Nancy Russell once described the subject of this work: “The mother bear with her two cubs has climbed up to a wobbly rock to safety. The cubs are holding on to their mother as they watch a porcupine go by. One can fairly hear the mountain mother tell her children to be quiet until the little enemy with his sharp needles passes by. The ’porky’ is small and all the other animals respect his armor.” In 1922, the same year that this bronze was first exhibited, the popular naturalist Enos A. Mills published an eyewitness account of a grizzly mother’s devotion. His story described a mother bear who led a group of hunters and dogs away from her two cubs, only to return to find that her offspring had been swept away by a rocky avalanche. Mills’ descriptions of the bear’s frantic search and subsequent discovery of her two cubs—one dead, one alive—was infused with the same kind of human allusion as in Russell’s sculpture. Russell exhibited the model for this bronze in Los Angeles in March 1921, and the first bronze cast was exhibited in the same gallery just one year later, when it was sold to a Pittsburgh collector for $225. By 1930 the bronze was selling for $300, and it was exhibited and sold through many outlets, including Tiffany’s in New York. As an artistic composition, the bronze is successful because Russell skillfully arranged the figures in a tight and dynamic pose that seems to suggest the tension of the moment. The bronze on display here was the only copy listed in the inventory of Nancy Russell’s estate. The inventory also listed two plaster models of the subject, and these were later used to make a small number of unauthorized casts bearing the mark of the Nelli Art Bronze Works in Los Angeles.