THE HAPPY HOOLIGAN

In this chapter I would like to give some notion of the Black Bear at home. I do not mean “at home” in the society sense of being dressed up “from four to seven” to receive callers; but in the good old backwoods sense of being in your shirt-sleeves with your feet on the table. There is a good deal more difference between the two attitudes than appears in a book on etiquette.

If you meet a man at an afternoon reception you see one side of him—the outside. If you are a member of the local vigilance committee and call on him officially in the course of business, you get a specialized insight into another phase of his character. But as an old hermit with a rat-tailed file for a tongue once said to me in the hills, “You never really know a man till you’ve watched him through the transom when he thinks himself alone.”

It is pretty much the same with bears. We are all familiar with them as seen at their public receptions in the bear pits. We know their company manners. Personally, I can never quite rid myself of the absurd notion that when the guards put the crowds out at five o’clock and close the Zoo gates for the night, the bears must yawn, stretch their cramped muscles, shake themselves with that lumbering, disjointed violence of theirs, and exclaim in bear language, “Thank heaven, that’s over until to-morrow!”

For the rest most of our information about them comes from self-appointed vigilantes who, rifle in hand, knock unexpectedly at the doors of their summer residences and do not even offer them the customary five minutes in which to say their prayers. In their reports, as in accounts of other executions, the chief emphasis is laid upon the attitude of the victim in the face of death. “The condemned mounted the steps of the scaffold with a firm tread.” Or, if the animal happened to be gnawing a bone when discovered, “At the conclusion of a hearty breakfast consisting of ham and eggs and coffee, the sheriff came in and read the death-warrant.” Or, best of all, if the unhappy brute ventured to show its teeth as the firing squad sighted down the rifle barrel, we are informed that, “the savage and bloodthirsty monster died game.”

She began to swing her head from side to side

This may be good journalism, but it is mighty poor natural history. It gives us some insight into the nature of the man behind the gun, but very little idea of the real nature of the bear in front of it. We never find out what the bear would have done if the trigger had not been pulled. A man once stopped before a plant in my garden and asked me what under the shining sun it was. He had never, he said, seen anything like it. As a matter of fact it happened to be a cabbage that had gone to seed; but the man, who had always killed his cabbages as soon as their hides were prime, did not even know they bore seed. And he rather fancied himself as an amateur gardener, too. It is much the same in the woods. If you kill your bear just as soon as it begins to act natural, you may get to be an authority on hides, but there will be a lot of things that you don’t know.

We are not here discussing the ethics of killing. That is a question quite apart. Goodness knows that there is little enough glory—since there is little or no risk—in killing a Black Bear. To chase a timorous and inoffensive animal up a tree and then to stand underneath and shoot it is no very great achievement. The sport is altogether in the mind of the sportsman. It is a good deal like dressing up in a brown cotton imitation of a fringed buckskin hunting shirt and stalking the spring calf in the east pasture with an air-gun. It’s exciting—until you find out what it really amounts to. But you have to manufacture your own excitement. The point I wish to make is simply this: that if you want to find out how an animal lives, you must watch it live and not watch it die. When you start out to study the habits of a wild animal the place for your gun, if you have one, is in the rack at home.

For one thing, if you undertake to watch a man through a transom with a gun in your hand and murder in your mind, the chances are a hundred to one that he’ll feel something queer “in the air.” The thing has not been explained yet, but we can feel a scowl behind our backs much more readily than a smile. And in the woods the animals soon distinguish between a desire to kill and a desire to look on. I have tried both and I know.

All animals are quick to understand when we are afraid of them; and many of them seem to enjoy taking advantage of the fact. We can see this in cows and in dogs and even in turkey gobblers. And we would see it often in the woods, too, if we were not so much given to either running or shooting before we had time to see it. The Black Bear makes the most of his ability to inspire terror. He trades on it. He makes capital out of it. And he has come to be one of the most accomplished bluffers on earth.

In the summer of 1908 I spent some weeks in the mountains of the Yellowstone National Park getting a series of flash-light pictures of grizzly bears, and early in my stay I was joined by Mr. J. B. Kerfoot, of New York, who, although he had had no experience with bears, had done a good deal of amateur photography and was anxious to help me with the work in hand. The day after we reached camp we went out to look over the ground where we proposed to work that night, and on our way back we ran across an old Black Bear with two cubs and determined to take her picture. As soon as she saw us she ordered her cubs up a tree but, by a quick movement, I managed to get to them in time to intercept the second cub before it had a chance to obey. It then rejoined its mother and I placed myself between them and the treed cub and thus had things just as I wanted them, knowing that the old bear would not go far away and leave her youngster (who was bawling lustily from the branches) to its possible fate.

But when I called Kerfoot, who had the camera, to come forward and get some pictures, he was rather shy about it. He explained that he had come out to photograph bears, and that if this one had been by herself, he would not have minded her; but that he had always understood that an old bear with cubs was about the most dangerous thing on four legs, and that to interpose himself between her and her bawling offspring looked to him a good deal like suicide. I finally persuaded him that there was no danger, however, and he moved up to within fifty feet or so of the old bear. But he had no more than taken a step or two when she turned toward him with a coughing snarl that made him think his last hour had come. I could not help laughing at the old bluffer, for she had never so much as shown me a tooth, but had rather assumed toward me what you might call a “put upon” expression—whining and walking nervously back and forth and showing quite plainly that she thought herself badly used by a superior force. But Kerfoot was hard to convince in regard to her bluffing qualities, and while we were all maneuvering for a suitable position the cub came down from the tree, joined its mother and the other cub, and all three made off into the woods.

We followed helter-skelter, and as the cubs could not run very fast we finally succeeded in treeing one of them again and resumed operations. This time I picked up a club and by brandishing it valiantly every time the bear snarled at Kerfoot, managed to reassure him sufficiently to coax him up within about thirty feet of her. He had a Graflex natural-history camera that took a 4 × 5 plate, but had sufficient bellows to accommodate a twenty-inch lens, thus giving a very large image at a comparatively considerable distance from the object. In these cameras an inclined mirror, that flies out of the way at the moment of exposure, enables one to see the full-sized picture on the ground glass, and to focus on a moving subject up to the second of pressing the button. And when Kerfoot had looked at the picture at a distance of thirty feet he said that he thought he could get a fine head by going a bit closer yet, and moved ten feet nearer. He had just gotten things to his liking and was standing with the long camera held at the level of his eye and his head bent over the focussing hood when the bear gave a vicious snort, and executed the peculiar combination of broken coughs and gnashing teeth that is the trump card in the Black Bear’s game of bluff; and the photographer literally went straight up into the air. Of course the whole effect was reproduced on the ground glass within two inches of his eyes and he said afterward that he had thought his nose was scratched. But the sight was too much for me. I threw away my club, and throwing myself on the ground roared with laughter, and as soon as he understood what had happened, Kerfoot put the camera down and joined me.

And when we had laughed ourselves almost into tears we found the old bear sitting on her haunches and looking at us as serious as an owl. That ended her bluffing and we got several pictures of her, one of which, taken just before we left her, is reproduced here. By that time the poor old soul had so worried herself over the other cub that she was literally drenched in sweat, and she finally sat down and began to swing her head dejectedly from side to side, uttering a sort of moan at each swing, for all the world like a mourner at a wake, while the cub that was with her sat back and looked on. It was at this moment that the picture was taken, and when we had secured it we were so sorry for her that we packed up and left her alone.

This experience gave Mr. Kerfoot a pretty good insight into the real meaning of Black Bear ferocity, and later on we had many amusing experiences with the beasts. To show, however, that some people have eyes but do not use them, I will give another little adventure that we had toward the end of our stay in the mountain. We had with us as camp keeper a man who has lived most of his life in the Rockies, has hunted bears all over that part of the country, and ought to have been pretty well acquainted with the real nature of them. I do not believe that with a gun in his hand he would be afraid of anything that walks, but he had evidently never investigated very closely into what would happen to him when he had left his gun at home. We had stopped over night at a public camp at a place called Tower Falls, and after supper in the evening Kerfoot and I, having seen a Black Bear at the edge of a clearing, walked over to look at her. She was a large animal and lay on the ground near the foot of a big pine tree, and a single cub sat on one of the low-hanging branches above her head. We were talking about our plans for the morrow and walked toward the bear without thinking much about her one way or the other. When we got within fifty feet or so of her she backed up against the tree, and as we continued to advance without noticing her especially, she first stood up with her feet against the trunk and then climbed up ten or fifteen feet from the ground, driving her cub ahead of her. We walked up to the foot of the tree and looked at her for a few minutes, and though she stuck her upper lip out at us in the peculiar fashion of her kind, she made no other demonstration, and after we had stood there and talked for a little while, we turned back toward camp.

About half-way back we met our man Frank coming down to see the bear, and just behind him came a party of eight or ten people who had stopped for the night at the camp. We paid no attention to this crowd until, hearing a noise behind us, we turned around and found the whole lot running back up the hill very much frightened, and as Frank was bringing up the rear we asked him, rather jokingly, what was the matter. “Gee,” he answered, “I tell you, that’s a fierce old bear.” And we have not finished teasing him about it yet. That old bear certainly knew whom to bluff, and I have no doubt that the majority of the schoolteachers in the crowd thought themselves lucky to have escaped with their heads.

I do not mean to say that a Black Bear will not fight if it is forced to. But, personally, I have never seen one’s patience tried to the breaking point. If you chase one too closely it will take to a tree. If you follow it up the trunk, it will retreat toward the top. I imagine that if you kept on following it until it could go no farther you would end up by getting a pretty bad mauling, for it has sharp claws and tremendous muscles to back them up with; but it is perfectly safe to say that if you were at the top of the tree and it was half-way down, you would have a hard time getting at close enough quarters with it to get hurt.

A black bear at home

These conclusions, like all the others scattered through the pages of this book, are founded upon many observations made during many years, not upon any single experience or upon the actions of any one animal; and I want to lay especial emphasis upon the fact that when I give, as an illustration, the account of any particular happening, it is only cited as an example of the things that, taken together, have gone to the forming of my belief. For instance, in the summer of 1906 I was camped high up on the continental divide in the mountains of Wyoming with two boys, Tommy and Bill Richards. One day when we were out in the hills we saw a Black Bear go into a thick tangle of underbrush surrounding a big pine tree and lying at the foot of a perpendicular cliff; and we determined for the fun of the thing to drive it out so as to get a good look at it. I accordingly made my way to the extreme right of the thicket, Bill stationed himself in front, and Tommy stayed where we were when we first saw the bear. Then at a given signal we all rushed in with loud yells. But instead of trying to escape, the bear went up the pine tree and lodged thirty feet or so from the ground in a clump of foliage. One of the boys had a camera and now wanted to get the bear’s picture, so I suggested that he could do this by driving the bear further up the tree, and as Tommy said he was not afraid of the animal I cut him a long pole and he climbed up to where he could reach up and poke the bear with it. He punched it in the belly and the bear was furious, slashed at the stick, gnashed its teeth, and made a most terrifying fuss, but refused to move. Tommy, however, kept on poking and in a few minutes the bear got over its anger, appeared to grow interested in the game, and before they got through, it was actually playing. Tommy took to tickling its feet, and it would raise first one and then the other and try to catch the pole with its teeth and claws, all in a high good humor. Tommy finally dislodged him by climbing higher yet and fairly threshing the branches with his pole, and they got an excellent photograph that they subsequently published in the St. Nicholas magazine.

The Black Bear is very fond of water, and seldom stays for any length of time where it cannot get its daily bath. The grizzly also bathes, especially in hot weather or to rid itself of vermin, but the Black Bear loves water for its own sake. They have regular bathing holes and after taking a swim either stretch themselves out on a grassy bed near by, or climb up into a convenient tree, where the sun and wind soon dries them off. We found one such bear’s bath tub in a beautifully situated glade among the mountains and spent a good deal of time concealed in some nearby shrubbery, hoping to get a picture of Ursus emerging from the bath. During one of these waits a small Black Bear sauntered up to the edge of the pool, looked carefully around as though to make sure he was alone, and then slipped into the water and swam twice the length of the plunge. Just as he was crawling out on to the bank again, Kerfoot snapped his camera at him and, frightened by the sound, the bear took to his heels and climbed up a near-by tree. He settled himself about forty feet from the ground in the sunlight, and having apparently made up his mind that he had been scared over nothing settled down for a comfortable snooze. We now made up our minds that we would like a second picture to complete our record of the performance, and walked over to the bottom of the tree where the bear was ensconced, but, as is usually the case with these black animals, we found that the position in which he sat did not lend itself to a picture, so we sat down under the tree determined to wait till he changed his position. Nothing happened for fifteen or twenty minutes, when, quite unexpectedly, the bear made up his mind that he was not going to be held prisoner any longer, and with a great puffing and snorting, started stern first down the tree. Kerfoot, who by this time had gotten over his initial ideas about Black Bear, picked up a stick and hammered on the trunk to scare him back again. But this was one of the bears who, when he bluffed, bluffed to the limit, and, instead of retreating, he redoubled his growls and snarls and continued to come steadily down the tree. By this time I was becoming interested and was making bets with myself as to which of the two bluffers (for I knew that they were both bluffing) would eventually take the trick. Kerfoot finally settled the matter by actually hitting the bear a whack over the rump with his club, and the latter scurried back up the tree, twice as fast as he had come down.

One of the most characteristic features of the Black Bear’s game of bluff is its utter failure to show any concern when the bluff is called. A dog, for instance, when he indulges in a bluff that fails to work, very frequently shows plainly that he feels himself a fool. He’ll rush out with every evidence of intending to attack; growling, snarling, and coming headlong toward you; and when (if you know dogs and are not impressed by his fine acting) he gets quite up to you without frightening you, he will cringe, lick your boots, sometimes roll over and put all four feet up—which is the dog sign of complete discomfiture or complete surrender. Of course it is not possible for us to really know how any animal’s mind works. We are almost certain to credit them with some of our own psychology in trying to follow theirs. And so I do not mean to imply that a dog under these circumstances “thinks he is a fool.” But we know that he acts very much as we would feel if we thought we had been shown up. The nearest that we can come to interpreting his actions is to say that they seem to mean, “I did not know that it was you, or I never would have tried to frighten you.”

But a Black Bear does not, as the boys say, give a continental whether his bluff works or not. If he scares you, well and good. He’s gained his point. If he doesn’t scare you, well and good again. Nothing has been lost by the attempt. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred he’ll sit and look at you exactly as though nothing had happened, and the inference is, “Well, I’ve made my suggestion. Now it’s your move.” It was thoroughly typical of the animal that the old bear that so scared Kerfoot when he was focussing his camera upon her should have simply sat down on her haunches and stared open-eyed at us when we rolled on the ground in laughter.

Nor is this kind of bluff and this attitude toward failure to make good on the part of the Black Bear, confined to intercourse with strangers. I have seen one of them go through exactly similar actions with another bear. One of the most amusing little incidents I ever watched—because it so laughably illustrated the happy-go-lucky, anything-to-keep-one’s-self-amused attitude of these beasts—will serve as an example. I had been watching a Black Bear that was feeding in ignorance of my presence, and after some time it had sat down at the foot of a small pine tree on a side hill and was leaning lazily against the trunk, turning its head now and then as though watching for something to turn up. It was a pretty good-sized bear—three hundred pounds or so perhaps—and when another animal of about its own size appeared some distance along the side hill and, somewhat to my surprise, began to walk threateningly toward it, I became very much interested. The first bear, however, did not seem to share my interest. He paid, or pretended to pay, no attention whatever to the newcomer. And the latter, very deliberate but very determined, came straight toward him. When he arrived at the other side of the small tree (it was not more than six inches thick) he half drew back on his haunches, half raised his fore-quarters from the ground, lifted one paw as if to strike, and uttered the coughing snarl ending in a rapid champing of the jaws that is the Black Bear’s ultimate expression of wrath. I thought that I was going to have a reserved seat at a prize fight. But my original bear continued to lean against his tree and look about lazily as though waiting for something interesting to turn up. He did not seem to so much as suspect that there was another bear in that neck of the woods. And the challenger turned round and walked away as deliberate, as dignified, and as unconcerned as though nothing whatever had happened.

The actions of these two bears, moreover, illustrate another characteristic of the tribe. You never watch Black Bear when they are quite at home and undisturbed without being made to feel that they are hard put to it to know what to do with themselves. A grizzly “knows his business” in every sense of the expression. When he starts out, he knows where he is going and goes there. When he starts a job, he finishes it and goes on to the next. I have followed one along and over the high ridges of the Rockies for two days on end when the light snow of early fall showed every step he took. I have tracked one from ground-squirrel burrow to marmot hole; seen where two hours of incredibly laborious digging had yielded him a mouthful of breakfast; followed his careful search for more provender, to be got by more digging, and seen where, the possibilities of that particular ridge having been exhausted, he had started on a predetermined journey across country for another feeding ground. The grizzly is working for his living and knows it.

But Black Bear act for all the world like boys on a rainy Saturday. They’ve got nothing but time, and the one problem in life is how to kill it. Watch one for a couple of hours and you’ll see him start forty different things, finish none of them, and then sit down and swing his head hopelessly from side to side as though to say, “Now what shall I do next?”

If you have only seen these animals in captivity you are apt to think that their air of restless boredom is due to their confinement; that they don’t know what to do with themselves because they are unable, in a bear pit, to follow their natural vocations. I am always sorry for wild animals in captivity, but I am, I think, less sorry for the Black Bear than for most others. For they act just about as bored to death in the woods as they do in the Zoo. I have seen one come along, rip a piece off an old stump, sniff for bugs, find none, stand undecided for a few minutes, and then walk up to a tree and draw itself upright against the trunk, stretching like a cat. It then sat down at the foot of the tree and scratched its ear. It then got up and started off aimlessly, but, happening to straddle a low bush in its path and liking the feeling of the branches against its belly, it walked backward and forward half a dozen times to repeat the sensation. Then it started back the way it had come and smelling a mouse under a log, suddenly woke up and became all attention. It tried to move the log and failed. It dug a bit at one end but gave that up. It then tried again, very hard this time, to turn the log over, and the log giving away suddenly, the bear turned a complete somersault backward, but instantly recovered itself and rushed around with the most ludicrous haste to see if the mouse had gotten away. It hadn’t. It hadn’t had time. Which may give you a faint notion of how quick that clumsy-looking bear was when he really got awake. After he had eaten the mouse he was up against it again. He didn’t know what to do next. There was a fallen tree near by and he got up on the trunk and walked the length of it. Then he turned around (quite hard to do without touching the ground, but he was very careful) and walked back again to the butt. Here he stood and looked straight ahead of him—stood at gaze, as the old romancers used to say. Then (the log was perhaps eighteen inches high) he climbed down backward very slowly and carefully as if he were afraid of falling, and walked around to examine a place where the upturned roots had left a hole in the earth. Finally he sat down and began “weaving.” That is to say, he began swinging his head from side to side, making a figure ∞ with his nose, as one often sees them do behind the bars of the Zoo. There is nothing in the world more expressive of hopeless ennui.

But although one is constantly tempted to call the Black Bear names; to refer to him as an idle, pottering, purposeless, “footless,” lazy, loafing tramp; he can upon occasion be the most persistent thing on four feet (always excepting a porcupine), and the fact that he has no business of his own to attend to by no means deters him from poking his sharp nose into any and everything that doesn’t concern him. There never was a more convincing example of the fact that idle hands (and paws) are supplied by Satan with mischievous occupation. He is chock-full of inquisitiveness and eaten up with curiosity. And if you imagine that because he’s clumsy he can’t be quick, or that because he acts foolish he is anybody’s fool, you will be very far out of the right reckoning.

One Black Bear in one-half hour can do more to make an unguarded camp look like a hurrah’s nest than any other known agency; and I have had one come back half a dozen times from half a dozen different directions, to try to get at my camera to paw it over and find out what it was. One day when I was photographing grizzlies I buried the tin case that held my electric battery while I went back to camp for something. I did this because I knew that there were Black Bear in the neighborhood, and I hoped by this trick to keep them from tampering with my effects. But when I got back a Black Bear had been there, had dug up the case, pulled the cover off, chewed the tin all out of shape, and had bitten holes in each of the dry batteries. Another time I found one sitting under a canvas shoulder bag that I had hung on the branch of a tree, hitting it first with one paw and then with another as it swung. He made so comical a picture that I watched him for a while, but when he reached out his snout and grasped the bag with his teeth I hurriedly drove him away, for the bag had some wooden cylinders of flash powder in it.

On the trip when Mr. Kerfoot and I were working together we frequently built ourselves seats in convenient trees from which to watch for grizzlies, and operated the electric mechanisms of our cameras by strings stretched from the apparatus to our crannies among the branches. On one occasion, when we determined to work a second night from the same location, we left these strings in position so as to save ourselves the considerable trouble of running them a second time. But the next night when we came to set up our cameras we could not find the ends of the strings. There had been two of them running to widely separated points, each one hundred feet or so distant from our look-out. And we could find neither of them. Finally, I climbed to the seat in the tree to see if I could find the other ends of the string, and discovered that a Black Bear during our absence had been trying our seat, and had pulled both strings in and left them hopelessly snarled up among the branches. He had, I suppose, found our scent on the tree, followed it up to investigate, found the seat (a piece of board nailed across two limbs), and having his curiosity aroused by the strings, had pulled them in to see what was at the other end.

There was a fairly well-trodden bear trail that led under this same tree, and that night, after we had got things shipshape again, we had another amusing object lesson in the ways of the Black Bear. We had little more than got settled for our long wait for dusk and the coming of the grizzlies, when we saw a lean old Black Bear with one cub coming down the trail toward our tree. When they got within thirty feet or so of us the mother stopped, evidently seeing us. But the cub kept on. Whereupon the mother called it back and it sat down beside her. Then began one of the most farcical exhibitions I ever saw. This old bear (Kerfoot declared her to be an old maid that had married late in life) was evidently used to going down that particular trail and wasn’t going to change her habits on account of any interlopers. But at the same time she was afraid to pass the tree with us in it. She would come on a few steps and then back off again. Then she would wander up and down in the most undecided and worried way, grumbling and growling to herself. Finally she sat down and fairly cried—moaning and whining like a spoiled child. All the while the cub kept running ahead and then turning round to look back, as much as to say, “Come on, it’s all right. What’s the matter with you to-night?” And, of course, all the time the whole Rocky Mountains was open to her to go round by. Once she went back the way she came and we thought we were rid of her. But she came back again and recommenced the performance. Then I got down and drove her off.

Black Bear are found pretty generally in grizzly countries except in places where the grizzlies are very plenty, and now that they are all scarce they cover the same ranges almost everywhere. In the early nineties, in the Selkirks in British Columbia, I never saw a Black Bear. Now, however, although the grizzlies are still as plentiful there as anywhere, the Black Bear are numerous. But the Black fellows are mighty careful never to get in the grizzlies’ way. I have seen one stand up on his hind legs behind the trunk of a good-sized tree and sidle round it, peeking out as he went to watch a grizzly bear go by; and I have already told how the two Black Bear took to the trees when they heard a grizzly coming. I know of nothing that better illustrates the keen senses of these animals than the way in which they will detect the approach of a grizzly long before a man’s senses can make him aware of the fact. In the Yellowstone National Park, where there are many animals of both species occupying the same ranges, I found that I could always get warning of the approach of the grizzlies when their twilight feeding time approached by the sudden and complete disappearance of the Black Bear; and on several occasions, in different parts of the mountains, when the frequent flashes of our electric cameras had scared the grizzlies away from that part of the wood, the Black Bear seemed, strangely enough, to be aware of the fact and made no attempt to retire at their usual hour. This was so interesting an exhibition of keen senses or quick intuition that I watched very carefully during the whole period of my stay to try to satisfy myself as to the source of their knowledge. The fact that they began to be uneasy as the usual hour for the grizzlies’ arrival came near, sometimes led me to think that they merely judged from past experience as to how long it was safe for them to stay out. But, on the other hand, I saw so many cases where a sudden suspicion of unexpected danger led them to make themselves scarce, and this, too, when the suspicion turned out to have been right, that I was forced to conclude that they either heard or smelled their enemies. But I could never find out which it was that they did. Several times I have seen them suddenly rush with snorts of apprehension to the nearest tree, and had their actions explained a few minutes later by the silent appearance of a huge grizzly.

The grandest wild animal of the United States is the grizzly bear. But the most amusing, the most ludicrous, the most human and understandable of our wild animals, is our friend Ursus americanus (Pallas). I have called him the Happy Hooligan of the woods, and I can think of no more descriptive phrase for him. He is neither evil-intentioned nor bad-natured. Yet he has probably terrified more innocent wayfarers than any other denizen of our forests.

THE GRIZZLY BEAR

The Narrative of a Hunter-Naturalist—Historical,

Scientific and Adventurous

BY

WILLIAM H. WRIGHT

With 24 Full-Page Illustrations from Photographs

$1.50 net; postpaid $1.65

“This is the narrative of a hunter-naturalist, who deals with a single animal as he has found it in the Western mountains. It is the best book that has ever been written about any of the bears. One of the best books that has ever been written from the popular standpoint about a single species of animal. It deserves far more extended notice than it can receive here and will be read carefully and thoughtfully by naturalists and big game hunters who may learn much from it.”

—Forest and Stream.

“Far more entertaining than a novel.”

—William T. Hornaday.

“One of the best books of adventure that has appeared in many months.”—San Francisco Chronicle.

“Full of the atmosphere of the big game woods and vibrant with hazards of the chase.”

—Boston Globe.

“The very spirit of the grizzly is in subtle fashion brought near us. The book will long hold high place in the literature of sport.”

—New York Tribune.

“Well illustrated with photographs of bears taken in the woods set off by the animals themselves.”

—Spokesman Review.

“An excellent work.... The book is fascinating in its descriptions and furnishes another proof that if truth is not stranger than fiction, it is at least more interesting.”—The Independent.

“The volume is most entertaining and wholesome. It is filled with the atmosphere of the wide open outdoors and it ought to appeal to everybody who has a drop of red blood in his veins.”

—Brooklyn Times.

“All the beauty and glory of life in the open permeate this book. It is a book for live boys, for active men, for every Diana spirit chained to domestic or professional task, for all Americans keen for adventure, and zestful for nature truths.... This is a genuine hunter-naturalist’s narrative. Its historical and scientific facts are savored with the spice of the camp-fire story-teller’s style.”

—Philadelphia Public Ledger.

“This book should grace the library of every true American.”

—Portland (Oregon) Evening Telegram.

Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York