A Grizzly For Alice

Most fearsome of all North American big game, the grizzly bear has the strength, speed and cunning to engender both terror and admiration. Native peoples identified it as a mighty spirit. Mountain men gave it a wide berth. Encounters with grizzlies on the Lewis and Clark expedition showed the bears to be so resistant to musket balls, and so aggressive when wounded, that men were forbidden to engage a grizzly alone. Settlers carving new futures in the American West found these creatures ruinous.

Fact and legend became intertwined as tales of the great bears proliferated. Some of the most remarkable stories were true. In 1904 Outdoor Life published one such tale. "Conquest of the King of the Grizzlies" began this way:

Old Mose, the most dreaded grizzly bear in the entire United States, met a death befitting his long life of murder and outrages at 4 o'clock on Saturday evening, April 30. His last stand was made in a quaking asp draw within the confines of his home among the broken rocks near Canon City, Colorado.

Jack Bell's long article included a sidebar with pertinent statistics. Age: 40 years. Weight: 1,000 pounds. Killed: Three men, 800 head of cattle. Shot over 100 times. Reward offered for him for 30 years. Cost of his depredations: $30,000. Identified by two toes missing on left hind foot. Killed: April 30, 1904. Hunters: J.W. Antburry and W.H. "Wort" Pigg (dogs: Ray, Ring, Ginger and Dummit).

Stories about Old Mose and the killing of "Four Toes," his intimidating offspring, ran in Outdoor Life for the next eighteen months. But that was a century ago. Habitat for the wide-ranging grizzly has since steadily diminished. Farms and ranches, then suburbia and interstate highways have blotted out huge sections of the grizzly's home range in the Lower 48. There the bears are now fully protected. In Alaska and the western Canadian provinces, grizzlies still thrive, but nonresident sport hunting for them is limited.

Despite pressures on their habitat and bear/human conflicts that keep grizzlies from areas that might otherwise accommodate them, exceptionally big bears still turn up. In 1970 James Shelton found a massive grizzly bear skull in Bella Coola Valley, British Columbia. This "pickup" became the new world record for the species, topping the list in the Boone & Crockett Club's 1981 edition of Records of North American Big Game. Remarkably, a bear with an equally impressive head fell to a hunter's rifle in the same province the very next year. Roger J. Pentecost's account of his adventure on the Dean River was subsequently published by B&C...

Suddenly, off to our left about 70 feet away and partly obscured by a cedar, something started to move slowly up out of the ground. It was a massive head in profile, followed by an enormous shoulder hump. We froze. Here was what we had come all this way for--a good bear. But really, I never wanted it quite so close. As I readied my Husqvarna, I heard Jason close his gun... I squeezed the shot off. But, the bear, instead of falling over dead, rose up out of the hollow in the ground and turned toward us. Here it was, coming right at us. I aimed at his shoulder, still hardly believing he wasn't down. This next shot hit his side... he plunged off sideways into a thick area of alders, windfalls and devil's club. As he was going in, I placed a third shot.