From the first Ghost Bear Loremaster's notes concerning the Clawing ritual
These files will give you an impression of Clan Ghost Bear's special charcter
Wolfnet Arxhive
File:44463-CR7-02/14/03
From the first Ghost Bear
Loremaster's notes concerning the Clawing ritual
Few Clan rituals are as bloody or as dangerous as the Ghost Bear Clawing. The Clawing represents a rite of passage into the upper echelons of the Ghost Bear command structure, and so every Ghost Bear Khan and most Galaxy Commanders have performed the Clawing. Ghost Bear warriors traditionally spend a month (the length of Tseng and Jorgensson's exile from the Clans) performing a complex series of focusing rituals and training exercises before attempting the Clawing. Only the highest-ranking "unClawed" warrior of each Cluster is offered the chance to participate in this yearly ritual.
On Strana Mechty's winter solstice, the ritual party lands its vessel in the planet's antarctic circle. The Loremaster of the Clan assigns the candidates of each Galaxy to hunting parties. Each hunter is equipped with an ornately decorated spear, a primitive but efficient cold weather outfit that resembles the traditional dress of the Inuit of Terra, and a survival kit equivalent to those carried by Tseng and Jorgensson on their flight. Each party is also assigned a pair of specially trained dogs. The Loremaster of the Clan begins the ritual by charging each hunting party with its task: to kill a ghost bear and return to the base camp with its carcass as proof. The ritual party remains at the base camp for one month, then abandons for dead any warriors who have not returned. While outsiders may interpret this as a contradiction of the Bears' principle of brotherly love, we consider it a testament to our respect for tradition and the high demands we make of our leaders.
Many warriors die in their attempt to complete the Clawing. Some die from exposure or starvation, but most die at the claws of their honored prey. The average survival rate is less than 40 percent, and most survivors return empty-handed. Surviving the ritual but failing to complete it brings only disappointment, not dishonor, because most unsuccessful hunting parties simply failed to find a ghost bear.
The role of this ritual in selecting the Ghost Bear high command places an unusually high number of Elementals within the ranks of our Khans, Galaxy Commanders and Star Colonels. Aerospace pilots, though well respected in Clan Ghost Bear, rarely achieve a higher rank than Star Captain.
Wolfnet Archive File:
76765-LG9-10/27/23
It is a sad fact of lifee
that over the years, many Clans have found real or imagined
reasons to hate one another.
This account is paraphrased from the Clan Ghost Bear version of The Remembrance.
The origins of the long-standing feud between Clans Ghost Bear and Wolf lie within a matter that, on the surface, did not even concern Clan Ghost Bear: the annihilation of Clan Wolverine. \tab Immediately following the Council's unanimous vote to destroy Clan Wolverine in a Trial of Annihilation, the renegade Clan divided into several independent units, each attempting to simultaneously stock up on supplies and avoid pursuers. Most of these units saw escape to the Inner Sphere as their only chance for survival. Though Khan Tseng bid well and cleverly for the right to destroy Clan Wolverine, that honor went to Clans Wolf and Widowmaker.
One of the small Clan Wolverine units fled to a moon in the Arcadia system, where a Ghost Bear patrol watched the renegades liberate some supplies from a hidden stockpile and leave the planet. The Ghost Bear failure to raise the alarm became public knowledge through the deathbed statement of Star Captain Amon, who commanded the Bear patrol. Even years after the fact, Amon spoke of the incident in a tone of deep indignation when he stated that "hunting the Not-Named Clan was an honor denied us. Had the Wolves been truly determined to stop them, they would have. That they failed in their task was not of concern to me or my unit.
Enraged by the Ghost Bear warrior's righteous attitude and shamed by even this questionable evidence that they failed to complete such an important task, Clan Wolf immediately launched a series of punitive raids against Ghost Bear worlds. Bear and Wolf units grappled for several days with no clear winner until Khan Sandra Tseng cleverly defused the situation by pointing to the Not-Named Clan as the Wolves' true enemy. Rather than venting their anger against a perceived slight, Khan Tseng asked the Grand Council, should not Clan Wolf concentrate on finishing the job by hunting down the renegades? The matter was put to a vote and defeated by a narrow margin when cooler heads pointed out the difficulty of tracking the renegades through so many years of space travel. \tab Both the events of the Trial of Annihilation and the longdelayed revelation that the effort failed left a bitter taste in the mouths of Wolf and Ghost Bear warriors.
Those Ghost Bears inclined to hold grudges viewed Wolves as haughty, unreliable, and unforgiving. Many Wolf warriors considered the Ghost Bears to be un-Clanlike slackers with little regard for honor or authority. Though these specific characterizations faded with time, both Clans find new slights often enough to feed the simmering hatred between them.
Wolfnet Archive File:
95215-TJ3-12/8/60
From the notes for the book
Becoming a Khan: The Legend Factor,
censured by the Grand Council as frivolous and lacking respect for Nicholas Kerensky.
The original Khans of Clan Ghost Bear were remarkable for more than their status as the only married couple to found a Clan. The bonds of love and loyalty they forged between all members of their Clan surpassed ordinary camaraderie and made them, in every important way, a real family.
Sandra Tseng and Hans Jorgensson were the parents of that family. They taught cooperation and communication by both deeds and words, and those words and actions earned them the status of legendary heroes. Clan Ghost Bear pays its founders such deep respect that by unspoken consent, its Clan Council always fills an open Khanship by electing the most eligible Tseng or Jorgensson. Only rarely has the Clan been forced to elect a leader from another genetic legacy, and then only recently. The Clan seems always to prosper under TsenglJorgensson guidance, and this nearly faultless record lends further credence to the founders' mystique.
Nadia Winson, one of those "other" Khans, was captured as a bondsman from Clan Wolf mere days after she earned her Bloodname. Winson, a cagey warrior and staunch Crusader, quickly regained her warrior status and rose through the ranks, eventually assuming leadership of Clan Ghost Bear during one of those rare periods when no candidates named rseng or Jorgensson were eligible. Ironically, it was Winson, not a namesake of the founders, who attempted to force the issue of invasion in the Grand Council in 3000. When both Ghost Bear KhaRs died during the Clan Wolf's Trial of Refusal protesting the 3048 vote to invade the Inner Spheres the Ghost Bear Clan Council made an uncharacteristically impulsive vote for change. They elected as their new Khans Karl Bourjon and Theresa DelVillar.
Wolfnet Archive File:
33334-GB9-04/04/54
From the unpublished war
journal written by Commander Jaime Wolf during the Clan invasion
[EDITOR'S NOTE: Judging by the date of
the first entry, Commander Wolf began this journal when he
decided to actively aid the Inner Sphere against the Clans and
invited the rulers of each realm to Outreach for training.]
Of all the events of the Clan invasion, the one that prompted the least comment was Clan Ghost Bear's decision to replace one of its Khans in the middle of this major military operation. It seemed to be an impulsive choice for a Clan so dedicated to the principles of loyalty and tradition, but further analysis proves that they remained true to their founders' ideals.
The easiest explanation for their action also makes the most sense. Quite simply, the Ghost Bear's track record indicated that the Clan should have been rnore Successful during the invasion than they had been so far. In the first two waves, Clan Ghost Bear conquered only eight worlds, half as many as Clan Wolf subdued in the same amount of time. It could be argued that Clan Wolf owed its success to the fact that it entered the Inner Sphere one Galaxy stronger than any other Clan, but Clan Smoke Jaguar took fifteen worlds in the first two waves with the same number of warriors as Clan Ghost Bear. Clan Ghost Bear simply failed to operate as efficiently as those other Clans.
The primary cause of Khan Karl Bourjon s failure laid in his gross underestimate of the scope of the operation. The Bear warriors consumed most of their available supplies during the first wave against token resistance. Had Khan Bourjon admitted his mistake at that point and brought forward additional supplies, I believe he would still be Khan. Khan Bourjon also failed, along with most of his Clan, to accurately judge the will of the people to resist. While all the Clans suffered from this failing to some degree, only the Ghost Bears and Smoke Jaguars mishandled the situation so dramatically. When combined with the Bears' initial reluctance to trust the administration of supposedly conquered worlds to either ComStar or the existing government, the garrisons left on these planets proved woefully inadequate. It should have required little guesswork to realize that the citizenry would rebel, and the Bears' reaction to these obviously unexpected uprisings also seemed uncharacteristic. Whole Galaxies returned to pacify what amounted to civilians with a grudge.
The loss of troops suffered in the Beta Galaxy collision with the asteroid did not improve the Khan's situation. Though he was not blamed for the tragedy, Khan Bourjon must certainly be held responsible for failing immediately to focus his warriors' anger at losing their brothers and sisters into meaningful gains on the fields of battle. Instead, he agreed to honor the dead in the traditional solemn ceremony.
With popular opinion already beginning to solidify against him, Khan Bourjon repeated an earlier mistake by again leaving inadequate garrisons on those worlds his Clan was forced to retake. He compounded this mistake by failing to react to Clan Wolf's accelerated attack schedule, Ieaving his warriors clamoring for their Khans to call forward provisional garrison clusters to free up the invading warriors to assault more worlds Khan Bourjon continued to reject this step even when his saKhan encouraged him to add these special-purpose troops to his forces.
The growing dissatisfaction reached a flash point when the Bear warriors learned that Khan Bourjon originally intended to reject ilKhan Showers's scheme to seriously delay or stop Clan Wolf s advance. While Karl Bourjon had as much disdain for the Wolves as any of his warriors, he somehow failed to see the advantage to falling in with the ilKhan s plan. Only the Bears' tradition of obedience to the ilKhan prompted Bourbon to acquiesce. The Ghost Bear warriors were furious when they learned that their Khan had even considered passing up the opportunity to conquer a capital world. At that moment, the invading Ghost Bears decided to replace Khan Bourjon at the earliest opportunity. It seems reasonable to assume that Aletha Kabrinski, the Clan's Oathmaster and a staunch Crusader, stood at the head of this movement. The loss of Khan DelVillar in the invasion of Last Frontier gave the Bear warriors the chance they needed to shake up the status quo and replace Khan Bourjon. Kabrinski's nomination of Bjorn Jorgensson answered the belief of most warriors that only by electing a Tseng or Jorgensson as Khan would their fortunes change.
This incident illustrated many things about Clan Ghost Bear: its political awareness, a degree of superstition and the power of those who lead when supported by the confidence of their followers. It also showed, though no one recognized the warning signs, that Clan Ghost Bear's family ties were no longer so strong.
Wolfnet Archive File:
09081-GB1-01/18/51
From the unpublished war
journal written by Commander Jaime Wolf during the Clan invasion
The news of ilKhan Leo Showers's death affected Clan Ghost Bear in a strange and profound way. All normal activities ground to a halt as Ghost Bear warriors said a silent prayer for the soul of Leo Showers. His loss forced many of them to realize that they had lost something far more fundamental than battles in the first months of the invasion. They had lost touch with each other. Among the Clans, only Clan Ghost Bear looks upon its founders as parents of a great family. When the Clans expanded following their successful campaign to retake the Pentagon worlds, and again when Nicholas Kerensky instituted his ambitious program to genetically engine neer warriors, Clan Ghost Bear lost a certain degree of closeness simply because of its size. Before the invasion started, however, Bear warriors managed to maintain close personal ties to their trothkin long after leaving the sibko. Also because the Ghost Bear warrior caste structure is less military and more fraternal than most Inner Sphere units condone, the Ghost Bear units developed fierce loyalty and shared close bonds of friendship and trust with one another. This intimacy also fostered a more informal command structure than that of other Clans, which is exactly what founder Hans Jorgensson intended.
Even before the invasion began, time and circumstance conspired to erode the Clan Ghost Bear warriors' unique relationship. When they launched the invasion, the nature of the military operation forced Clan warriors into a regimented schedule unlike any since the retaking of the Pentagon worlds. Trothkin lost touch with one another and communication broke down as the warriors concentrated all their energy on the immediate matter at hand.
The ilKhan s death apparently served as a kind of emotional wake-up call for the Ghost Bear warriors. Whenever possible, they began shuttling between worlds renewing friendships and re-establishing the lines of communication. Their shared loss seemed to bind them even closer together.
Other Khans speculate that this renewed sense of unity was what galvanized the Clan in its battles against the Inner Sphere from that point on. The Ghost Bears had strayed from the path, and it took a shocking event like the death of their leader to bring them together again. In fact, the Ghost Bears success on Tukayyid can be attributed, at least in part, to their strong esprit de corps.
