Summoning the Ghost Bear

Abstract

Summoning the Ghost Bear Kim Todd (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 72] Reports of a large, gray grizzly gathered thick as mist in the North Cascades of Washington State in the 1940s. A hunter after deer near White Chuck Cinder Cone glimpsed a silvery mother and cub. Near Fire Mountain, not far from the town of Darrington, a grizzly with long gray fur and two cubs ran at a man on the trail. She chased him up a tree, raking through his boot to his foot with roughly three-inch claws. After an hour and a half in the branches, he was rescued, carried out on a horse. Roughly a year later, the bear—or a similar one with gray fur that fluttered "like a flying squirrel," an observer reported—charged at a family of six who were admiring the view from Fire Mountain. The husband shot the bear, who stopped, veered off toward Fire Creek, and then disappeared. At the time, grizzlies like these were [End Page 73] common enough that no one was surprised, but rare enough to make the newspapers. Their longtime presence in this sodden landscape along the Canadian border—characterized by sharp peaks, silver fir forests, and riotous rivers draining them—was memorialized in hunting accounts of the Salish peoples and, later, fur trading records of the Hudson Bay Company. Accounts of bears from white settlers moving in and claiming land during the late nineteenth century carried a whiff of the fable and violence of Davy Crockett tall tales. In 1888, one grizzly was shot with seven bullets, finally dying just a few moments before reaching the hunter. In 1924, an animal referred to as "a monster grizzly bear, whose footprints are as large as an ordinary hat" plundered campsites for bacon. They ravaged sheep, killed cows, and, wounded, left long, bloody trails into the bushes. Not long after the silver sow abandoned Fire Mountain, though, grizzlies became increasingly scarce. And as scientists tried to puzzle out reasons for the decline, they collected these stories, attempting to turn them into data points. Paul Sullivan, the author of a 1983 report tallying grizzly bear sightings in the North Cascades, commented on the challenge of this documentation: witnesses had died; others offered conflicting reports; still others were known to be serial exaggerators. Many white colonists' early reports of bear encounters seemed like mythological battles. But the mythologizing resulted from the nature of the observations, the glory, the dread. Sullivan wrote: "I am keenly aware that encounters with wildlife species as majestic or fearsome as the grizzly bear are privileged moments in the life of any observer." Grizzlies, like other large, fierce animals, generate legends. The introduction to my middle school short-story anthology outlined the three kinds of conflict: man versus man, man versus nature, man versus himself. "You will like these stories," the preface concluded, which I thought a bit presumptuous. But it is true that humans versus nature, particularly nature in the form of a beast, is one of Western culture's oldest forms. Hercules stalking the hydra to its swampy lair, holding his breath against the poisonous scent of the monster. Or Odysseus, slipping his ship past the hungry mouth of Scylla, lurking in her cave with her triple row of fangs, or Beowulf, challenging ravenous Grendel, who consumes men entirely, drinking their blood and eating even their hands and feet. Part of the terror of the beast is its unknowability. The heat of its breath, the sharpness of claws that might remind you of those that raked an arm as you lifted the cat off the kitchen table, though, much, much larger. Who knows what the beast is thinking, how its mind is organized, how its bizarre body—all those necks, or a lion torso topped by eagle wings—works? A theory I love proposes that dragons and other early monsters were based on dinosaur bones, unearthed and dressed in the papier-mâché of assumptions, with imagination offering the breath of life. But what happens when these beast stories take as their subject actual animals? When the werewolf is real a wolf? [End Page 74] Or a...