Humans and bears - Wild encounters

[brotherbear]

When the last grizzly bear has been dead a thousand years or more, perhaps the stories that will survive about these mighty animals will put them in a category of an incarnate demigod of the past. There is a great deal that recommends the grizzly to the fabric of a lasting legend, and the symptoms of such an investiture are already evident. By thousands of campfires and other places where outdoorsmen get together, since the first of our frontier adventurers encountered these pugnacious creatures on the plains and in the mountains of the Far West, men have told glowing stories about the grizzly - stories that have all the raw glamour of their subject and so easily rise to the height of an epic. The bravest, toughest, and most distinguished of these men have spoken with the greatest of pride about their conquests of the grizzly - Lewis and Clark, Zebulon Pike, Kit Carson, Stonewall Jackson, General Custer, Theodore Roosevelt, and many more. Not one has held him lightly; and most have honestly respected him in their hearts - just as the old-time Indian considered it an accomplishment of greater bravery and distinction to have killed a grizzly than to have taken the scalp of any human enemy. One can cast aside all the yarns of the neophytes and the fabrications of imaginative journalists who never really knew the grizzly; and one can fully discount all the honest doubts and theories; and still Old Ephraim stands realistically in all the impressive admiration which might be expected of the largest and most powerful of all carnivorous creatures on earth today. - The Beast that walks like Man by Harold McCracken. Reply