Grizzly Lied Quotes

But if you think your deadline is real, go out in the woods and get a grizzly bear to chase you. Which of your pressing concerns seems more real now?

Antonia Valleau cast the first shovelful of dirt onto her husband’s fur-shrouded body, lying in the grave she’d dug in their garden plot, the only place where the soil wasn’t still rock hard. I won’t be breakin’ down. For the sake of my children, I must be strong. Pain squeezed her chest like a steel trap. She had to force herself to take a deep breath, inhaling the scent of loam and pine. I must be doing this. She drove the shovel into the soil heaped next to the grave, hefted the laden blade, and dumped the earth over Jean-Claude, trying to block out the thumping sound the soil made as it covered him. Even as Antonia scooped and tossed, her muscles aching from the effort, her heart stayed numb, and her mind kept playing out the last sight of her husband. The memory haunting her, she paused to catch her breath and wipe the sweat off her brow, her face hot from exertion in spite of the cool spring air. Antonia touched the tips of her dirty fingers to her lips. She could still feel the pressure of Jean-Claude’s mouth on hers as he’d kissed her before striding out the door for a day of hunting. She’d held up baby Jacques, and Jean-Claude had tapped his son’s nose. Jacques had let out a belly laugh that made his father respond in kind. Her heart had filled with so much love and pride in her family that she’d chuckled, too. Stepping outside, she’d watched Jean-Claude ruffle the dark hair of their six-year-old, Henri. Then he strode off, whistling, with his rifle carried over his shoulder. She’d thought it would be a good day—a normal day. She assumed her husband would return to their mountain home in the afternoon before dusk as he always did, unless he had a longer hunt planned. As Antonia filled the grave, she denied she was burying her husband. Jean-Claude be gone a checkin’ the trap line, she told herself, flipping the dirt onto his shroud. She moved through the nightmare with leaden limbs, a knotted stomach, burning dry eyes, and a throat that felt as though a log had lodged there. While Antonia shoveled, she kept glancing at her little house, where, inside, Henri watched over the sleeping baby. From the garden, she couldn’t see the doorway. She worried about her son—what the glimpse of his father’s bloody body had done to the boy. Mon Dieu, she couldn’t stop to comfort him. Not yet. Henri had promised to stay inside with the baby, but she didn’t know how long she had before Jacques woke up. Once she finished burying Jean-Claude, Antonia would have to put her sons on a mule and trek to where she’d found her husband’s body clutched in the great arms of the dead grizzly. She wasn’t about to let his last kill lie there for the animals and the elements to claim. Her family needed that meat and the fur. She heard a sleepy wail that meant Jacques had awakened. Just a few more shovelfuls. Antonia forced herself to hurry, despite how her arms, shoulders, and back screamed in pain. When she finished the last shovelful of earth, exhausted, Antonia sank to her knees, facing the cabin, her back to the grave, placing herself between her sons and where their father lay. She should go to them, but she was too depleted to move.

I was lying on the ground. I could feel my blood mixing with the dirt. And Reese said, ‘You can stay up here and fuck the grizzly bears, puss.’ And the goddamned thing is, when I finally was able to stand up, I was more scared of imaginary grizzly bears than I was of Reese. Although I’m sure a grizzly bear has better table manners. I just motivated myself the hell away, as fast as I could crawl. I’m not even sure there are grizzly bears around here, anyway.

Our first trip was to the Canadian Arctic, where we were supposed to witness the migration of the Porcupine caribou herd, the largest and most magnificent movement of mammals in North America, and document their crossing of a remote river called the Firth, which Pete assured our editors at National Geographic Adventure “shouldn’t be too big of a deal,” given the size of the herd (roughly 123,000 animals, flanked by wolves, grizzly bears, and other predators). Unfortunately, we planned so poorly that we failed to locate a single caribou, returning home with little to show, aside from a lone photo capturing a set of antlers lying forlornly on the tundra—which, one of the magazine’s fact-checkers indignantly informed me, had actually belonged to a moose.

Whenever people had asked me which bear was my favorite, I had dithered and hedged. "I like them all equally," I would say, diplomatically. Sun bears were cute with lolling tongues. Grizzlies were emblematic of the American wilderness. And who could pass up the panda? What a jolly fellow. That, however, was all a lie. My favorite bear was unequivocally the polar bear.

I won’t wax poetic about the land in a perfectionist sense: we work hard out here, and things constantly threaten the tiny equilibrium we’ve established in the market garden. Whatever peace we find is often hard won. But I stand firmly with Berry and Kingsolver and so many other writers who possess a deep need to step outside the city to find a place of calm. I don’t like the word “authentic”; at best, it’s divisive and antagonistic, implying one way of being is intrinsically better than another. But I do very much favour the notion of alignment. I’m convinced that at the heart of the matter lies a desire to draw what we do into alignment with how we live. Some of us aren’t in a place where we can live consistently on the land that holds our hearts, but come mishaps or miracles, we’re bound and determined to make that land as much a part of who we are as humanly possible.

It’s ‘round the next bend, down a sunny dirt road. Just ask the next squirrel, Caterpillar, or toad for the tree-house home of the Bear family, where Ma, Pa, and the cubs are cozy and warm in their split-level tree. Just at the moment, Inside their quaint home, They’re reading the harvest honeycomb. “Honeycomb dribble, honeycomb drip, what lies ahead? A handsome stranger? Money? A trip? Grizzly growl, grizzly grum, warn us of any danger to come! Then, Mama blew hard. Loose flour flew. Who caught the flour? Papa, that’s who. But Mama and Papa both had turned white-- Pa from the flour, Mama from fright. The sign in the pan, stuck to the honey, was no handsome stranger, no trip, no money, but a bone-chilling warning of danger ahead, the frightening footprint of a great giant’s tread. “Bigpaw!” breathed Mama. “Good grief and alas! The Thanksgiving Legend is coming to pass!

This whole conundrum reminds me of that kids' game, "Which would you rather?" Which would you rather: Have your nose torn off by a grizzly or have a lungworm burrow through your eyeball? Have genital leprosy or elephantiasis of the face? Spend the rest of your life alone in a magnificent mansion or live in an overflowing outhouse with Beyonce? Which would I rather: Tell the truth and break a solemn promise to my comatose friend -- or lie and lose the only girl who ever looked at me like I wasn't some idioot flapdrol? It's a game I can't win.

Will he be back?” “Buck or the bear?” Her lips quirked. “The bear.” “Not today. Hopefully, never.” “Was it a grizzly?” “Black bear.” “It must have been a grizzly. It wasn’t black--it was brown.” He shook his head as if he couldn’t believe her. “Black bears come in lots of different colors. Grizzlies are a whole different species. You have to learn which is which and you have to react to each of them differently.” “I don’t know what you mean.” “I mean you have to be aggressive with black bears. With grizzlies, the best thing to do is lie down, pull yourself into a protective ball, and play dead. The bear might maul you a little, but at least you won’t be killed…not usually, at any rate.” She sagged back against the trunk of the pine tree, her face pale again. “That’s comforting.” Call sighed in exasperation. “Dammit, Charity, don’t you know anything about living out here?” “Obviously not as much as I should.” “I can’t imagine what a woman like you is doing up here by herself in the first place. You did come on your own? No husband, no boyfriend, right?” She straightened, beginning to get annoyed. “I don’t need a husband to do something I’ve always wanted to do. Maybe I should have learned more about the animals around here and less about the history of the area, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have come.” “This is hard country. Bad things happen up here. Unless you’ve been wearing blinders, by now you’re beginning to see that. Why don’t you accept my offer, sell this place, and go home where you belong?” Home where you belong. They were fighting words to Charity, right along with be a good little girl. Her lips tightened. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? For me to sell out and go home. Then you could have your precious privacy back. You wouldn’t have to worry about someone making noise when they worked next door. You wouldn’t have to worry about saving some greenhorn from a bear. You wouldn’t have to think about--” She gasped as he took a threatening step toward her, his eyes snapping as he backed her up against the trunk of the tree. “Yeah, I wouldn’t have to worry about what mischief you might get into next. And whenever I saw you, I wouldn’t have to think about what it might be like to kiss that sassy mouth of yours. I wouldn’t have to drive myself crazy wondering what it would feel like to reach under that silly panda sweatshirt and cup your breasts, to put my mouth there and find out how they taste.

if you think your deadline is real, go out in the woods and get a grizzly bear to chase you. Which of your pressing concerns seems more real now?