Time and Labor Day

On a calm summer day in 1823, in northwest South Dakota, a mountain man named Hugh Glass experienced absolute terror when he stumbled across a she-grizzly bear and her two cubs.

He was alone. She stood on her hind legs, swatted his rifle away, then his pistol, but he held tight to his knife. Few of us will ever experience first-hand a fright of this magnitude, a life-and-death wrestle with a hot, mad mother grizzly bear.

The author Frederick Manfred described in his book Lord Grizzly how at that instant Hugh’s sense of time felt twisted, distorted. “Time stiffened, poured like cold molasses.”...