The Biography of a Grizzly

Wahb is a grizzly cub in the Wyoming badlands when a rancher’s rifle takes his mother and his siblings, and the rest of Seton’s 1900 book follows him alone. He learns which valleys are safe, grows into the largest bear in the country, drives off every rival that tests him, and carries a lifetime of buckshot and scars for it. Seton wrote as a naturalist first, and the details of tracking, feeding and territory come from years in the field, but he tells the whole thing as a life rather than a specimen report. The closing chapter, in the Death Gulch country near Yellowstone, is one of the quietest things in American animal writing. Free PDF and EPUB editions are available here.