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Isabella Lucy Bird (1831-1904) http://tinyurl.com/LBird

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Bear Encounter

From A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains, 1881.

Reader: Jessica Teeter

Never satisfied with finely-honed descriptions of California scenery, great travel writers who come here are also likely to toss into their works an encounter or two with a dangerous beast.

In 1873, British writer Isabella Lucy Bird was traveling through Truckee on her way to Colorado when she decided to stay a while. Exploring the surrounding countryside alone and on horseback, however, was more exhilarating than planned.

The forest was thick and had an undergrowth of dwarf spruce and brambles, but as the horse had become fidgety and scary on the track, I turned off in the idea of taking a short cut, and was sitting carelessly shortening my stirrup when a great, dark, hairy beast rose, crashing and snorting, out of the tangle just in front of me. I had only a glimpse of him and thought my imagination had magnified a wild boar, but it was a bear.

"Brown Bear in Spring," photographed by Arsen Gushin, 2006. Larger.

The horse snorted and plunged violently as if he would go down to the river, and then turned. . . . finding that I must come off, I threw myself off on the right side. . . . I got up covered with dust, but neither shaken nor bruised. It was truly grotesque and humiliating.

The bear ran in one direction and the horse in another. I hurried after the latter, and twice he stopped till I was close to him, then turned round and cantered away.

Isabella Lucy Bird was the first woman elected a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, a recognition not only of her experience as one of the most traveled women of her era but of her charitable works throughout the world.