Some may consider bears to be godless killing machines, but there is something about them undeniably fascinating.  Perhaps it is the fact that they are remarkably beautiful — cute, even — and yet deadly.

I run into bears all the time when I’m hiking.  I saw a youngish one at the end of August, on the Appalachian Trail.  He (?) was positively scampering through the forest, bounding around, jumping up onto trees and down again, just for the joy of it.  Halfway up a tree he paused and looked at me, and we locked gazes for maybe half a minute.  I decided to just casually keep on walking…  And he dropped down from the tree and ran off.

The word bear comes from Proto Indo European bher, meaning “glossy brown”, from which is also descended brown, burnish, and beaver. However, the Indo Europeans did not call bears bher; they called them rtko (pronounced something like “URRT-ko”), the ancestor of Latin ursus (as in the constellations Ursa Major and Minor, the Great and Little Bears) and Greek arktos (as in Arctic, which in fact is named after those constellations).  However, the speakers of Proto Germanic had great respect for bears; and so instead of boldly calling them by their names, they used a euphemism, and called them “glossy browns” instead.  Bher in Proto Indo European became beron in Proto Germanic, bera in Old English, and bear today.

The word bear is a burst of powerful, elastic, enclosing energy — a natural word, in fact, to associate with a powerful hug.