Remember when the Government Moved Wolves Back Into Yellowstone? Well, Now They’re Hoping to Return the Grizzly to the Wilds of Idaho. The Welcome Wagon Is Not Waiting. : Howdy Neighbors!

It is the first day of fall, the morning after the first hard freeze, and the wind that rushes through the firs already carries the chilly promise of winter.

Summer’s juicy huckleberries are long gone. The elk have rubbed the velvet off their antlers, leaving shreds of skin strung like Christmas lights on the bark of trees. The gray granite ridges, still bare of snow, cast autumn shadows on the deep saddles below. Now is when the king of this forest, the grizzly bear, should be obsessing on food--culminating its yearly carbo-loading ritual of scrounging up one-third its own weight every day in bugs, rodents and roots before bedding down for a long, long slumber.

For decades, the grizzly’s fall feast marked an annual rite of passage here in the Bitterroot Mountains, straddling Idaho and Montana. And at first glance, the Bitterroots haven’t changed much since the frontier days almost two centuries ago when Lewis and Clark struggled to cross them on the most harrowing part of a harrowing journey.

But today an emptiness looms here for old mountain men like Bud Moore, who spent their youth hunting game and trapping mink, and for generations have spread the lore of these jagged peaks. It’s an emptiness--a sense of missing a beloved but irascible friend--that used to come only in the abyss of winter, when the great bears slept.

This vast, untamed wilderness is still grizzly country. There just aren’t any grizzlies.

Fifty-some years ago, the Bitterroot grizzly made its last stand among these lush firs, pines and alpine meadows. A symbol of the old West and a casualty of the new, the big bruins vanished after finding themselves on the wrong end of settlers’ Winchesters.

Now the federal government wants to bring the king back to the Bitterroots. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service hopes to airlift several Canadian grizzlies to the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness in Idaho, starting in 1997, in the world’s first experiment to reintroduce the top predator to an ecosystem it no longer inhabits.

But their mission has incited a phenomenal wave of Western angst. Townspeople alternately dread and worship this animal they likely will never see. The region, half-tamed, half-raw, is grappling with just how much “wild” it wants in its wilderness.

Sprawled across 10,000 square miles of federal forest and wilderness lands, the Bitterroot Mountains are the biggest, wildest, remotest place left in America’s lower 48 states. Yet some people insist it’s still not big enough, wild enough or remote enough for such a ferocious predator.

But if not here, then where? Where is there room for the legendary animals of the West except in zoos?

Protected as a threatened species in every state but Alaska, grizzly bears have vanished from 98% of the lands south of Canada they once occupied, an immense area stretching from California’s coast to Missouri’s prairies. Federal biologists believe at least one new major population must be created in the Rockies to ensure the bears’ long-term survival.

Hoping to sidestep the sideshow that erupted this year over release of another predator--gray wolves--in Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho, some traditional foes have teamed together. Environmentalists and the timber industry have crafted a novel plan that would bring the grizzlies back, but only under the firm control of local citizens.

The local control idea, which is unprecedented, raises some fundamental questions: Just who, or what, is wilderness for? Are the stewards of public land the people who live the closest and have the most at stake, or are they all Americans, via their government caretakers?

To the people of Hamilton, Mont., which stands at the gate of the Bitterroot National Forest and at the heart of anti-government rebelliousness, the grizzly has come to personify not the frontier, but the heavy hand of the feds.

Grizzlies are to Montana what great white sharks are to Southern California: A curiosity elsewhere, a menace up close. Many folks in Hamilton worry that the 400-pound beasts will wander down to the Gas ‘n’ Grub or Bad Bubba’s BBQ on Main Street and maul their children or make meals of their cows and horses. The rural West’s old survival strategies--”the only good bear is a dead bear” and “shoot, shovel and shut up”--are hard to shake.

Other Bitterroot locals say the war to tame the West has already been won; now it’s time to give some of the territory back.

Moore, who fought fires, cleared trails, trapped furs or managed timber here for most of four decades, is one of a few people who remember when grizzlies roamed these mountains. His chiseled face harbors traces of both the old frontier and the new: Born at a time when men were called heroes for slaughtering grizzlies--some hunters killed as many as 100 apiece--he has lived long enough to call that folly.

“When there’s a grizzly on the mountain and you know it, you’re in a wilder place by far,” says Moore, 78, with eyes the blue of a mountain-fed pond and a grandfatherly grin that widens whenever he talks about the bears. “It’s just a dead place without them. I’d like to see the Bitterroots regain that wildness.”

*

From the crest of Diablo Mountain in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness of Idaho, a mile and a half up, John Weaver trains his binoculars to the east and points toward a ridge that marks the border with Montana. Out of sight some 20 miles away lies Montana’s Bitterroot Valley, site of one of the fastest-growing subdivisions in the Rockies. Yet from this vantage point--one that grizzlies may soon share--not a single road nor roof is within view. Even the chain saws humming in the forest to the north are out of earshot.

From here, one can certainly sympathize with Lewis and Clark, who, while eyeing these steep-sided peaks and narrow, timber-filled valleys, wondered how their expedition team would ever make it out alive. “The worst roads that ever horses passed,” Clark wrote about the Bitterroots. “The most terrible mountains I ever beheld,” exclaimed another explorer.

Even today, few people pass through this wild, roadless terrain--only a smattering of hunters, backpackers, rafters and anglers. One can sometimes hike for days without seeing another human face. Combined, the wilderness areas and national forest lands here make up the largest contiguous block of federal territory outside the California desert.

As remote as this wilderness seems, though, a grizzly could easily follow the drainages of streams straight toward Main Street in Hamilton. In fact, black bears already do it.

“The problem is,” says Weaver, a biologist who until recently was team leader of the federal government’s Bitterroot grizzly plan, “bears don’t recognize human boundaries. Eventually some would come over the top and into Montana. No question about it. The question is how long and how many.”

After a 15-year search for a new home for grizzlies, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is due to unveil in March details of an $800,000 federal experiment. The agency is likely to announce plans to capture four to six grizzlies in British Columbia each year for five years and release them near the center of the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, beginning in the summer of 1997.

Although grizzlies are abundant in Canada and Alaska, they have been retreating from the continental United States since the turn of the century. The animal that graces California’s state flag hasn’t actually existed anywhere in the state since 1922, when the last one was shot by a San Joaquin Valley rancher. Only an estimated 800 grizzlies remain in the continental states of the more than 50,000 prior to European settlement.

Biologists believe the two major populations that exist south of Canada--in Yellowstone and Glacier national parks and the Bob Marshall Wilderness in Montana--are not sufficient to sustain the bears’ long-term health. Isolated pockets of threatened or endangered species are vulnerable to disease, starvation, inbreeding or other dangers.

But perhaps the late naturalist Aldo Leopold best summed up the modern philosophy behind reintroduction in words he penned 50 years ago: “There seems to be a tacit assumption that if grizzlies survive in Canada and Alaska, that is good enough. That is not good enough for me. Relegating grizzlies to Alaska is about like relegating happiness to heaven; one may never get there.”

A majority of Americans today seem to agree with Leopold, if a survey of more than 900 people sponsored by the federal wildlife agency is an accurate reflection.

Nationally, 77% of those polled said they strongly or moderately support bringing grizzlies back to the Bitterroots, mostly because they want to save the bears from extinction and make wild ecosystems whole. The closer people live to these mountains, they are somewhat more wary: 73% of people surveyed in the Rockies and 62% of those in Idaho and Montana said they were strongly or moderately supportive. However, in a separate poll conducted only in Hamilton, the results were nearly the exact opposite: 59% said they opposed reintroduction.

Emotions here are running feverish, to say the least, with mail from more than 3,000 people flooding the wildlife agency’s office in Missoula in July and August alone.

“If these flower sniffing environmentalists . . . are so infatuated with saving these predators, then take them and your selves and go back to East L.A., California or whichever rat-hole place you come from and transplant them there,” wrote one self-described “Native American, Native Montanan and Native Bitterrooter.”

“I can assure you that I will not allow one of these animals to attack me, my family or my livestock . . . I’ll shoot the bastard,” wrote another Montanan.

Others, however, said they were willing to risk an occasional attack on a hiker or livestock to see the Bitterroots finally become “whole” again.

“I have chosen to remain in Montana because of the singular beauty and diversity of wildlife,” one cattle and sheep rancher wrote. “The grizzly really gives Montana its uniqueness and deserves every chance for survival.”

“When a hiker whines about fear of the bears and the need for safer trails, I say we need more bears. Preferably hungry ones,” wrote another supporter.

By far the most passionate argument against the bears is the risk of their leaving the wilderness behind and crossing the granite ridges into the suburbia and ranchland of the Bitterroot Valley. An occasional wayward male, which has a range encompassing several hundred square miles, might indeed try it, grizzly experts acknowledge. All the reintroduced grizzlies, though, would be equipped with collars transmitting radio signals, and the wildlife service has promised to move ones that wander toward populated spots, just as they already airlift bears out of well-traveled areas of Yellowstone and Glacier parks.

With that in mind, federal wildlife biologists say the risk to the bears probably exceeds the risk to the people. A grizzly fears nothing except rifles and starvation--and both are threats in the Bitterroots.

“If I was an ol’ grizzly in here,” Weaver says while hiking along a trail devoid of berries and nuts, “I’d be looking for mushrooms, digging for pocket gophers and listening for gun shots.”

Biologists are at odds over whether changes in the Bitterroot wilderness since the grizzlies vanished have left insufficient natural food in fall months to satiate the astounding hunger of the animals as they prepare to den for the winter.

The Chinook salmon have disappeared. The nut-bearing white bark pine has been decimated by disease. And the huckleberries are not as abundant as they are in the Yellowstone and Glacier parks. Each day a Montana grizzly eats the equivalent caloric load of 10 huckleberry pies, and the bulk of it is plants. Except for insects, rodents and an occasional wounded elk, meat in their diets is rare.

“Superficially, you look out here and say this is pretty wild country. Must be bear country,” Weaver says. “Yet there’s been these ecological changes, some of which started off-site--the dams down below, the blister rust coming from Canada--so it’s a real story of the stresses put on our ecosystems even in lands managed as wilderness.”

Weaver fears if the area has inadequate food, the bears are more likely to wander into the valley, or look for animal remains left by hunters, bringing them into conflict with people.

But Chris Servheen, a University of Montana bear specialist who is coordinating the Fish and Wildlife Service’s grizzly recovery program, stressed that although some of the Bitterroots’ food sources are not ideal, there are still plenty of insects, roots, berries and small mammals to provide nutritious grizzly meals: In human terms, it’s not lobster, but it’s at least bologna.

“I don’t have enough confidence in my abilities to judge whether that’s really good habitat in there or really bad,” Servheen says. “I’m concerned enough to just put a few bears in there and see what they do. We’ll let the bears decide.”

*

As Hank Fischer sees it, environmentalists in Montana and Idaho are like Indiana Jones searching for the Holy Grail: When the archeologist of film fame encountered a giant chasm, he took a chance and jumped--and landed on a bridge that materialized out of thin air.

“You just have to make this leap of faith,” says Fischer, who has been an active conservationist longer than anyone in the northern Rockies. “That’s what we are up to [in the Bitterroots].”

The giant chasm, in this case, is the polarization over bringing predators back to the West.

Earlier this year, gray wolves incited a groundswell of opposition among livestock owners and many local politicians when the Fish and Wildlife Service released them in Yellowstone and the southern Bitterroots. To protest loss of control over their own destiny, Montana legislators introduced a resolution that if wolves are returned to Yellowstone, they should be set free in New York City, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., too. The common refrain was: “No wolves, no way, nowhere.”

The wolf war had dragged on for over 10 years, and even at the last minute, the wolves destined for central Idaho were held up in pens at the Missoula airport for two days until a judge rejected an eleventh-hour injunction request from the livestock industry.

“It was a poor model for species conservation,” says Fischer of Defenders of Wildlife, the lead environmental group behind the move to bring the wolves back. “It was too long, too polarized, too expensive.”

Facing a controversy over the grizzly that is even more fierce--to match the legendary ferocity of the animal itself--Defenders of Wildlife and the National Wildlife Federation have teamed with a traditional enemy, the timber industry, to try a new power-sharing tactic in bringing the bears back.

Under their proposal, a 13-member commission composed largely of residents chosen by the governors of Idaho and Montana would oversee day-to-day management decisions, such as determining when a grizzly should be moved to avoid conflict with timber harvests. Under the traditional approach, the Fish and Wildlife Service has sole authority to make all such decisions regarding endangered species.

The timber industry has endorsed the plan because it would put bears only in protected wilderness areas where log-cutting is already banned rather than harvested lands to the north. The bears would be declared a “nonessential experimental” population, which means if one moves into the forest north of the Lochsa River, the companies are immune from the usual rigorous steps required by the Endangered Species Act before building roads and cutting timber.

The unprecedented alliance between the timber industry and the two environmental groups has derailed much of the expected opposition from Montana’s and Idaho’s conservative politicians.

Montana Gov. Marc Racicot has endorsed the “power-sharing” compromise, saying it is better than the alternative: the federal government ramming it down their throats as it did with wolves. Idaho Gov. Phil Batt, however, maintains a “no bears, no way” stance. The congressional representatives of both states, who have been extremely vocal in their opposition to the wolf reintroduction, so far have been uncharacteristically silent on the grizzlies, largely out of deference to the timber industry. Local political support--or at least a neutral silence--is considered crucial to ensure funding for the program, especially in this era of belt-tightening and environmental reform in Congress.

“Given the politics of the situation, it is absolutely essential to bring in the groups that have opposed reintroduction and recovery,” says Tom France, an attorney with the National Wildlife Federation. “If the price is to give up some of the decision-making, that is a fair price.”

Still, handing over so much control to citizens in conservative states is a leap of faith for the environmentalists. And putting a protected species within roaming distance of prime timber is perhaps an even bigger leap of faith for the lumber companies, which, like the governors, feel it’s better than having no say at all.

“All of us realize the old way of doing things doesn’t work in the long run,” says Seth Diamond of the Intermountain Forest Industry Assn. “As an industry, we’ve been just saying no to this sort of thing and not being successful. So we want to try something new. The Bitterroot gives us an ideal opportunity to test a new concept. “

The consensus, however, has split the environmental community. Leaders of the Sierra Club and National Audubon Society, among others, are angry that some of their colleagues want to hand over some control of federal lands to a commission subject to the whims of politicians and the timber industry.

“[It is] bad for bears, bad for conservation and sets dangerous precedents for endangered species recovery planning,” conservationist Brian Peck says. “There is no provision to ensure a strong conservation voice on the committees. In fact, there is nothing to keep the governors from appointing only people who gave $10,000 to their last campaign.”

Federal wildlife officials are reluctant to surrender their authority, but they are so worried about political backlash that they likely will try the citizens’ approach, with some added legal assurances that the bears will not be treated like pawns.

“I really like having citizens involved, because Lord knows, we don’t have all the answers. They know the land quite well, they know their own communities,” says Weaver, who recently resigned from the grizzly team due to a family illness.

“But we’re walking that fine line between trying to accommodate local interests while still considering the larger national interest. This land is public land. It belongs to all of the American people, not just one special interest or one town.”

*

Even in this land famous for its rugged individualists, Lee Foss is a rarity: A third-generation Montanan raising a fourth. As a teenager, he climbed aboard the school bus with a loaded rifle, and the driver let him off along the banks of the Bitterroot River so he could hunt his way back home.

To this day, Foss and his siblings live on the land where they grew up--a sprawling, 1,500-acre ranch their grandfather bought for 25 cents an acre back in the 1800s, not too many years after the original settlers passed through here to map the first course to the Pacific.

But the reality of life in Montana today is vastly different than when Foss grew up. Living with one foot in his grandfather’s 1890s and one foot in his own 1990s, he has to supplement his traditional cattle and horse ranch with a real estate business that sells ranches to out-of-towners, many of them Californians trying to mortgage a piece of the mythical Montana that only exists in their dreams.

By the time Foss, now 47, was born, the Bitterroots had already been somewhat tamed, and the grizzlies wiped out by hunters and trappers trying to civilize the forest.

“You can’t turn back time,” Foss says, standing in the kitchen of the modern ranch house he built on his 300 acres of land to make life in the Bitterroot Valley more hospitable for his San Diego-raised wife. “Progress happens. They want to bring the grizzly back because that’s the way nature used to be. They want to turn this place back to the 1800s.”

For Foss and his neighbors in Hamilton, population 2,737, living on the edge of a national forest quickly dispels romanticized notions of wild animals. Instead comes the patience and pragmatism it takes to share the land with them.

Black bears lick their Weber grills and bump their rumps against their apple trees to knock down the unreachable fruit. Moose bathe in their ponds, cougars prowl around their horse pens, bobcats lounge on their porches and elk have worn a path from the forest to their front doors.

And they joke that if grizzlies are moved into the Bitterroots, they’ll all have to hang their refrigerators in bear-proof bags.

“Whatever happens in the national forest affects every one of us directly. That is our environment. We’re surrounded by it,” Foss says. “This [bear reintroduction] is going to have a dramatic impact, maybe not on ourselves, but our heirs.”

This is Montana’s most rapidly growing county--nearly exclusively white, Republican, and right-wing, dubbed by some the “heart of the militia movement,” if not geographically, then at least philosophically. People here are so anti-regulation that Montanans joke that when you drive through Hamilton, you don’t even need a driver’s license.

Foss is a conservative, but he is probably further to the center than most residents of Hamilton--he voted for Perot, a protest vote, he calls it. His name even appears on the membership lists of a few of the nation’s most prominent environmental groups--although it was his wife and son who signed him up. He calls conservation “a good idea that has gone astray.”

Yet, like most of his neighbors, Foss has a deep-seated distrust and simmering anger over government intrusion.

The owner of 200 head of cattle and 20 Arabian horses, he worries most about a provision of the Endangered Species Act that allows grizzlies to be shot only if they endanger a life but not if they harm livestock or other property. What if a grizzly mauled his wife’s beloved $100,000 stallion? Is he supposed to sit around and watch? No one, he says, should tell someone what to do on his or her own land. No one. He doesn’t even believe in zoning.

“When you survive off the land, and that’s what we’ve done, you know what works and what doesn’t,” Foss says. “We have major problems going on in our national forest already and now they want to bring grizzlies in.”

Foss doesn’t really mind the bears--they are a natural part of life in the Rockies, and he even believes a few remain hidden in the Bitterroots. But he has seen federal officials screw up so many management decisions on land abutting his home, from control of fires and wild horses to spread of pests and tree blights, that he thinks putting grizzlies in their hands is like handing a loaded rifle to a toddler.

“There’s this saying--the last, best place. And we’re it,” Foss said. “But give the government enough money and they’ll f- - - it up.”

About 45 miles south of the university town of Missoula, Hamilton has all the amenities that make Montana so tempting to weary urbanites. Main Street with its antique shops and hardware stores dissolves into the snow-capped mountains. Log cabin-esque homes with vegetable gardens, a few cows and more horses per household than automobiles, are nestled into the firs and aspens. A trout stream runs through town.

Yet the closest most Hamiltonians ever come to a grizzly are the bleachers at the university football game, where the University of Montana Grizzlies mauled the visiting Idaho State University Broncos at Homecoming. Most people here think reintroduction would be a foolhardy waste of tax money.

“We have children who are on streets and homeless. We have elderly who are starving. It’s beyond me how they think we have money for this,” says Marie Lisa, an artist and Florida transplant who lives next to the Fosses.

Montanans are accustomed to opening their local newspaper a couple of times each year to find front-page accounts of gruesome maulings, especially in Glacier National Park, which has the highest density of grizzlies south of Canada. Injuries there occur on the average of twice per year--a rate of one for every 1 million visitors--and nine people have been killed by the bears in the park’s 85-year history. Although each death is horrifying, bear attacks are relatively rare. Five times more people have drowned in the park than have died in maulings.

But the hostility and anxiety here transcends the actual impact of the animals. Most of all, they believe that once the grizzlies are back, the federal government will tell them how to live. Foss worries that if grizzlies are returned to the Bitterroots, it won’t be long until some of his more hostile, trigger-happy neighbors go after them like bounty hunters, just like some have already done with the wolves. Everyone carries loaded rifles around here, and sooner or later, one of the bears will be shot. Foss is convinced one of his neighbors will wind up in jail or be slapped with a big fine for killing an endangered species.

“Out in the wilderness, the grizzlies won’t be a problem, since if you go back there, you prepare for them,” he says. “It’s when they come out of the wilderness that you have a problem. And it’s not if they come out, it’s when.”

Foss chuckles when asked about the federal government’s promise to relocate bears that wander too close to the valley.

“Yeah, right. Get a life! Have you ever called up the federal government and asked them to do anything?” he says. “Do you really believe the government when they say ‘trust me’?”

Foss’ wife, Suzy, left San Diego 20 years ago for Montana, a city dweller lured by John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High.” Today she seems a harmonious blend of refined and rural; her faded jeans are soaked with horse slobber yet her red nails are perfectly manicured. She’s a vivacious animal lover and left-leaning idealist, yet she’s infused with the same anti-government fervor of her rancher husband and most of her neighbors.

“My husband, God love him, is a native Montanan and a little bit of a redneck,” she says, laughing. “But I’m still a little bit of a San Diego liberal.”

When she talks about the pleasures of Montana, it’s the animals that she mentions the most. She recalls seeing a mother black bear and her cubs rolling down a hill on their land. “It was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen,” she says.

It’s the transplanting of the grizzlies that she hates--she compares it to drugging and kidnapping Canadian citizens to bring them across the border.

“I’d love to see more bears, I just don’t think it can be done in a way to be true to that goal and good for the bears,” she says. “The reality is everything I’ve seen the government put their fingers on, they mess up. In the end, I think we’ll end up with another bureaucratic screw-up.”

The grizzlies, she says, have been gone from the Bitterroots so long that it’s best to just leave nature be.

“If I came across a grizzly in a benign encounter, I’d feel honored. But I wouldn’t want to see one with a collar on it,” says her neighbor Lisa, who rides into the forest several times a week, often alone. “That’s why we live here, because it’s nature in the raw.”

*

The son of a lumberjack, rancher and moonshiner, Bud Moore was born in the shadow of the Bitterroots in 1917. As a young boy, he would sit for hours, enraptured by the wild sagas about grizzlies that old trappers and hunters recited whenever they descended from the mountains.

By the age of 12, Moore had a tale of his own. While hiking alone near the Lochsa River, he spotted muddy bear tracks, each nine inches across. Suddenly, an old gray bear appeared before him, some 30 feet away, its wide head swinging. Legs trembling, the boy cocked his Winchester, ready to fire. The grizzly, hearing the click, rose slowly on its back legs, stared at him for a few moments, then dropped to all fours “and vanished without a sound.”

Little did he know at the time that the bears were already losing their war with the Bitterroot homesteaders. A few years later, all would presumably be dead.

“The same thing that puts a little spice in the wilderness for me puts fear in it to others,” says Moore, who spent 10 years as a trapper before becoming a forest ranger in the 1940s. “I consider it a privilege to have that kind of mystique in the wilderness, while other people want to domesticate it.”

Twenty years ago, upon retirement, he followed the grizzlies north, abandoning the Bitterroot Valley when it was no longer as wild as he desired. Now he and his wife, Janet, share their small sawmill and 80 acres of spruce and pines in Condon, a serene, rustic enclave in northwestern Montana, with 15 to 20 grizzlies that inhabit the Mission Mountains.

Moore has encountered the beasts several times in his life, yet he has never felt threatened enough to shoot one.

One August day last year, he was walking in the forest near his home with his dog, Gus, when he saw a mother grizzly and two cubs about 100 yards away, digging for insects at the base of an old stump. Since the wind was blowing toward him, he knew the bears hadn’t picked up his scent, and for the next hour, Moore sat with his back to a tree and watched them. At one point, the mother stood up to her full height and peered off in the distance, and the two cubs popped up, mimicking her.

If only the folks in Hamilton could see such a magnificent sight, Moore thought, then perhaps they, too, could enjoy living among them. Still, he doesn’t think the bears should be forced on the people of the valley, and he strongly endorses citizens’ control.

“Those are real people, with real beliefs,” he says. “I don’t think the bears can make it without citizens’ support. I don’t care if it’s grizzlies or wolves or salmon--you can’t do it by edict. You can’t mark a place for bears and mark a place for citizens and say forever live apart.”

His wife, who grew up in Washington, D.C., remembers asking her husband on her first Montana outing what she should do if she encounters a grizzly. “Just say good mornin’ ” he answered. At the time, she thought her husband was a crazy ol’ fool, but he was serious, and to this day, two decades later, she still follows his advice and talks to the grizzlies as she would any other neighbor.

“I’ve always considered the grizzly my friends,” he says, “my old friends way back at youth.”

While a forest ranger in tge 1940s, Moore kept noting in his logs that a few of his old friends still roamed the Bitterroots, even though there were no signs any were still alive. Finally, after years of searching for tracks, Moore surrendered to what he already knew in his heart. He jotted down “zero.” Then he closed the book, sadly, and for the first time, the forest around him felt empty.