bear
Please look after this bear. Thank you.
A Bear Called Paddington (London: HarperCollins, 2002), 11.
We are enjoying a descent of bears upon this region. If we survive it there should be much to tell. They are as thick as caterpillars in a pest year…A mother and two cubs went up the road by our house the other evening tearing down the small cherry trees along the wall. You could see where one of the cubs had wiped his bottom on a large stone and left traces of a diet of choke cherries and blueberries. I almost got one cornered in our pasture last night, but he lifted the wire and went under the fence. It is terrible.
August 31, 1925 letter to Louis Untermeyer from Sugar Hill, New Hampshire, in The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), 176.
All the books tell you that if the grizzly comes for you, on no account should you run. This is the sort of advice you get from someone who is sitting at a keyboard when he gives it. Take it from me, if you are in an open space with no weapons and a grizzly comes from you, run. You may as well. If nothing else, it will give you something to do with the last seven seconds of your life.
A Walk in the Woods (New York: Broadway Books, 1999), 17.
Imagine, if you will, lying in the dark alone in a little tent, nothing but a few microns of trembling nylon between you and the chill night air, listening to a 400-pound bear moving around your campsite. Imagine its quiet grunts and mysterious snufflings, the clatter of upended cookware and sounds of moist gnawings, the pad of its feet and the heaviness of its breath, the singing brush of its haunch along your tent side. Imagine the hot flood of adrenaline, that unwelcome tingling in the back of your arms, at the sudden rough bump of its snout against the foot of your tent, the alarming wild wobble of your frail shell as it roots through your backpack that you left casually propped by the entrance—with, you suddenly recall, a Snickers in the pouch. Bears adore Snickers, you’ve heard.
Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods (New York: Broadway Books, 1999), 13–14.