It Almost Never Happens

It almost never happens a grizzly bear kills more than one human.  If they do, it’s generally at the same time.  A mother bear runs amok protecting cubs or, as in the horrific ending of Werner Herzog’s film Grizzly Man, a ferocious and indifferent attack on a couple in a camp.  Natural history books are not stuffed with serial grizzly man-eaters.  
   

There was Old Two Toes, who killed and partly ate at least three men in Montana, and was maybe accountable for two more deaths, but that was in 1898.  In Alaska, in 1995, a pissed-off grizzly attacked and killed a woman and her son, but as a response to being surprised on a moose carcass.  Occasions of deliberate, habitual, serial assaults are rare.  Human beings persist as the most vicious animal on earth.

    

Grizzly bears, like most predators, are smart enough to know that messing with humans in any way is a bad idea.  Tough to suppose one bear had killed and vanished three people over a fifteen-year span.  But not impossible.  One thing Jasper had learned as a participant in disparate cultures, is nothing that can be imagined is impossible.  In fact, most imagining, in one form or another, has already happened.  

   

Appreciate the control or scope of the aristocracy in America.  It endures and holds dominance despite inroads of sneaker-wearing New Money tech.  Families have consolidated and expanded their power for over three centuries.  They summer on Nantucket and Fishers and Islesboro.  Their sons and daughters go to Ivy League schools, work for Big Banks, Big Oil, the IMF, the Federal Reserve.  Their most daring and radical children become artists or filmmakers or work for the Nature Conservancy.  These are everyone’s darling cousins and nieces, gifted with mystical reverence.  They are singular children, indulged like shamans of other cultures who walk backward.