, Cheff's influence has spread to both Native-American and white society with a gospel of respect and understanding for the great bear and a spirit of restraint when man and beast cross paths. Reply