Grizzly Years [antikvár]

The big bear stopped thirty feet in front of me. I slowly worked my hand into my bag and gradually pulled out the Magnum. I peered down the gun barrel into the dull red eyes of the huge grizzly. He gnashed his jaws and lowered his ears. The hair on his hump stood up. We stared at each other for what might have been seconds but felt like hours. I knew once again that I was not going to pull the trigger My shooting days were over I lowered the pistol. The giant bear flicked his ears and looked off to the side. I took a step backward and turned my head toward the trees. I felt something pass between us. The grizzly slowly turned away from me with grace and dignity and swung into the timber at the end of the meadow. I caught myself breathing heavily again, the flush of blood hot on my face. I felt my life had been touched by enormous power and mystery.I did not know that the force of that encounter would shape my life for decades to come. Tracking griz would become full-time work for six months of many years, and it lingers yet at the heart of any annual story / tell of my life. I have never questioned the route this journey took: it seems a single trip, the sole option, driven by that same potency that drew me into grizzly country in the beginning.1The Big SnowNovember (1980s)It was mid-November and a winter storm was coming to the mountains of northwest Wyoming. The wind was gentle, chinooklike, swaying the bare branches of an aspen grove against a gray sky. The trees' leaves, already drawn to the forest floor by the October frosts of the brief Rocky Mountain autumn, lay silent under crusted drifts of November snow. I struggled carrying a bulky rucksack up the open slope toward groves of mixed fir, spruce, and pine. I had a 9,000-foot ridge to climb, another valley to drop into and cross, then a steep north-facing mountainside to crawl up until I reached the 9,200-foot contour.At that elevation, under the roots of a large, lightning-struck whitebark pine, was a five-foot-long tunnel dug into the side of the forty-degree mountain slope. The hole had been dug by a young grizzly bear. I knew because I had watched him dig it. He had started on the twentieth of September, removing hundreds of pounds of gravelly loam. He planned on