The California grizzly occasionally reaches a thousand pounds, while the enormous brown Kadiak bears, the largest carnivorous animals in the world, reach two thousand pounds; but the black bear usually averages about two hundred. Black Bruin had far outstripped all his contemporaries in size and prowess. In the fall of his seventh year he weighed upon the scales four hundred and two pounds, which fairly earned him the title of King.
His coat was long, thick, and glossy and black in color.
He was not as high upon the shoulders as one might expect for so large a beast. A wolf that stands thirty or thirty-two inches at the shoulder will weigh one hundred and twenty-five pounds and is a large wolf. Black Bruin was probably thirty-five or forty inches high at the shoulder, but considerably higher in the middle of the back, which also sloped off at the rear, where he was quite rotund. His tail was so insignificant as to be hardly noticed at all at a distance. His head was rather small for so large an animal. His eyes were also small and looked weak. His claws, which were non-retractile, were not rakishly long as are the grizzly's, but protruded slightly beyond the long hair upon his feet.
So altogether Black Bruin was most imposing for an eastern bear. He was sleek and well-groomed, with the exception of two or three months in the early summer when he shed his coat.
Living as he now did within easy reach of the abode of man, he went more and more often to the farmhouses and took toll of the farmers. His wariness in regard to men, which he had learned partly of White Nose and partly from sad experience, gradually wore away and his old life with Pedro helped him to forget how strange and fearful a creature man is, when dealing with wild beasts.
So while he came and went much more recklessly than he would otherwise have done, yet his knowledge of man's ways stood him in good stead.
He knew that man was a creature of the day, doing his work in broad daylight, while the bear is a night prowler. He knew that at morning and evening man came and went from the fields to his den, where he always stayed at night.
He knew at just what hours the man-beast would be sleeping, and when he would come forth and tend his creatures. He had often followed his own master in the old cubhood days at the farmhouse, from outbuilding to outbuilding, watching him do the morning chores.
Man's thunder and lightning he also knew and feared more than all his other powers. Dogs he despised and he also hated them, for they often interrupted him in his thieving.
One Sunday morning early in June Black Bruin had been prowling about a little Canadian village and had satisfied his appetite with a hen-turkey, which he had happened to discover sitting far from home. He was returning to his mountain, when, in crossing one of those broad paths in which men always traveled, he so far forgot his usual precautions as nearly to run into a team carrying a half-witted French boy to early mass, that was being celebrated in the little French Catholic church near by.