The Historic Grizzly

[brotherbear]

Continued...
The big sow grizzly hurried down the forested trail but paused long enough to throw her snout skyward, sniffing loudly. The sweet odor of decaying flesh once again reached her nostrils and set her belly to grumbling. Since emerging from hibernation two weeks ago, she had eaten only the same dry grass and bark from a few saplings.
The tantalizing odor made her want to gallop forward, but her three cubs were hanging back, play-fighting and snooping under rocks and logs. At any other time, she would have encouraged their play and foraging. Now, she uttered a deep grunt of impatience. The startled cubs scrambled close to her.
At a bend in the trail beside a creek, the odor became overpowering, and the sow loped ahead to a pile of freash-cut logs. At the base of the log pile she found the hide and guts of a deer. The sow stepped forward, mouth agape to devour the food. Suddenly she felt a sharp pain in her right leg. For a moment, she stared down, confused by the strange thing fastened to her paw. Then she smelled the steel.
A furious bellow ripped through the air, knocking the frightened cubs backward. The sow lunged to escape the massive no. 5 Newhouse bear trap, but the heavy device stayed securely fastened to her paw, even though she dragged two eight-foot logs attached to the trap with heavy chains some 50 feet down the trail. Soon the logs became entangled in a thicket of small trees. 
The sow turned her fury on the trap and bit it so hard that her upper canine teeth were broke. The pain, at first bothersome, became maddening as the trap bit deeper into her flesh with every frantic lunge.
For three hours the sow was a whirling dervish of bellowing, fighting, roaring, tearing fury until at last she lay back, exhausted. The cubs timidly approached her to nurse, but the sow pushed them away and returned to biting at the trap. By sundown, her lower canines and all of her molars were cracked or broken. 
The next day was a torturous blur for the sow, by now almost mad with pain and thirst, and the pitiful wailing of her hungry frightened cubs. Then came night, then day, and night and day. The pain eventually was replaced by a numbness in the paw, which had swelled to twice its normal size as a mixture of blood and lymph oozed from deep cuts made by the steel jaws.
On the morning of the fourt day, the sow was startled awake. She heard and smelled something. She reared up to her full height of seven feet, the big bear trap dangling from her right paw, and spotted the man cautiously approaching. The sow laid back her ears and lunged, but the trap held her fast.  Reply