Through most of human’s evolutionary history, what has made the bear magnificent in our eyes is the animal’s independence from us—its parallel life as a menace and competitor. But by the time Roosevelt was hunting bears in Mississippi, with the country exterminating its predators from coast to coast, that stature was being crushed. That one black bear, tied to a tree outside Smedes, symbolized the predicament of all bears. The animals now lived or died according to our wants and whims. It said something ominous about the future of bears, but it also raised disquieting questions about who we’d
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