A startled bear unseated her horse and forced her to dismount in the dust

Evidence

I turned off in the idea of taking a short cut, and was sitting carelessly, shortening my stirrup, when a great, dark, hairy beast rose, crashing and snorting, out of the tangle just in front of me. I had only a glimpse of him, and thought that my imagination had magnified a wild boar, but it was a bear. The horse snorted and plunged violently, as if he would go down to the river, and then turned, still plunging, up a steep bank, when, finding that I must come off, I threw myself off on the right side, where the ground rose considerably, so that I had not far to fall. I got up covered with dust, but neither shaken nor bruised. It was truly grotesque and humiliating. The bear ran in one direction, and the horse in another. — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 31

Categorization

• CANDY: The comic image of horse and bear bolting in opposite directions while she trudges after, saddle thumping, is a perfect telling detail of wilderness mishap.
• ADDENDUM: Complements the tamarisk/tree-nature worldbuilding threads in the trees essay by grounding a solo woman’s vulnerability against wild megafauna in lived narrative detail.