“Passage of Matashu” Grizzly tracks (Ursus arctos) - George River, Nunavik	Robert Mullen
	2009	West Bolton, Vermont, USA
	Acrylic, 24 x 48"	www.paintnpaddlestudio.com
North America's Grizzly Bears descended from Eurasian bears that crossed the Bering Strait about 50,000 years ago. Forty thousand years later, the species' New World range would reach its apex, stretching east to the Hudson Bay and south into Mexico. Piecing together the exact history of its retreat to its current range in Alaska, western Canada, and the northwestern contiguous U.S. is a difficult task. Oral traditions, such as the word "Matashu" (Red Bear) in the tongue of the Mushua-Innu of Labrador and Nunavik, records of the Hudson Bay Company, written accounts of travelers (including an unpublished report by Smithsonian naturalist Lucien Turner), a skull found in northern Labrador in 1975 and a photograph by William Brooks Cabot of a bear skull in an Innu camp in 1910, indicate that a population of Ursus arctos probably survived on the Labrador Peninsula into the early 20th Century.