V.
The climate shapes and produces animals as well as plants.
The bear is a serious beast, a thorough mountaineer, curious to behold in his great-coat of felted hair, yellowish or grayish in color. It seems formed for its domicile and its domicile for it. Its heavy fur is an excellent mantle against the snow. The mountaineers think it so good, that they borrow it from him as often as they can, and he thinks it so good that he defends it against them to the best of his ability. He likes to live alone, and the gorges of the heights are as solitary as he wishes.
[FULL-SIZE] -- [Medium-Size]
The hollow trees afford him a ready-made house; as these are for the most part beeches and oaks, he finds in them at once food and shelter. For the rest, brave, prudent, and robust, he is an estimable animal; his only faults are that he eats his little ones, when he runs across them, and that he is a poor dancer.
[FULL-SIZE] -- [Medium-Size]
In hunting him, they go into ambush and fire on him as he passes. Lately, in a battue, a superb female was tracked. When the foremost hunters, who were novices, saw the glitter of the little fierce eyes, and perceived the black mass descending with great strides, beating the underbrush, they forgot all of a sudden that they had guns, and kept whist behind their oak. A hundred paces further on, a brave fellow fired. The bear, which was not hit, came up on a gallop. The man, dropping his gun, slipped into a pit. Reaching the bottom, he felt of his limbs, and by some miracle found himself whole, when he saw the animal hesitating above his head, busy in examining the slope, and pressing her foot upon the stones to see if they were firm. She sniffed here and there, and looked at the man with the evident intention of paying him a visit. The pit was a well; if she reached the bottom, he must resign himself to a tête-à -tête. While the man reflected on this, and thought of the animal’s teeth, the bear began to descend with infinite precaution and address, managing her precious person with great care, hanging on to the roots, slowly, but without ever stumbling. She was drawing near, when the hunters came up and shot her dead.
[FULL-SIZE] -- [Medium-Size]
The isard dwells above the bear, upon the naked tops, in the region of the glaciers. He needs space for his leaps and gambols. He is too lively and gay to shut himself, like the heavy misanthrope, in the gorges and forests. No animal is more agile; he leaps from rock to rock, clears precipices, and keeps his place upon points where there is just room for his four feet You sometimes hear a hollow bleating on the heights: it is a band of isards cropping the herbage amidst the snow; their tawny dress and their little horns stand out in the blue of the heavens; one of them gives the alarm and all disappear in a moment.