He saw the cubs before he saw the sow. There was a pair, and they tumbled toward him, bawling like playful dogs. The cubs had been dropped in the spring, and at five months weighed a hundred pounds each. They nipped at each other as they bore down on Glass, and for the briefest of instants the scene had a near comic quality. Transfixed by the whirling motion of the cubs, Glass had not raised his glance to the far end of the clearing, fifty yards away. Nor had he yet to calculate the certain implication of their presence.
Suddenly he knew. A hollowness seized his stomach half an instant before the first rumbling growl crossed the clearing. The cubs skidded to an immediate stop, not ten feet in front of Glass. Ignoring the cubs now, Glass peered toward the brush line across the clearing.
He heard her size before he saw it. Not just the crack of the thick underbrush that the sow moved aside like short grass, but the growl itself, a sound deep like thunder or a falling tree, a bass that could emanate only through connection with some great mass.
The growl crescendoed as she stepped into the clearing, black eyes staring at Glass, head low to the ground as she as she processed the foreign scent, a scent now mingling with that of her cubs. She faced him head-on, her body coiled and taut like the heavy spring on a buckboard. Glass marveled at the animal’s utter muscularity, thick stumps of her forelegs folding into massive shoulders, and above all the silvery hump that identified her as a grizzly.