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couldn’t be dumped within a couple of hours. Packhorses—even first-rate ones—would have a hard time making it up the sides of the steep ridges. Challenging nature, they would have to leave their horses in the valley. Because of the spruces, of course, there would be plenty of wood to build a bonfire. But this was no guarantee of survival. Many men had perished in the Bighorns mistakenly believing that fire trumped sleet; it never did. Even the most sure-footed mountaineer was no match for the raw natural powers of this Wyoming wilderness. Whether it was wolf packs prowling or wind whistling through the canyons, only a fool wasn’t reduced to humbleness in such potentially lethal terrain. At the curl of twilight everything was ghostly and mysterious beyond even the deepest backcountry of the Adirondacks. “If I listened long enough, it would almost seem that I heard thunderous voices laughing and calling to one another,” Roosevelt wrote, “and as if at any moment some shape might stalk out of the darkness into the dim light of the embers.”89

Roosevelt took to calling the elk “lordly,” just as he had done with the buffalo. Even though the naturalist in him carefully studied every coloration and trait variation of those he killed, he began seeing the elk as almost holy. Nonhunters might be perplexed by this, but the northern Cheyenne would have completely understood the spiritual aspect of Roosevelt’s search for game. “From morning till night I was on foot,” he wrote, “in cool, bracing air, now moving silently through the vast, melancholy pine forests, now treading the brink of high, rocky precipices, always amid the most grand and beautiful scenery; and always after as noble and lordly game as is to be found in the Western world.”90

Since his boyhood, grizzly bears had enthralled Roosevelt. Carefully he studied all their zoological traits, realizing that they were essentially shy and not predatory. The sheer hulk of the omnivorous grizzly—a member of the brown bear family often weighing up to 1,300 pounds—made it the true king of the Rockies. With their astounding senses of hearing and smell, grizzlies were hard to hunt. But as any trapper could testify, they had terrible eyesight, and if you happened to stumble upon one in a refuge like the Bighorns it could lunge without warning or retreat. Come October, all the grizzlies would hibernate in dens until late April. So Roosevelt knew that his best chance for getting a large, full-grown grizzly was in September. But this was also the time of year when the bears had spent months actively digging for rodents and roots, so that their claws were the longest. As Darwin would have appreciated, these fearsome claws had an additional purpose besides warding off predators: they enabled grizzlies to dig winter dens with relative ease.91

The damp afternoon when Roosevelt stumbled upon his first grizzly provides one of the classic stories in American outdoor literature. Roosevelt’s desire for precision and suspense was urgent, even if the latter wasn’t always fulfilled. As recounted in Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, the odyssey began at sunset on September 12, 1884, when he happened to encounter bear tracks. It’s a testimony to Roosevelt’s familiarity with bears that he knew the bear was a grizzly. A strange “eerie feeling” of expectancy swept over him. Alone, he followed the footprints from tree stand to stand. As darkness neared, however, he could no longer see anymore. It was time to head back to camp. He vowed to pick up the bear’s trail in the morning.

Upon waking, Roosevelt and Merrifield checked on the carcass of an elk they had killed. To their surprise a grizzly had gnawed the body during the night. Wearing moccasins so as not to scare away game, the two men began following the bear marks. The mingling odors of pine and sweat filled Roosevelt’s nose. He drank it all in. “When in the middle of the thicket we crossed what was almost a breastwork of fallen logs, and Merrifield, who was leading, passed by the upright stem of a great pine,” Roosevelt recalled. “As soon as he was by it