Maggie Robin - Hercules the Bear--A Gentle Giant in the Family: The moving biography of the untameable grizzly bear who became a national hero

H ercules lay sleeping as I wrote part of this with his head on my feet. Earlier he had been playing with the cushion which was peeping out from under his enormous bottom, occasionally tossing it into the air and catching it in his paws. I told him, Uh-uh, not the cushion, and he looked at me as if to say, Come on, Mum, what do you take me for?, tucked it under his tummy and settled down to watch television.

It was a raw afternoon in November when I first started to write my book. The icy rain was coming down the Glen in great swaths of grey, battering against the old house. Andy had gone out to chop wood for the fire. He cut his logs a metre long and we put them straight into the enormous hearth blazing beside me. On days like that, when the fire was stacked high, it was useful to have someone like Hercules around to help me lift them.

The room, our sitting room, was probably very like your sitting room, with armchairs and sofa, TV and photos on the walls an ordinary-sized room with ordinary objects. The house it was in, our home at that time, was the Sheriffmuir Inn, off a narrow back road that led to the A9, the main road to the north of Scotland. The Parish of Sheriffmuir there isnt really a village is between Stirling and Dunblane.

When I looked out of the window here on a fine day there was no sign of humankind. The Ochil Mountains rose around us a vanguard of the great mountains that form the centre of Scotland. We were on the edge of the old Highland Line, and the people round here would have spoken Gaelic in the old days. Further down the Glen the land was cultivated in small fields and there were plantations of pine trees. In front of the Inn, and on the other side of the road there was a fast-flowing burn, fed from the mountains, in which Andy and Hercules loved to play in the warm weather.

The house was over three hundred years old. It was here that the famous Battle of Sheriffmuir was fought on a misty November day in 1715; indeed, the Inn was used as the headquarters of the Earl of Mar, who led the Jacobite army. Mar and his Highlanders were trying to break through to join the Jacobites who had risen in the northwest of England, when they met the Duke of Argyll at the head of a disciplined army of Hanoverian troops. They fought all day in the mist and the Clan Macrae were slaughtered to a man. In the end there was no conclusive victor. Sometimes, on dark days, one can almost imagine the kilted clansmen moving down the hillsides with gory broadswords in their hands If stones could speak the old Inn would have some strange tales to tell, but perhaps none stranger than the story I love to tell about the battle of wits between a man and a grizzly bear.

As I relaxed in front of the fire my thoughts drifted back to the day a young man, a stranger to us, came to the Inn to see for himself this bear called Hercules that he had heard so much about. He had spent many years in the north of Canada and in the Arctic, and had seen bears in the wild both grizzlies and their near cousin the polar bear.

Andy noted his enthusiastic interest and took him to meet Herc in his den, which he refused to come into and instead stood at the door incredulously repeating, I dont believe it; this cant be real; I must be dreaming, while Herc kissed and cuddled his dad.

Years ago, he told us, when he was working in the north of Canada, he had joined the search party for a friend who had gone off alone on a fishing expedition. They found his tent and there were bears footprints in the snow all round it. In an instant they knew that their worst fears had been confirmed and he prayed that his friend had been knocked senseless by the first blow from the huge hungry creature that had found the camp. He refused to go to the actual spot where his friend had obviously ended his days. All that was found of him was some shreds of clothing, a belt buckle and his false teeth.

On another occasion, further north, he had watched a polar bear sitting over a hole in the ice, patiently waiting for a seal to pop up. After a while a large seal weighing about 200 pounds duly appeared and slithered into the frozen air. With one movement the bear was on it, and with another he had delivered a massive swipe with his front paw that lifted the broken seal into the air and flung it like a toy over the ice. When the bear had moved off, he crept down and measured just how far the seal had been flung by that one blow: it was 66 feet.

I could well believe it. When Hercules was younger there was a tree trunk in his den. It was about 4 feet long and about 4 feet in diameter. It was oak, and so heavy that even Andy couldnt lift it and had to rock it from side to side to move it about the den. Hercules would pat it from paw to paw, sliding it easily across the floor, like a child with a toy. Once, when he was in a particularly mischievous mood, he picked up the log and used it as a battering ram to knock down a wall.

In Yellowstone |National Park, in the USA, a grizzly once killed a large black bear with a single swipe. The punch was so strong that it knocked the black bear against a tree 16 feet away.

At my feet Hercules stirred in his sleep and stretched out a front paw. My old Chamberss Encyclopaedia solemnly says of the great cuddly heap at my feet, No animal in the New World is more formidable. Native Americans believed that he was created to be more powerful and more clever than all other creatures: once he was created, runs the legend, even the god who made him, Manitou, had to flee to the top of a mountain to escape him. He would have had to flee fast, what is more, for over a distance of up to 150 metres a grizzly bear can run as fast as a good horse.