Word: beared
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...fortunate enough to live in one of the last five scraps of country in the Lower 48 that are still wild enough to support even a vestigial population of grizzlies. In the U.S., the great bear has been reduced to near prisoner status, surviving only for certain in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem (anywhere from 200 to 600 bears); the Northern Continental Divide of Montana (400 to 500); the Selkirk population in northern Idaho (30 to 40); an enclave in northern Washington State; and, most imperiled, Montana's Cabinet-Yaak ecosystem, where perhaps two dozen survive. Lewis and Clark passed near...
Where I live, in the Yaak, a wet foggy jungle, I have been searching all this spring for the sighting or the tracks of one mother bear and her offspring, on a mountain that is scheduled to be logged hard in the name of "fuels reduction," to theoretically reduce fire danger. I belong to a local pro-roadless group called the Yaak Valley Forest Council, which would like to see the fuels reduced on this mountain but in a way that would leave all the living green trees still standing. Last year many people saw the tracks of the bear...
...mosses--an outrageous diversity that is so rare elsewhere in the West. Like some lost explorer, I make little maps on scraps of paper about what I find, and I wonder what the future will bring. In Backtracking, Long quotes a wildlife biologist on the future of the bear in Montana: "Eighty years ago, there were grizzlies leaving their tracks on the beaches, right outside Los Angeles. Eighty years ago. I bet you have a living grandparent who was alive eighty years ago. Los Angeles is a different place now. Our job is to look ahead, eighty years from...
...freak Memorial Day blizzard falls, nearly a foot of new snow. I hurry out into the forest, searching. After a few hours, I discover a set of fresh bear tracks. The bear is just ahead of me and is moving slowly, unconcerned, though the wind is not in my favor. Trees are snapping all around me under the heavy load of wet snow, a sound like occasional artillery in some newly announced or perhaps ancient and ongoing war. But I am not asking for the return of 100,000 grizzlies to the American wilderness, I'm looking for just...
...editors, though, are wimps. They were afraid that my pursuit of historical accuracy--killing a buffalo with a black-powder musket, for instance--would upset you. They were also concerned about the law, in terms of eating animals like grizzly bear, beaver, horse and whale. Worst of all, they certainly weren't going to let me eat dog. The Corps of Discovery reached the Upper Columbia during the run of the fall Chinook and coho salmon. But instead of eating the fish, they bought the local tribes' dogs for butchering. Bill Yallup Jr., a descendant of Lewis and Clark...