Grizzly's Last Stand

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Even though I love them, they are haunting in my dreams. When I see grizzlies in the northwestern Montana forest up here, in real life, it is more exhilarating than frightening. After the bear has seen or heard or scented me and galloped away in alarm, a feeling of awe remains. Almost always the bears run away. Sometimes if they feel that they don't have an escape route, they will bluff charge, veering away hard at the last yard, the last foot, the last inch. I don't know why they are so much more frightening in my dreams: possibly some cellular residue of caveman days. The West in many ways is a remnant of that imagination, as witnessed by the sadness of such titles as the Grizzly Drive-In, the Grizzly Auto Ranch, the University of Montana Grizzlies, Lady Griz volleyball.

I am 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 here in 1805, south of the Cabinet Mountains, pushing hard for the Pacific then and having finally learned a little about grizzlies. It is in these remaining patches of wilderness that the endangered bears are making their last stand. We don't have much left to offer of what the grizzlies need: big, wild country without roads. They need these lands desperately, absolutely: lands that are an echo of what was once an unbroken frontier.

Grizzlies once occupied the grasslands of the Dakotas, where they fed on bison that had drowned in rivers, as well as the Pacific Coast, where they fed on stranded whales. These were grizzlies of prodigious size and power, bold as the noon sun. But the waves of humanity sent the grizzlies retreating into the highest reaches of the outback, into the farthest secret little forests, where they now exist in a no-man's-land, on diets that are as much as 90% vegetarian. The industrial force of the past two centuries selected against the larger, more aggressive grizzlies in the gene pool. Anecdotal evidence suggests that they are smaller.