On the seventh morning, dazed and starving, following smells she had never encountered before, she limped heavily into a clearing and sensed at once the utter alienness of the place. In it were objects she had never seen, never imagined. She stood perfectly still, at the very edge of the forest wall, into the protection of which she could escape if she had to, her snout lifted, sniffing the alluring, alarming odors.

On the far side of the space, beyond the jumble of unfamiliar things in the center, an amazing creature appeared; the only being she had ever seen, other than her own kind, that could stand on its hind legs. The creature made tentative sounds.

“Oh, wow. Hey, you. Shoo.”

The bear too reared nervously onto her hind legs to see the strange thing better, to sniff better at its scent. Was this a threat, an enemy? Was it food? She threw back her head and loosed the fierce, long, huffing roar that was half-uncertainty, half-belligerence.

The smaller creature shrank back, made more sounds. “Oh, my God! Doug… Doug! Where’s the-”

It was food, the she-bear decided. She dropped onto her three uninjured legs and loped painfully, purposefully toward it.

The Missoula Messenger, August 31, 2002

CANADIAN COUPLE KILLED, PARTIALLY EATEN BY GRIZZLY

Bill Giles

The Associated Press

Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness, MT-In a horrific incident at Lost Horse Creek campground, on the Idaho-Montana border about forty miles southwest of Missoula, two campers were attacked and killed Wednesday morning by a marauding grizzly bear.

The dead are Douglas Edward Borba and his wife, Mary Walker Borba, both twenty-six-year-old graduate students in environmental sciences at McGill University in Montreal. In an ironic twist of fate, the Borbas were in the Wilderness as part of a preliminary study to assess the ecological impact of the recent restoration of grizzlies to the area. Accompanying them was the director of the study, J. Leonard Kazin, 50, an associate professor at the university, and two other students, Edward K. Jekyll and Elise Martineau. Mr. Kazin was unharmed, as were Mr. Jekyll and Ms. Martineau, who had both gone to Darby for supplies at the time of the incident.