Not long ago the state of California failed to take advantage of an opportunity it may not have again until after the next ice age: the chance to reintroduce grizzly bears to this overcivilized and overpopulated state. Last summer Montana’s Fish, Wildlife, and Parks Department offered to share with California its unwanted grizzly bears, which have been getting into trouble with ranchers in the big sky country just as they did here more than a century ago. Eldridge Hunt, of California’s Department of Fish and Game, declined Montana’s offer with this somewhat insincere reply: “It’s unfortunate that we don’t have grizzlies here in California, but we’ll just have to live with our black bears.”

Black bears, of course, are the pesty, undersized cousins to the grizzlies. There are about 15,000 black bears in California today, most of them residing in Yosemite Valley (or so it seems), where they make their living burglarizing tourists’ cars and pilfering food from hikers’ backpacks. Though they rarely weigh more than 300 pounds, they can peel back the door of a Toyota as easily as we might shuck an ear of corn. (For some reason unknown to biologists, they favor breaking into Toyotas over any other make of car.) In spite of the instinctive fear most people have of the black bears, they are almost never a danger to humans. It’s food they want, and they know very well that humans have a lot more of that than good sense. If the relatively cowardly black bears have learned they are free to plunder and pillage without fear of reprisal whatever humans have, it is little wonder that the California Department of Fish and Game is so reluctant to see their black bear problems compounded by the return of the more formidable grizzly bear to California.

In 1830 there were more grizzly bears in California (about 10,000) than there were white men. They roamed over most of the low land areas of the state, and San Diego County, which was the southernmost range of grizzlies along the coast, had a sizable population of grizzlies as well. Every year at Santa Ysabel a grizzly was captured by vaqueros for the bull-and-bear fight, which was the main attraction at the annual Indian fiesta. The vaqueros would capture the grizzly by lassoing its legs and neck and having their horses pull in all directions until the beast was so exhausted it could either be forced into a cage or tethered to a stake. The largest grizzlies were capable of dragging two horses and their riders along behind them, so this method of capturing a grizzly not only required a great deal of skill and timing but a certain degree of foolhardiness as well. Several horses and more than one vaquero were lost in this way.

As for the bull-and-bear fight itself, the method was to tie the hind foot of the grizzly to the forefoot of the bull, turn them both loose, and see what came of it. Often the two animals were reluctant to fight and spent their energy trying to get away from one another. The promoters of this gruesome event would then prod the bull and bear into a fury by poking them with a stick that had a sharp nail attached to the tip. Eventually the confused bull would charge the bear, and the bear would sink its teeth into the bull’s neck and rip open the bull’s jugular. Sometimes the spectacle ended too quickly — one grizzly was said to have killed three bulls in rapid succession — but sometimes the fight went on for as long as two hours. The bear almost always won.

If this senseless and cruel form of animal torture demonstrated anything, it was the grizzly’s phenomenal physical abilities. Grizzly bears are faster than a horse over short distances, stronger than two horses in a tug of war, as agile as a monkey, tall enough to dunk a basketball flat footed, as smart as a football player, and sometimes weigh as much as a small pickup.

In 1846, when Californians rose up in revolt and declared their independence from Mexico, it was the grizzly bear that was depicted (somewhat crudely) on the flag of the Bear Flag Republic, and in this form the image of the grizzly bear haunts us still. Even though the grizzly bear later became the official state animal, its fate in California was doomed. During the gold rush days, grizzly bear meat, which is said to taste something like pork, was bringing more than a dollar a pound in Sacramento — twice the price of venison — and grizzlies were being slaughtered all over the state. Several hunters bragged about killing a hundred grizzlies or more, and in 1848 one party of five hunters brought 700 grizzly pelts into Fort Sutter. In San Diego, a Mr. James Hobbs started a profitable enterprise shipping fresh grizzly bear meat, killed and butchered in this area, by boat to San Fran cisco, where it was then sold to miners in the mother lode country. Later, Hobbs found that by drying the meat before shipping it, he could reduce the shipping costs, ship more meat, and make even more money.

After the gold rush days were over and the sheep and cattle industries came to the state, grizzly bears were all but finished off. Henry W. Henshaw, a naturalist attached to the Wheeler surveys of San Diego County in 1872, wrote, “A supply of strychnine is part of the outfit of every sheepherder and by means of this the number of bears is each year diminished till in many sections where formerly they were abundant they have eventually disappeared.”

Before the arrival of the white man, when grizzlies roamed free in San Diego, they were found in greatest numbers along the seacoast, where they grew fat and lazy living on the dead sea life that washed ashore, and in the lowland hills and valleys where they ate acorns and dug for roots. But in later years the grizzlies sought refuge in the mountainous country in the east and northern part of the county, which probably had not been their natural habitat before the arrival of white men. In the 1870s, several grizzlies weighing at least a thousand pounds were killed in the upper San Luis Rey Valley, and as late as 1877 a 1500-pound grizzly was killed near Fallbrook. In return, the grizzlies took a few men as well. Vital Clayton Reche, a resident of Temecula in the late 1800s, said in a 1937 interview that he knew of six men killed by grizzlies in one ten-year period. He attributed this to the invention of the Winchester repeating rifle — grizzly hunters became less cautious than they had been in the days of the single shot rifle, and the wounded, enraged grizzlies were able to attack and kill the would-be hunters.

The Indians of California conceded the grizzly bear his title as master of this land and even considered the grizzly to have supernatural abilities beyond other animals. Among Indian shamans there was a specialist — the grizzly bear shaman — who acquired a special power by sleeping with a she-bear in her den. Sometimes these shamans would put on padding and dress up in the skin of a grizzly bear to terrorize and even murder their enemies, hoping that in the bear disguise they would go unrecognized and unpunished. To kill a grizzly, the Indians would try to surprise one while it slept, or, if the bear couldn’t be killed in its sleep, they would send one very brave man to chase it out of its den, where several hunters would plant their wooden spears at an angle and try to get the charging grizzly to impale itself. One swat from a grizzly’s paw could easily separate a man from his earthly ambitions, and even if the Indians sometimes succeeded in killing a grizzly, as often as not an Indian’s life was traded for that of the bear.

It is said that grizzlies were the only animal in California that would purposely stalk and kill a human. Unlike any other animal, they apparently had such little fear of men that they regarded them as just another form of prey. Whether or not they ate the flesh of man seemed to be a matter of individual taste. While they were said to have relished the flavor of Indians, according to Joseph Grinnell, one of California’s leading wildlife experts in the ’30s, some grizzlies found white men to be unpalatable, or at least distasteful; though the grizzlies would kill a white man as readily as an Indian, they often passed over the opportunity to make a meal of them.

Considering the grizzly’s reluctance to yield respect to man — and California’s destiny to become the most populated state in the Union — the eventual elimination of grizzlies from California was assured. Even though grizzlies were once found in greater densities in California than anywhere else on the continent, they now survive here only in zoos and on the state flag. As far as anyone knows, the last grizzly in California was killed by a cattle rancher at Horse Corral Meadow, near Sequoia National Park, in 1928.

Today, grizzly bears are doing fairly well in Alaska, particularly in and around Mt. McKinley National Park. They still have little respect for man and frequently demonstrate this by assaulting park visitors or breaking into cabins. Sometimes in the early spring, when they have a craving for almost any kind of meat, they will put their reservations aside and eat even a white man. Wilderness enthusiasts from all over the world flock to the park for the opportunity of having their lives threatened by the man-eating beasts, and the park rangers, by making it illegal to carry firearms in the park, have greatly improved the odds for this once-in-a-lifetime wilderness experience to occur.

But down here in the lower 48 states, grizzly bears aren’t faring so well. As usual California has set the trend, by eliminating grizzlies, and the rest of the country is rapidly following. In the contiguous 48, there are fewer than 200 grizzly bears living in the wild now, mostly in and around Yellowstone National Park. There, too, grizzlies occasionally harvest the overabundant human population, though the redneck residents of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming seem to be growing increasingly reluctant to participate in this balance of nature, as is demonstrated by their eager ness to send their grizzlies to California.

In spite of the California Department of Fish and Game’s refusal to accept Montana’s offer, there would seem to be several advantages to reintroducing grizzlies to San Diego County. Perhaps we should examine just one of them.

In August of 1984, a dead, 60-foot blue whale washed up on the tranquil shores of Cardiff-by-the Sea. The rotting carcass lay there putrefying in the hot sun, swarmed by blowflies and curious tourists. Within a few days, however, the horrifying stench of the animal was so bad nobody would get within 200 feet of it, and some nearby residents were forced to leave town until the state parks, or the coast guard — or whatever government agency would assume responsibility — dealt with the problem. The trouble was, no government agency had any idea of how to dis pose of the huge carcass.

While a dead whale washing ashore might have seemed like a unique problem at the time, it certainly has happened thousands of times in the history of San Diego beaches. But this time there weren’t any grizzly bears to clean up the mess. Just 150 years ago that stench would have summoned every bear between the coast and Mt. Laguna, and within a week they would have solved the problem the way nature intended. Without grizzlies, it took a bulldozer to push the carcass into the surf and a coast guard cutter to tow it out to sea — all at great expense. Meanwhile, somewhere in Montana a grizzly bear went hungry.

But if we brought the grizzly bear home to San Diego, he would find it was a different place from the one he left, and there is no guarantee he would like what he saw. He might very well decide Montana is a better place for him after all. So it would be necessary for us to accommodate him in whatever way we could. In some ways this might be easier than it was a hundred years ago. For example, the cattle industry, which really was responsible for the extermination of the grizzly in California, is almost extinct now itself. There is less and less demand for beef these days, and the few large cattle ranches that are left survive mostly as tax write-offs for larger land-holding corporations. Since the public subsidizes these cattle operations (mostly through low-cost grazing on government land), maybe Californians would prefer to see these lands converted into grizzly ranches where our state totem could roam safe and free.

It is unlikely that grizzlies would respect the boundaries of these ranches, however. It is the nature of grizzly bears to defy any thing of man’s — which, of course, is the reason we need them here so badly. They would invade our suburbs, our parks and cities, and probably even our homes, and we would have to tolerate this in the same way a Hindu tolerates his sacred cow. And like the Hindus, we would have to accept the benefits of our association with the grizzly bear as being more spiritual than material.

Anybody who has spent a night in grizzly country has been forced to con front his or her own mortality. We may want to go out at dawn and kill the grizzly for reminding us of it, but that would only post pone the inevitable. In time, we will still die. This fear of our own mortality, of course, is the real reason the grizzly bear is no longer with us. We may feel safer for having eliminated the grizzly from this land, but we are greater fools for it. We go about our lives seek ing wealth, security, and good health, as though these things could save us from our fate. Of course they can’t, and we need the grizzly bear here to remind us of it every day.

Even more disturbing than the thought of our own death, though, is the horrifying thought of being devoured by an animal. We will eat almost anything on the planet, from fish eggs to bamboo, yet we can’t bear the thought of anything eating us. Carrying this irrationality to the extreme, when we die we have ourselves sealed within decay-proof caskets so as to deny the nourishment of our bodies to the earth that nourished us. Even though it is the fate of every other living thing to be absorbed back into the planet, we are revolted by the thought of vultures, fishes, coyotes, and even worms making use of what we have no more use for. We are the broken link in the food chain, and even though life goes on without us, we feel this strange, unnatural distance between ourselves and other living things, as though the animals stopped talking to us when we put ourselves above them. The grizzly bear was the one animal that kept us in our place, and it can put us there again.

If the grizzly bear survives anywhere on the continent, perhaps he will return to California during the mass animal migrations following the next ice age or some other natural or man-caused catastrophe. This migration, of course, will have to hap pen without the blessing and sanction of the California Department of Fish and Game, but hopefully the grizzly won’t be punished too severely for this transgression. He will only be doing what comes naturally. In the meantime, we are haunted every day by the image of the grizzly bear on our state flag. He is telling us what liars we are. This is not the home of the grizzly, this is the home of Mickey Mouse, and until the grizzly bear returns, it is that silly little desexed, anthropomorphized fig ure that is our state totem and belongs on our state flag.

We know the grizzly bear belongs here, this place is his birthright, he is part of our heritage, and having him here among us should be our right as inhabitants of this land. Without him we lack something, we are incomplete, our land is less magnificent than it was meant to be.

We need the grizzly bear. We miss him. We long for the sight of him lumbering down our streets, powered by the flesh of humanity, foraging through the sunroofs of cars caught in the rush-hour traffic, loitering outside our 7-Elevens, lounging with the transients in Balboa Park, sunning himself in the middle of I-5 if he wants to, blessing and enriching our asphalt world with his mountains of scat which, if we examine closely enough, are com posed of our friends, our neighbors, and someday maybe even us.