SELWAY-BITTERROOT WILDERNESS, Idaho -- Old-timers never strolled here as people do now, heedless and blithe through head-high huckleberries.
Back when this wilderness was truly wild, a prudent traveler passed here like a soldier walking point. A blur of tawny motion, a rustling sound, might be the only warning:
Grizzly bear.
A quarter-ton of muscle, scythe-shaped claws and racehorse speed. Near-sighted eyes, sharp nose and sharper wits. To stumble on a grizzly in these canyons was to know, with pounding heart, what it meant to be at a stronger creature's mercy.
Jack Hogg would like that knowledge to return to these mountains, along with the hunchbacked bear. "We humans need to know that we're not at the top of the food chain," the biologist said, "that there's something bigger, stronger and tougher than us."
Seventy years after the last grizzly was shot here, the federal government is poised to grant Hogg's wish.
The big bear that once ruled the West from Canada to Mexico is now threatened with extinction in the lower 48 states, reduced to perhaps 800 specimens in three isolated preserves. To reverse the decline, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wants to bring Canadian grizzlies into this 6,000-square-mile protected wilderness along the Idaho-Montana border.
It's a daring move in Idaho, a state where the 1995 reintroduction of wolves provoked a furor and a few wolf shootings; where anti-federal billboards are posted along the interstate; where Gov. Phil Batt's response is "no bears, no way" and Rep. Helen Chenoweth calls the idea as crazy as "bringing back sharks to the beach."
Two-thirds of Idahoans like the idea, according to a state poll. But those who don't include folks in the powerful timber industry. Their worry: along with the bear come Endangered Species Act protections that could curtail logging in the surrounding national forests.
"They're not afraid of the bear," said government scientist Chris Servheen. "They're afraid of the lawyers."
To defang opponents, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is poised to do something that's never been tried before: give local folks control over the fate of the introduced bears. The agency is also prepared to waive regulations that might restrict nearby logging.
The plan was hatched by an unlikely coalition of Rocky Mountain conservationists and timber executives. Backers say it's the only way to persuade people in the towns fringing the wilderness to lay down their guns and their lawsuits.
