Bears and Scents of Place in Sid Marty’s The Black Grizzly of Whiskey Creek

Abstract

Most Western humans think of more-than-human animals as having certain spatial requirements adequate to their needs to feed, reproduce and survive but assume that their territorial needs are more or less generic and interchangeable. In his acclaimed literary nonfiction book The Black Grizzly of Whiskey Creek (2008) Sid Marty represents the spaces and places of two bears, a black bear and a grizzly bear. In this animal biography cum forensic account of a series of bear attacks upon humans in Banff, Alberta, Canada, during eleven days in 1980, Marty reconstructs the events by researching the particular bears and interviewing the wardens involved, and factoring in the climatic and environmental forces – particularly the eruption that spring of Mount St. Helens and the concomitant alteration of weather patterns and plant growth as far away as Banff, Alberta – that led to the unusually high number of tragic bear-human encounters that summer. I argue that The Black Grizzly of Whiskey Creek, several chapters of which Marty writes in the third-person as if from the points of view of each of the two individual bears involved, allows us to explore how we might think of bears’ and by extension other more-than-human animals’ senses of place and exemplifies how literary works can play a role in coming to understand more fully the lives of some of our animal relations. I argue that bears’ tremendous olfactory senses are so indelibly connected with their familiar surroundings as to constitute a veritable “scents of place.”