Running for Your Life: Bear Truth

When it comes to a wonderful piece of bear nonfiction by David Trotter (London Review of Books, Nov. 7), which refers to North American grizzlies, aka “Moby-Dick with Claws,” it's understandable the blood gets stirred to write a letter in response.

And so, a letter appears in the Dec. 5 LRB, courtesy of Jane Campbell of Oxford.

Ms. Campbell adds to the conversation started by Trotter's essay. She writes of a passage in “The Biography of a Grizzly,” by Ernest Thompson Seton, that recounts the aftermath felt by a bear cub survivor, injured in his hind leg, from a hunter’s bullet after the man had shot and killed his mother and three siblings:

“As cold night came down, he (Wahb by name) missed (his mother) more and more again, and he whimpered as he limped along, a miserable, lonely, little motherless bear … not lost in the mountains, for he had no home to seek, but so sick and lonely, and with such pain in his foot, and in his stomach a craving for a drink that would never more be his. That night he found a hollow log, and crawling in, he tried to dream that his mother’s great furry arms were around him, and he snuffled himself to sleep.”

Ms. Campbell’s letter continues:

… Wahb survives to be the biggest, fiercest grizzly in the region but never has a mate or exacts revenge on hunters. He dies of old age.

Next: Running for Your Life: How’s About “Ducks, Newburyport”?