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Everyone loves a teddy bear, especially one called Ted.
He's likely the world's largest black bear, at 850 pounds, but he doesn't throw his weight around. When his fellow bear Honey doesn't want to play, which is often, he merely whines, "like a foghorn,'' says curator Donna Phelan. And when he wants to make friends, which is all the time, he makes a "wonderful amiable sound, an umph-umph-umph.''
Ted, Honey and a cub named Lucky live on two acres outside the North American Bear Center in Ely, which opened in May 2007 with 40 exhibits. Many are based on the research of Dr. Lynn Rogers, whose work with bears around Ely is world-famous.
Half a century ago, a Minnesota logger who lived in a forest full of hungry bears decided that if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
By the time he died at age 86, Vince Shute had fed generations of black bears, become best friends with a bear named Brownie and inspired bear-lovers all over the world.
Shute wasn't a sophisticated man, but he had a heart.
More than any other river in Wisconsin, the Bois Brule has a pedigree.
They call it River of Presidents, but it also attracts senators and millionaires. Named for pines charred by lightning strikes
— “burnt wood’’ in Ojibwe, then French — it rises from conifer bogs near Solon Springs and flows
toward Lake Superior. Its cold, spring-fed currents harbor trout, and well-heeled fishermen discovered the river long before
loggers moved in.
They built the first lodges in the 1870s, when Ulysses S. Grant came to visit, followed by Grover Cleveland in the 1880s. In the 1890s, St. Louis oil and rail tycoon Henry Clay Pierce amassed 4,160 acres along the river and built a fishing retreat.
In southwest Wisconsin, following the Kickapoo River is a lot like watching a magic act: No matter how closely you pay attention, eventually what you see is going to disappear into thin air.
When it reappears, it will be in a completely different spot, and you'll have no idea how it got there.
"Look, there it is again," said my husband, as we drove Wisconsin 131 through the Kickapoo Valley. "It's meandering like mad."
When it rains on Isle Royale, you just have to soak it up.
Moisture comes with the territory in Lake Superior's northern reaches. No one comes here for the weather, despite early advertising that called it a "Summertime 'Bermuda' Paradise."
Bermuda it's not. But paradise? It depends on how you look at it.