The Grizzly Maze by Nick Jans

Author:Nick Jans
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group

Equally thought provoking is the bear that circumstances label Treadwell’s killer. When Van Daele first examined the big bear’s mouth in the opening stages of the necropsy, he found incontrovertible evidence that this animal had had previous human contact, though of a quite different sort—a tattoo inside its lip, a simple number: 141. It had been placed there in May 1990 by a Fish and Game team led by internationally recognized bear biologists Sterling Miller (Van Daele’s predecessor) and Dick Sellers. As part of the massive post-Exxon Valdez oil spill studies, this animal was captured by tranquilizer dart, inspected, tattooed, and released—just over the hill from Kaflia, in Kukak Bay. Almost certainly, he was a local, rather than a transient, bear. He was estimated to weigh eight hundred pounds then, and examination of an extracted tooth (growth rings similar to those on a tree provide reliable measurement) gave an age of fifteen years—a mature male in his prime. He was then, as at the time of his death, in solid shape, without notable injury or scarring. The biologists rated his body condition a 3 (average) on a scale to 5, not unusual considering it was early in the season. As is normal, his ear tags wore away—so at the time of his death, he had no outwardly apparent distinguishing marks.

Bear 141 went on to live another thirteen years before he died at Kaflia. Over the twenty-eight years of his life, he wandered untold miles with the seasons, moving each year from his den in the high country to the coastal rye grass flats where he fed and mated each spring, and on to the salmon streams and berry fields of summer and fall, where he gorged, then wandered back up into the nearby mountains to dig his den and drift off to sleep. He spent at least half of each year curled against the cold in absolute solitude, drifting through dreams we can scarcely imagine as his body consumed itself, until the gnawing of his flesh stirred him awake. Nearly three decades of this—a rare survivor, a patriarch. How many young did this bear sire? How many still walk the country, expressions of his genetic message, shaped on the uncompromising lathe of centuries? The roots of his being stretch back into a far landscape where mammoths and ground sloths wandered, and men clad in skins stood watching, small on the skyline. No doubt his ancestors crossed paths with these puny beings. Some of these bears felt the sting of arrows and spears in their flanks, and those that survived learned fear.

Somehow that lesson was momentarily forgotten, perhaps overridden by the very impulses that had carried his species so far—the instinct to defend personal space and hard-won food. And the bitter irony is that his death resulted from the actions of someone who hoped, above all, to protect creatures like this bear from others of his own kind. It’s almost certain Timothy Treadwell and this bear had known each other for years and passed each other on the beach at Kukak or the funneled trails of Kaflia.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.