The Black Grizzly of Whiskey Creek

by Marty, Sid

• ISBN13: 9780771056987
• ISBN10: 0771056982
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-11-25
• Publisher: McClelland & Stewart

Summary

In the summer of 1980, the citizens of Banff, Alberta, were shocked when a man staggered out of the bush, terribly injured in a bear attack. Thus began a story that would make headlines worldwide. Despite the massive hunt that followed, the Whiskey Creek mauler evaded park wardens and struck again - and again. Bestselling author Sid Marty describes these events, including his own involvement, creating an evocative and gripping story that speaks to our increasingly complex and combative relationship with the wilderness and its inhabitants. Book jacket.

Author Biography

Sid Marty’s work has been published in periodicals including Equinox, Canadian Geographic, Legacy, Canadian Business, and National Geographic Traveler. His prose and poetry have been published or reprinted in many literary periodicals, anthologies and school readers and his books about life in the mountains and prairies of Canada’s west have been consistent bestsellers. Sid Marty lives and writes in grizzly bear country at the foot of the Rocky Mountains.


From the Hardcover edition.

Table of Contents

Author's Note	p. ix
Map: Whiskey Creek and Surrounding Area	p. xii
Introduction: The Bear in My Head	p. 1
Bushwhacker's Soliloquy: A Few Thoughts while Waiting in Ambush	p. 11
Facts and Myths	p. 17
"The Most Dangerous Place in Banff National Park"	p. 25
The Year of Ashes	p. 43
Sticky Mouth Awakes	p. 55
The Hidden Road	p. 61
The Langshaw Effect	p. 67
Counting Coup: The First Victims	p. 74
The Hunt Begins	p. 101
The Ranges of a Bear: Hunting with Guns and Typewriters	p. 130
The Bad News Bear	p. 151
Business as Usual	p. 167
Counting Coup: Like a Stone Monument	p. 182
The Track	p. 200
The Snare	p. 223
Last Stand	p. 242
Necropsies and Reckonings	p. 262
Notes	p. 278
Acknowledgements	p. 282
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

There are trails near the timberline, connecting between the ranges, whose purpose is known to very few, because they are not part of the trail system used by humans. Known as bear roads, they tunnel through the krummholz and slide alder where most people stop, baffled, unwilling to get down on all fours and crawl, unsure of their welcome in that hedged darkness. They are roads of ancestral knowledge, passed on from the mother bear to the cubs, imprinted in the brain to be recalled later, perhaps some years after the cubs have dispersed, maybe long after the siblings have gone their separate ways. Mothers and cubs might meet again on those roads, and recognize each other, and pass each other by without doing harm.

One road, of many such, crosses rock slides where the shale is packed into the interstices between great fallen blocks of limestone by the coming and going of padded feet. Here a hole in the path marks where a boulder the size of a small car was grappled and shoved out of the way, and sent rolling down the mountain like local thunder. This road winds across avalanche chutes, over the flayed trunks of old-growth trees that can be three feet or more in diameter, trees that lived for a century or longer before a winter avalanche finally called them to account, leaving their bones like giant pick-up sticks between the boulders, the trunks now scarred by claw marks. Here and there will be a drift of snow, insulated by a layer of broken shale that fell, piece by piece, from the precipice high above earlier that spring, as meltwater loosened the rocks, so in the heat of summer there are still places where the traveller beast can stretch out and rub its back and cool off in the icy slush for a moment below a boiling of frustrated deer flies. The bear road curls through a mossy gulch now and then, where a brook purls down the mountain to form a pool of icy water in which a bear may stop to bathe its hot, cracked footpads in the mud

while slaking its thirst. And if, later, you came upon the spot by chance, you might think that a huge man had stood barefoot in the mud; you might wonder if the stories about Sasquatch are true, and then you might note how the mud is punctured at the end of each toe pad. And this fact will make you stand up quickly; it will make you turn around, and listen, and listen.

In the old-growth forest, where the deep layers of duff and moss sometimes serve as the flimsy roof over a rock crevice, a place to be sniffed at and passed by carefully, or else out on the flatter lie of a bog, the road is marked by tracks a foot deep and a foot or more long. These tracks were made over the centuries by the padded humanoid feet of bears that journey between mountain ranges; each has put its front foot and then the corresponding rear foot down in the same print the first of its tribe made here centuries before. It may seem as if this were a trail made by human footsteps, but you will look in vain for any other sign of their habitation or resort. There are no axe blazes, no fire circles or rusty tin cans. The road may be grown in with fresh green moss as if it had been unused for years, but it has not been forgotten, and won’t be as long as bears are allowed to live.


From the Hardcover edition.

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Excerpted from The Black Grizzly of Whiskey Creek by Sid Marty
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.