by Will Hobbs
In the afternoons Walter would tire of being on his feet, and he’d pick at little cracks in the stream bottom’s bedrock, cleaning all the grooves and cracks with a screwdriver bent at right angles near the tip. The old man called it “crevice mining,” but to Cloyd it looked like Walter was an old dentist who’d just gone crazy.
It didn’t seem as crazy when the old man brought him a nugget the size of a raisin that had been caught in one of the cracks. Walter Landis was so excited, Cloyd could picture what he’d be like if he actually found a big treasure. His heart might not be able to take it. He might die on the spot out of pure happiness.
At the edge of a melt pond, below snowbanks that had survived the summer in the shadows, Cloyd found bear tracks in the mud. They showed five toes but lacked the grizzly’s long claws. Nearby, fresh bear scat. Even if it wasn’t a grizzly, he wanted to track this bear.
The trail led down the mountain into the timber, where the bear had stopped to dig up a squirrel’s cache and to overturn a log for the ants and grubs underneath. Cloyd tracked the bear upslope now, far from any trail, and thought he’d lost it when he emerged from the forest at the tree line. The bear wasn’t above him on the open, grassy slopes as he’d hoped. But when he crouched and then crawled up to the very top of the Divide, with the wind blowing stiffly in his face, there the black bear was, not thirty feet away, sitting on its haunches and sniffing the wind.
The bear couldn’t see him and didn’t catch his scent either, until the wind shifted a little. All it took was a look over its shoulder, and the bear exploded in flight down the mountainside. The black bear didn’t stop running until it had reached the timber more than a mile below. Cloyd had read about this, how fast a bear could run, but he’d never seen it himself.
As if out of the sky, a woman appeared over the grassy slope of the Divide. She was coming his way.
As the hiker approached, he could see that her eyes were shaped like his. Almond-eyed, high-cheekboned, with dark, braided hair that fell almost to her waist, she had to be Indian, though she didn’t look very much like a Ute or Navajo. She was carrying a big pack, but she wasn’t bent under it. Her legs were sinewy and strong, and she came striding toward him across the alpine carpet of short wildflowers, out of the blue sky and billowing white clouds. From her neck hung the largest pair of binoculars he had ever seen and a camera with an extra-long lens.
“That bear was sure surprised,” the woman said in greeting, with a smile at her lips. “You could’ve almost tapped him on the shoulder. I’ve been watching you. You’re a good tracker.” Her eyes were black, and her chin delicate like his sister’s. He guessed she might be the age his mother would have been, had she lived.
“I’m just learning,” he said.
She didn’t offer her hand, and Cloyd was glad of that. She was curious about him, but her eyes didn’t try to know him all at once. “I’m Cloyd Atcitty,” he offered.
“I’m Ursa.”
She took off her pack and sat quietly, and admired the view. Her eyes were on the Pyramid and the Window. Close at her throat, a small, flattened turquoise bear hung suspended from a delicate gold chain.
“Your necklace,” Cloyd said. “It’s a bear.”
The Indian woman who’d appeared out of the sky smiled a smile that reminded him even more of his sister, who was curious and did well in school and liked to laugh. The woman touched her bear charm and said, “It’s for my name, Ursa. My name means ‘bear’”
Everything about her was filling him with surprise and awe. Yet she was easy to talk to. “What are you doing up here?” he asked her. “Where did you come from?”
She laughed. “I was about to ask you the same question. But you asked first. This morning I came from the head of Snowslide Canyon, and I’m looking for grizzly bears in these mountains.”
Ursa was watching his eyes to see his reaction. She could see how keenly he was listening.
Cloyd asked quickly, “Have you found any?”
The woman with the long braid shook her head. “Of course, I’ve only been trying for three weeks. There’ve been teams from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service looking all summer…. They’ve given up; they’re all gone now. There’s only me left, and a couple of game wardens who are somewhere west of that mountain right now.”
She was pointing toward the Rio Grande Pyramid.
“Are you from around here?” Cloyd asked doubtfully.
Ursa brought out two granola bars and gave him one. “I’m a wildlife biologist—I research grizzlies. I teach at the University of Montana in Missoula. Unfortunately, I’m running out of time down here on my grizzly search—I have to be back in the classroom nine days from now.”
Cloyd was wondering how much she knew. Had there been more sightings? “How come everybody’s looking for grizzlies?” he asked her.
Ursa paused, looking out over the mountains, nibbling at her granola bar. Cloyd had already wolfed his. He was pleased that the storm in the Needles didn’t look like it was heading their way. The sun was shining on this conversation, which he didn’t want to end.
“I’ll go back to the beginning,” Ursa said with a smile. “Last summer there was a grizzly bear killed in these mountains. It was the first grizzly confirmed in Colorado since the early 1950s. When people think of grizzlies, they think of a few places in Wyoming and Montana, but not Colorado. The story even ran in papers around the country—people were amazed. It caught people’s imagination to think of grizzlies surviving in Colorado all this time.”
“Grizzlies? You said grizzlies. There’s more than that one, for sure?”
Ursa’s black eyes reflected hope and doubt at the same time. “The only evidence we have so far is the word of the outfitter who killed the grizzly last summer. He claims he saw a grizzly with three cubs this May, over in that drainage there….” The grizzly woman, as Cloyd now thought of her, was pointing to the Rincon La Vaca, below the Pyramid on the Pine River side. “But I’m not sure I believe him, even if he is fully qualified to tell grizzlies apart from black bears. This guy goes to Alaska to hunt grizzlies every year. He’s not exactly a friend of bears.”
Mention of the red-haired man was making Cloyd sick and angry. The red-haired man always seemed to be the big man in the middle of things.
“No one who knows bears and knows his background really believes his version of what happened last summer, when the grizzly supposedly surprised him….”
Cloyd’s heart was beating fast. Not everybody had believed Rusty’s story.
“There was someone who might know what really did happen,” the grizzly woman said. “There was supposed to have been a boy, a Ute boy, who was there when the bear was killed….”
Cloyd’s face was blank, like a mask. He would let her talk.
Suddenly she stopped and looked at him. “You,” she said. “You are that boy, aren’t you?”
He nodded. It was time to tell her his story. She wanted to know, and he would tell her.
As he was about to begin, she said, “Start from the beginning.”
Cloyd wondered where the beginning was. His mother, who died getting him born? His father, in a sleep he would never waken from in the hospital in Window Rock? His grandmother, who raised him; the group home in Durango?
“I found a bearstone once,” he said, pointing at the charm at her throat with a twist of his lips.
He was sparing with his words, but Cloyd told her more of himself, of his true feelings, than he had ever told anyone before. He wanted to tell his story to this woman. In addition to being the grizzly woman, it felt like she was his sister, his grandmother, the mother he never knew. He told her about Walter Landis, the farm, and the gold mine, and he told her the true story of what had really happened when Rusty killed the grizzly.
“I’m not surprised,” Ursa said when he was done. Her voice sounded tired and sad. “It’s an old story, the mountain man killing the thing he loves. Indian people have known this lesson for a long time. The People
know that the hunter who only takes and gives nothing in return will one day wake up to find that all the animals have vanished. This is what comes from not recognizing that people and animals are all relatives in the spirit world.”
It was strange, how closely her words echoed his grandmother’s. “Do you really believe there’s a spirit world?” he asked her.
Ursa’s eyes shone with conviction. “Oh, yes,” she said softly.
It made him feel good to hear her talk.
“Cloyd, I only hope Rusty Owens was telling the truth about the mother and cubs. Let me tell you what’s at stake…. If any of us can prove there are still grizzlies in Colorado, in this Weminuche Wilderness, it means they’ll be given the greatest possible protection under the Endangered Species Act, and most likely more will be brought in, to insure a breeding population.”
At first Cloyd doubted he could have heard right. This news was almost too wonderful to believe. “That’s true?” he asked her, not with a smile, but with almost desperate hope.
“True,” the grizzly woman said. “Prove one, they’ll bring others.”
He could hardly wait to tell the old man about that. “Can you camp with us tonight?” Cloyd asked her, looking away as he said it. He didn’t want her to leave.
“Sounds great,” she said. “And I’d love to meet your friend.”
On their way down to the camp on East Ute Creek, Cloyd told her about the bear scat he’d found. Ursa was listening carefully. “I’ll take some hairs from it,” she told him. “In the laboratory, they’ll be able to tell if it’s black bear or grizzly. The chromosome structures in the DNA are different.”
Cloyd led her down the mountainside. Behind him, he heard nothing, she walked so quietly. He could learn to go as softly. One thing she had said above all others stuck in his mind and kept repeating itself: “Prove one, they’ll bring others.”
It was a special time, this evening with the grizzly woman in camp. Walter had baked a peach cobbler in the Dutch oven, and Ursa and Cloyd both ate seconds. She liked peaches and peach cobbler just as much as he did. They were finishing up their cobbler, and the old man was pouring coffee out of the old enamel pot. “Nothing like coffee out in the fresh air,” Walter was saying. “Never tastes better. Warms up the old bones. Cloyd, you sure are a lucky fellow. Imagine meeting someone way back here that’s as keen on bears as you are….”
The woman was eyeing both of them fondly, this unlikely combination of a Ute boy and an old white rancher. She’d been charmed by the grizzled farmerturned-prospector and his fascination with gold, his eagerness to speak of the excitement of the search, his instinctive reluctance to tell in detail of the treasure he was after. She was sipping her coffee, and the firelight was dancing in her dark eyes.
“If I might,” the old man asked the grizzly woman in a formal tone, “and I don’t mean to pry … but is Ursa your entire name?”
“It is,” she replied. “I gave it to myself at the time I decided to make grizzlies my life’s work. The name I grew up with was Elizabeth Torsness. I grew up in southeast Alaska. My mother is Tlingit and my father’s people were some Tlingit and some Norwegian. His great-grandfather came from Norway during the Alaska gold rush.”
Alaska, Cloyd thought. The name had magic and power. Alaska was big and beautiful, he knew, but mostly what it meant to him was bears. Alaska meant huge bears.
“ ‘Kling-it’?” the old man repeated. “I don’t believe I’ve heard of Kling-its.” He stroked his beard with great seriousness. “Heard of Kling-ons—Cloyd and I went to one of them Star Trek movies.”
The grizzly woman had a good laugh. “That’s the way it sounds, but it has a funny spelling. Begins with a T instead of a K. We’re one of the tribes that carves the totem poles. We didn’t for a long time, but now we’re starting to again.”
Walter was shaking his head in wonder and pouring himself another cup of coffee. He held it in his hands, letting the hot cup warm them before it warmed him inside. “I always wanted to see Alaska,” he said. “I guess I never will.”
“Did you see bears where you grew up?” Cloyd asked her.
“Bears were our only neighbors,” Ursa replied. “They were grizzly bears, though in Alaska people mostly call them brown bears or especially ‘brownies.’ I grew up on Admiralty Island, a big island off the coast. My father was a fisherman and he built a float house about halfway between the mouths of two streams. The brownies fished too, and when the salmon were running you could see as many as twenty around the falls on one of those creeks.”
“Twenty grizzlies in one place,” the old man marveled. “Imagine that, Cloyd.”
Cloyd was imagining, as Ursa was filling in the details. “The falls were only about six feet high,” she said. “Bears would stake out their favorite fishing holes, either in the stream right below the falls or right on the edge of the falls themselves. Now and then they would have terrible fights over the best spots … but grizzlies can take as well as give horrible wounds. They have amazing powers of healing.”
“And you would see them catch the fish?” Cloyd asked.
“Oh, yes. I especially liked to watch the ones standing on the lip of the falls, They’d just hang their heads out there—sometimes they’d grab one in midair. I watched them all the time. A brownie can eat a hundred pounds of salmon in a day. There’s so much food up there … that’s why they grow bigger than Rocky Mountain grizzlies.”
Cloyd was having trouble picturing one thing. “How can you get close enough to watch them … without getting hurt?”
“Don’t get me wrong,” Ursa said. “Grizzlies can be dangerous…. But people and bears have been sharing those salmon streams for thousands of years. It’s a matter of respecting the bears’ dominance, knowing how to act around them, knowing the distance that’s comfortable for them.”
“How close?” the old man wondered, his eyes wide.
“At the creeks, a few hundred feet. They were used to us. It was close enough—they looked enormous to me. Quite a few of them weighed upward of a thousand pounds. We’d see them all the time on the tidal flats around our house. They’d loll around like hound dogs.”
“Holy cow!” Walter exclaimed. “I thought I could tell a whopper, Cloyd. Her actual life story’s taller’n a whopper!”
Ursa had a sparkle in her eye and Cloyd wondered for a moment if she was making all this up, but he didn’t think so.
“Sometimes people came to visit,” she continued. “They’d want to see the bears fishing. They were uncomfortable if my father didn’t carry a weapon along, so he carried a hefty stick just to make them feel better.”
“Did he ever use it?” asked Cloyd, who was anxious to know more about how dangerous grizzlies were.
She smiled. “If a thousand-pound bear charged at thirty miles an hour …,” the grizzly woman calculated, “that stick wouldn’t have seemed like much of a weapon. No, he never used it, but he did get hurt once by a bear. It was a bear that was new to the creek. The bear rushed him and broke his collarbone and three ribs….”
The grizzly woman’s face filled with emotion as she paused, remembering. “It was my mother who saved my father from a worse mauling, or even being killed. Was that bear ever surprised when she opened her umbrella in his face! I’ll never forget the look in that bear’s eyes and how fast it ran off.”
“Well, I’ll be busted to flinderjigs!” Walter exclaimed, with a quick slap to his knee. “My, my … And how about you, Ursa? This research that you do among the grizzlies in Wyoming and Montana … have you ever been hurt?”
Ursa gave a few raps on the log she was sitting on. “Not so far. I’m very careful not to blunder between a mother and her cubs, but I do get a lot closer than hikers who are wearing bells, making noise, giving bears the opportunity to vanish without ever being seen. I need to get close to make my notes and to take pictures and movies. Grizzlies get used to me being around, and they’ll go about their business. But I’ve been charged a few times
over the years….”
Now Cloyd’s eyes were as wide as saucers. “You were?”
“Grizzlies will bluff you into giving them the space they feel they need. The scary part is, their bluffs don’t look like bluffs in the least. It’s the scariest thing in your life. If the bear not only stands up, but woofs several times … if you hear a popping sound of the jaws, and the bear lays its ears back—look out.”
“Good lord,” the old man whispered hoarsely.
Cloyd felt like he was there, and one of those bears was charging him.
Ursa’s teeth were clenched. “If you turn and run,” she said, “you’ll probably get mauled. In a short burst, they’re faster than a racehorse.”
“Then what do you do?” Cloyd wondered.
“You try to make yourself look as big as possible, without making any threatening gestures. But don’t look the bear in the eye. You talk softly and apologetically. If it charges, it’ll probably stop before it gets to you. Or sometimes it’ll run right past you.”
The old man was pulling hard on his beard. “Gives me chills just thinking about it!”
She shrugged. “I try to keep in mind that I’m statistically much more at risk driving on the highway. So, the more time I spend in grizzly country and out of my car, the longer I’ll live, statistically speaking.”
Cloyd could tell that Walter liked this woman. Cloyd liked watching the old man’s face as he listened to her stories. Walter said with a grin, “Must be hard to recall those statistics when a grizzly’s charging….”
“They are simply awesome creatures,” Ursa replied. “You never forget how powerful they are and how deadly they could be. The amazing thing is, ordinarily they’re ferocious only when attacked. They don’t take kindly to being killed, and when they are being killed, ‘they’re hard to put down’ as the hunters in Alaska often say. They can do a lot of damage as they’re dying.”