The Historic Grizzly

[brotherbear]

Continued from post #1...

The grizzly was then - and still is - the historic Great Plains counterpart to the lion or leopard of the Masai Mara or the striped tiger of the steamy jungles of the Bengal: the largest and most powerful creature of the landmass, fully capable of killing humans, fully capable under certain unusual conditions of consuming humans, too. In Cary's time on the plains most Americans were still hunters - George Armstrong Custer took time off from chasing Indians to shoot a grizzly in South Dakota that same summer - but in the nineteenth century we still understood that we had been prey almost as much as we'd been predators. Naturally we look especially closely and with a certain primal dread at any animal that might configure us as a meal. And especially so at an animal like a bear that is so much more human-like in its attack than big cats or sharks. Reply