But who were the shooters? The more questions I asked, the more I realized how well hidden the poachers were. It wasn’t the dense tangle of leafy forest scrub or the crumbling rock walls that hid them—it was a thicket of social relations and a stony culture of resistance to outsiders. Sometimes, when I talked to a Grafton man, I got the feeling that his face was a mask, that a bear killer was peering out at me through the eyeholes. But I could never be sure. What seemed clear was this: in a town that refused to allow the government to protect it from bears, vigilantism seemed the only option.
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