Our conquest of the wilderness becomes one step more complete with the death of every bear." "The bear is a thing we can't control, one of the only living things that Americans are afraid of. "This is a special place because it is one of the few places left on earth where man is not the dominant animal," said Chris Servheen, a biologist who runs the national Grizzly Bear Recovery Program for the Interior Department. Last year, people in the Yellowstone area killed 14 grizzlies. Records showed a sharp drop in encounters between bears and people in 1983. The changes appear to be helping the bears, which are now in hibernation until the spring. It also has started quietly to restrict oil and gas drilling, logging and sheep grazing on certain lands around Yellowstone where grizzlies congregate, an area about the size of New Hampshire. Last summer an administration often viewed as hostile to conservation closed almost one-fifth of Yellowstone to tourists, not to protect people from bears but to protect bears from people. In the last year the federal government has mounted an unusual rescue effort. There are at least 10,000 grizzlies in Alaska. If the bear vanishes from Yellowstone, it will have only one major American home outside Alaska-the wild realm around Glacier National Park and the Bob Marshall wilderness in Montana.
The grizzly, symbol of the American wilderness, is slowly dying out of Yellowstone National Park and the surrounding forests, once one of its prime stamping grounds. But here, campers, park rangers, foresters and townspeople also were conscious of the death of a bear, one of only 200 grizzlies roaming the largest remaining swath of wilderness in the lower 48 states. In Sturgeon Bay, Wis., they mourned William May, 23, the camper who died so violently that night. 15, and did what the rulebook said they had to do: they killed him in return. A day later, government officials tracked down No. The 435-pound grizzly lunged out of the darkness one night last June, dragged a camper from his tent in the Gallatin National Forest and ate him alive. Six months later, they still talk about the death of Bear No.
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