You know I ramble on about "the high country" and our patch of aspen forest. We don't get a lot of bear action here, because the mountains up behind our place are hunted National Forest, and the bears keep their distance. I'll bet the mule deer appreciate that even more than we do.
I'm talking about bears because I want to link you to a poem, written by a longtime friend and posted by the other DrC, about the mama grizzly called 399. She was maybe the most famous real bear ever. 399 lived to a ripe old age and raised lots of cubs, including the quadruplets who really put her on the map.
To quote the boast of another equally famous (if less real) bear - Yogi - 399 truly was "smarter than the average bear." Cubs get killed by male bears, and she'd often keep her brood near enough the highway to scare the males away. How she'd learned that was "safe ground" nobody knows. It did help make her famous, of course.
She was finally killed on a nighttime ramble by a motorist she probably scared the cr*p out of by stepping in front of his vehicle. I foolishly wish we could have made her wear a harness out of reflective tape, but she'd have torn it off instantly.
Grizzlies are the apex predators throughout most of their range, except for us human recent arrivals. Individual grizzlies can learn to fear humans, but it isn't instinctual with them, and most don't learn.
Anyway, go read Sunni's poem about 399. It was good enough to leave me misty-eyed.
