The Biography of a Grizzly

This is the story of Wahb, a grizzly bear born in the mountains of northwestern Wyoming, and one of the most powerful narratives about a wild animal ever written. Seton, a pioneering naturalist and artist, observed actual grizzly behavior to create this "biography," but what emerges is something closer to epic: a creature of tremendous strength and terrible loneliness, shaped by loss and shaped by the vanishing American frontier. As a cub, Wahb watches his mother and siblings fall to a cattleman's rifle. He survives alone, nursing wounds and hatred, learning the brutal arithmetic of predator and prey. As he matures, he becomes sovereign of his territory, capable of tossing pine logs like broomsticks, crushing the largest bull with one paw. The prose is vivid, dramatic, and surprisingly emotional. Seton renders Wahb's interior world with empathy and rigor, capturing a specific moment in American history when the wilderness was being tamed, and one bear's life becomes an elegy for what was lost.