ANGOON, ALASKA - Somewhere deep in the forest, the grandpas are listening.

For thousands of years they have lumbered through the thick, mossy trees and across the cold streams - the massive grizzly bears that many people here consider part of their family, the ones they call the grandpas.

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On the island with one of the highest concentrations of grizzlies in the world - more than two bears for each of the 700 people who live here - the animals demand a reverence that seeps through the village, the land and its residents. Their paws pound paths through the misty, dark green thickets, and their claws mark the bark.

And on the island the natives call Kootznoowoo - The Fortress of the Bears - stories of the grizzlies are everywhere.

"When you're in this land, you have to be careful about what you say about the bears because they're going to hear you," said Dan Johnson, a member of the Tlingit Indian tribe whose family has lived here for countless generations. "You don't joke about them. You don't make wisecracks. Because they hear you."

Late last week, inside a house just outside the village, Johnson - who serves as Angoon's municipal judge - settled onto a couch, well aware of his extended audience in the forest. He leaned forward and began his village's most recent bear story: The Mystery of the Missing Cub.

"My grandmother told me this when I was about 10 years old," he said.

"She was 12 years old when this happened. She said she was finished with her chores one day, and like kids do, she was walking around with a friend, looking for something to do, when she walked past the Bear Clan house and realized something was different."

For decades, a distinctive totem pole stood in front of that house facing the sea. On the top of the totem pole sat a special brown bear, one that carried a story all its own.

"As my grandmother and her friend arrived, the man who (looked after) the house came out, and (the girls) asked, 'Where's the totem pole?' And he pointed up to where it was supposed to be.

"It was gone."

It's the beginning of a story that for more than 90 years has been missing several chapters - as a bear called "Kaats" in Angoon was taken in by a university in Greeley that will always know it as "Totem Teddy."

It's a story that stretched from Alaska to the Colorado plains, and - this weekend - stretched back again.

It's a saga that involves a search for identity and preservation of age-old tradition.

Until the sun rose over Alaska on Saturday, it was a story that had no ending.

'Totem Teddy' fervor

In 1914, six years after the totem pole disappeared from the seaside in Angoon, the Colorado State Teacher's College in Greeley was a school of only a few hundred students. It specialized in education degrees to the point that its athletic team was called "The Teachers."

That same winter, a gift arrived from an alumnus who had moved to Juneau, Alaska, where he was a school superintendent. He somehow happened upon what was then described as "an emblem of a primitive people." It was topped by a large brown bear.

"The first mention we've found of the totem pole was a picture of it in the student magazine in 1914," said Mary Linscome, archivist of what is now called the University of Northern Colorado.

Nobody knows (or has admitted to knowing) how the pole found its way into the possession of the alumnus in Juneau; its disappearance from Angoon remains part of the mystery.

"The magazine did state that it was a museum-quality piece and was very desirable by collectors," Linscome said, "and that several other universities were trying to collect one."

Roughly 10 years after the totem's arrival, the school changed its mascot to a bear. Images of the totem pole appeared on yearbooks and in logos. Someone started calling the pole "Totem Teddy," and the name stuck.

Soon people were getting married and engaged under the pole. It became a meeting point, and from a seat 15 feet high, the bear watched the school grow around it.

"From the '40s through the '60s, the Totem Teddy fervor was hot," Linscome said. "It was part of freshman initiation, how you treat the totem."

As the school's rivalries grew, so did the pole's travels - and travails. It was kidnapped, tarred and feathered, dragged around and even attacked by woodpeckers.

In an attempt to preserve the totem, the damaged wooden bear was removed and a cement replica was cast and put in its place.

The wooden bear was lost, and the pole - with its cement replica - spent time in a warehouse and was moved around campus until it was finally placed in the student center, where it rested until recently.

"He was just down in the atrium," Linscome said, "while people passed by without noticing."

'I know where that is'

Nearly a century after the totem pole was taken from the house next door to his father's home, Harold Jacobs cast a line back in time and felt a tug.

Jacobs had spent the bulk of his childhood listening to his elders, capturing their songs and stories, and made a life of trying to bring those stories back to life.

As a researcher for the tribe, he now spends his time trying to find lost items that generations of his people have never been allowed to touch.

After the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990, tribes were allowed to file claims to repatriate items they considered sacred to their ceremonies - items that were taken over the years and often found their way to museums.

One day in 2001, Jacobs was looking through photos with a friend and found a picture of his father's home in Angoon - a rare landmark dominated by the paintings of two giant killer whales on the front of the house.

Jacobs handed the photo to Peter Corey, who happened to be the curator of a museum in nearby Sitka. More importantly, Corey happened to be an alumnus of the University of Northern Colorado.

When he saw the picture, it wasn't the killer whale house that caught Corey's attention, but the totem pole standing nearby.

"I know where that is," his friend said. "That's Totem Teddy."

Tlingit culture thrives

In Angoon, there are no tourist shops with whimsical dancing bears or cheesy totem pole knockoffs. If you want to buy a teddy bear wearing a T-shirt, the closest spot is likely a gift shop in Juneau, about 50 miles away.

As the defenders of one of the last remaining strongholds of Tlingit (pronounced KLING-kit) culture, the people of Angoon hold tight to tradition and each other.

Nobody in town puts an address up on their home. (The city added street signs only a few years ago.) In many homes, the CB radio still squawks all day, a party line that carries the comings and goings of the town.

In Angoon, they sing the same songs and tell the same stories that have existed since long before contact in the late 1700s with the Russians and the British, who renamed the area Admiralty Island.

Despite the influx of satellite dishes and the lure of work far away from the island, many residents say the culture is stronger than ever. The children of parents who weren't allowed to learn the language are now taking back their Tlingit names. In the island's school, each child takes a class on Tlingit - the language and the stories behind it.

The return of lost items like the totem pole, they say, strengthens the future.

"Sometimes it makes me feel sad because my kids know more than I do," said Annie Braley, who has lived on the island all her life. "But it's also a good feeling because I know they're learning. And they're going to go further than us because they know the stories."

'You're taking away our mascot'

Daniel Brown says he heard the totem pole before he saw it.

"When we arrived in Colorado, I heard, 'What took you so long - what took you so long?' " Brown said. "It was the spirits."

Financed through grants from the National Park Service, a 13-member delegation from Angoon traveled to Greeley at the end of October carrying the papers that proved their ownership of the pole.

When they first arrived, the delegation, including Brown, spent time with the pole, telling stories, singing songs and dancing. Soon afterward, they were guests of honor at a ceremony to celebrate the pole's imminent return. During the ceremony, they did their best to explain the carvings on the pole to the people who kept it for so long.

The tale is difficult to translate. Even in the Tlingit language, it takes about two hours to tell properly. A simplified summary goes something like this:

The images on the pole tell the story of a man named Kaats, a Tlingit ancestor, who was captured by a bear at a time when some animals could assume human form. When the bear that captured Kaats returned to his den and asked where the man was, a female bear in the den hid Kaats in a hole. The female bear eventually married Kaats.

After she had cubs, the bear told Kaats he could not continue his old life in the human world. When he broke that contract, the bear cubs - his children - ripped him apart.

In the song that is often sung after the story is told, the female bear spends hours walking around Kaats' dead body after the cubs kill him. When the bear finally walks away and looks back, she has a human face.

It's a story the Tlingit have told for centuries. It's one they hope their children will have a chance to feel by touching the pole.

Despite the elation at seeing the pole at the university, the Tlingits soon discovered there were elements of it they would never see again. When it was carved, they say, it was designed as a mortuary pole, to hold the ashes of their ancestors. At some point, the place where ashes were kept was hollowed out and the ashes were lost.

While saddened at the discovery, they say the loss doesn't diminish the pole's power.

"The ashes aren't there," Brown said. "But the spirits were in the pole."

Along with the missing ashes, the original wooden bear was never found; the cement replica still stands in its place. In addition, the bear's new, somewhat cartoonish paint job is far from traditional Tlingit colors.

"Even if it is missing some pieces, it is still a whole being for what it stands for," Brown said. "It's like a veteran when he returns home from a war. He may not return home whole, but he comes back, and the pieces he leaves behind stay there."

After telling stories and sharing songs for hours, the tribe members prepared to return to Alaska.

"When we left, someone said, 'You're taking away our mascot,' " Brown remembered. "I said, 'No, the ashes that were in this pole are spread all over this campus. So there will always be part of the brown bear here.' "

A precious passenger

In the driver's seat of a U-Haul headed from Greeley to Seattle, Solomon Little Owl rarely took his mind off his 1,200-pound passenger.

"Before I left, I was given a vest by one of the Tlingit, and at certain times I would feel things and I was reminded of stories," said Little Owl, UNC's director of Native American Student Services.

When he heard that the totem pole needed transportation, Little Owl offered money from the "Fightin' Whites" fund - money raised from the sale of merchandise of the intramural basketball team, which was named to draw attention to what some students see as racist Indian mascots.

In the case of his own university's mascot, Little Owl said, he remains proud. "It's an important part of the history, and it's a piece of helping the university find an identity. We could have been the falcons or the coyotes, but we chose the bear because of the pole, and it's where the history begins."

The University of Northern Colorado recently revamped its logo, replacing the letters UNC with a silhouetted bear, which is now ubiquitous throughout the school. Inside the University Center, the computer store is called Bear Logic; the salon is Bear Images.

"You create your own myths, your own illusions, to try to find your identity," Little Owl said. "And that's what (the university) did."

In late October, after Little Owl and another student dropped off the pole at the ferry terminal in Seattle, he said the excitement brought by the Tlingit never waned throughout the tiring drive home.

"I could just see the smiles on people. It was such a positive feeling," he said. "Sometimes, people don't have to tell you that you're doing the right thing. You just know."

A rousing homecoming

As the sun rose Saturday, a ferry named after the Northern Lights pulled up to a frosty dock in Angoon. Braving the icy roadway, elders hobbled over on canes and a young man brought out his drum.

"There it is!" someone shouted, as the black pickup truck came into view. "There it is!"

After a ceremony at the dock, townspeople followed a procession to the pole's previous home - the Bear Clan house - where Peter McCluskey, a tribal elder, stepped onto the porch.

As he stood in the pole's ancestral home, a thick, bitter cold mist rolled in from the sea. Ravens cawed overhead, and he could barely speak.

"I just want to thank everybody. I really, really mean it . . . . I'm so happy, I don't know what to say," he finally managed. "Words get stuck in my throat."

Next to him, tribal elder Frank Jack took over, speaking slowly.

"Today this totem pole completes a circle," he said.

The procession continued to the elementary school gym, where the crates were unloaded, and - to the sounds of people growling and stomping their feet - ceremoniously opened.

In the crowd, 76 year-old Bessie Fred smiled.

"This is bigger than me. It's bigger than my whole life," Fred said. "It's worth more than anything in this world to get back what your grandparents made."

As part of the repatriation trip, the group from Angoon also traveled to La Junta, where they retrieved three items from the Koshare Indian museum. While in Greeley, they were met by a representative of the Logan Museum in Wisconsin, who delivered an elaborate ceremonial headdress.

The tribe plans to house the totem pole in the high school, where they will share its history with students. On a nearby wall, they also plan to place a history of its time in Colorado.

In addition, UNC anthropology professor Sally McBeth, who made the trip as a representative of the university, plans to take her experience in Alaska back to the classroom.

As the ceremony continued through the day, much of the town streamed through the gym to watch or participate.

"It's been gone so long," said 26-year-old Robert Johnson, who stood up and identified himself as "the next generation" - one who promised to continue the tradition.

"We've been driven by society into a place where we almost forgot who we are," Johnson said. "And getting some of these things back makes us feel whole again."

He nodded to the pole.

"That is who we are."

'The lost child' is home

Inside the gym, the drumming continued well past sunset as the tribe began to sing, low and mourning, a song that would become one of the many on the soundtrack for the totem pole - the song they call The Cub That Got Washed Away.

"It is the story of the mother bear and her two cubs," Dan Johnson said. "It takes place at a time when it was probably springtime when the river was flowing swiftly, and one of the cubs was washed downstream. Try as she might, the mother couldn't get the cub back. And as she was walking back to the surviving cub, she composed that song.

"It's similar to the way the totem was taken, so suddenly, washed away just as quickly."

As the party continued, the drumbeat quickened. The songs of the mother looking for her cub were replaced with more powerful growls from members of the crowd.

Soon the songs took the forms of the other animals of the area - killer whale, raven, salmon, beaver - leading to human shouts of joy, as each tribal member walked to the center of the room, where a 600-pound cement brown bear rested in the place of honor.

As a cold, clear night took hold outside, the dancing continued. Somewhere deep in the forest, the brown bears of Kootznoowoo settled in for the winter.

Somehow, Johnson said, the grandpas heard everything.

"I think the bears are happy, as happy as us. The lost child has come home."

sheelerj@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-2561