When they first come out of their dens both bears feed entirely upon vegetable matter, even the grizzly being too weak to wander round to look for the carcases of beasts which have perished during the past winter. This he becomes strong enough to do a week or so later, but at first he is every bit as sorry a spectacle as Ursus americanus under similar conditions, being almost too weak to stand, and sitting down to groan and wag his old head from sheer exhaustion after every few yards he walks. If at this time the weather looks unpropitious, both bears not infrequently come to the conclusion that it is not yet time to get up, and therefore turn in for one more nap.
In early April (that is, on first leaving their dens) both Ursus americanus and Ursus horribilis frequent the river bottoms to feed upon the rank herbage which grows there; and a little later find food very much to their taste in the young mountain grass which springs wherever the snow leaves the hill-sides bare.
It is in April that the hunter gets some of his best chances at bear, for if he be lucky enough to find one of the earliest of these mountain pastures, and patient enough to watch it for a few days, he is almost certain of his reward.
At this time, too, a bear is worth killing, for his hide is at its very best when he leaves his winter quarters, though it deteriorates very rapidly as summer advances.
Towards the end of April (in an average year) when the bear has purged his system with a diet of mountain grasses, Nature provides him with somewhat stronger food, in the buds of the olali bushes (service berry, &c.), in the roots of the wild parsnip, and a little later in the catkins which come upon the willows. Later still (in May), when the woods begin to swarm with ticks and other insects, the bears follow the snow in its retreat to the high places, finding at its very edge great patches of golden lilies (Erythronium giganteum) and the small pinkish blossom of Claytonia carolineana (Indian potato), both blossoms springing from bulbs of which bears are as fond as the Indians, with whose women folk the former not seldom clash in their morning operations in these wild potato fields.
But to find the bear feeding either upon bulbs or grasses, or any stronger meat, the hunter must be out early and up late, for bears are reasonable beings, rarely if ever feeding grossly at midday, but breakfasting at dawn and dining after dark.
Indeed, bears are more or less nocturnal in their habits, and this is especially true of grizzlies, who, when much hunted, become purely nocturnal in their feeding and in their wanderings.
I know a country (the name of it I prefer to keep to myself for a year or two yet) which appears to be a high tableland, densely timbered and full of caribou, and from this innumerable gullies and clefts lead down to lower levels, where, at the bottom of steep canyons, are piled rock and stone slide, and débris of dead pine wood. There are opens among the pines at the top, and here in snow-time, if you leave a caribou carcase for a couple of days, you will find plenty of bear-tracks going to and fro. Every day the number of them increases, until it seems to you that the place must be alive with grizzlies; but you will never see one of the track-makers by day. The bears here have been a good deal hunted, and have become as cunning as monkeys, coming up from the gullies at night but vanishing like spectres at the first peep of day. It was here that a friend of mine killed and left a mule deer, hanging its head up in a tree hard by, to be called for on some future occasion. When that occasion came, the head was missing, and was found a little further on, laid with the carcase and carefully covered up with moss and sticks and snow.
This, of course, is a common trick of the grizzly’s, but it was quaint of this particular beast to gather up the fragments so carefully. By the way, whilst I am on the subject of ‘carcases,’ I may as well say that it is not my own experience that grizzlies are very gluttonous feeders, upon flesh at any rate. Indeed, it seemed to me that a deer’s carcase lasted some bears whom I have known almost as long as it would have lasted an ordinary camp Indian. I knew, for instance, of a mule’s carcase in the spring of 1892 which served as an attraction to four bears (two black and two grizzlies) for at least a fortnight in the Kootenay country.
But to come back to the bear’s menu. About the same time that the Erythronium is in bloom, black bears feed freely upon a plant called ‘arpa’ by our British Columbian Indians (Heracleum lanatum) upon skunk cabbage, and upon a plant which Professor Macoun has kindly identified for me as Peucedanum triternatum.