What the black bear eats from choice, the grizzly will eat from necessity; so that if there are no carcases about, and few or no bulbs in the country, the hunter may expect to find U. horribilis making the best of ‘arpa’ and skunk cabbage. As the season advances, the bear changes his diet somewhat, and before his great autumn harvests of fish, fruits and nuts, we find him tearing up rotten logs for ants and beetles, turning over boulders for the larvæ which lie below them, digging up yellow jackets’(wasps, &c.) nests for the sake of the grubs inside, and occasionally burrowing in the hill-sides for marmots or ground hogs.
The bear’s season of plenty begins with the ripening of the first fruits on the flats by the river bottoms, when those who care to shoot game out of season may find some sport in killing both varieties of bear as they wander over the sand bars of Alaskan rivers, looking for fruit and a cold bath to allay the irritation of their bald and mangy-looking hides.
The berry season in British Columbia begins at midsummer, and from that time until late in the fall there is always plenty of bear food in the woods: raspberries (which bears love beyond all things), currants, gooseberries, soapberries, service, wine, salmon, bil- and black-berries, strawberries, choke-cherries, and a score of others, whose flavour I can remember but whose names I never knew.
I have never seen, except in the Caucasus, such a land for wild fruit as British Columbia. Compared with it, Colorado, for instance, is a most unfruitful country; but, to make amends, Colorado abounds in acorns and pine nuts, of which there are few, if any, in British Columbia. Where the acorns are, there will the bears be also, but acorns are an uncertain crop, failing utterly one year and abounding another.
By the way, just before the acorn crop comes in, the silver-tips of Colorado seem to devote a good deal of their time to digging in woodland bogs, but whether they dig for roots or insects I am not sure. In Alaska, in British Columbia, and all along the Pacific Coast the bear’s bonne bouche is kept until nearly the end of the year. In spring the ‘tyhee’ salmon (O. chouicha) turns up the streams, and a few of this ‘run’ stay all through the season; later on come the humpies (Onchorhynchus gorbuscha), and of these, the Indians say, none return to the sea. In October, then, in Alaska and elsewhere, the glacial streams, tributary to the main rivers, are full of these misshapen salmon, crimson and purple, and patched with all manner of vivid leprous patches, their dorsal fins frayed and rotting as they swim. The streams stink of them; your paddle strikes one which is already broken up and drifting seaward; others, swollen with decay, are standing, tail upwards, on the river bottom; whilst others, driven by some strange madness, diseased and dying, still struggle up the shallows towards the glacier.
At this time of year, the dense woods of grey and mildewed pines and prickly devil’s club, which crowd down to the river’s edge, are full of bears; the mud flats between forest and stream are pitted with huge tracks (I have measured many 12 ins. by 9 ins.), and the filthy gorged American eagle sits puking and moping with ruffled feathers among cleaned back bones and rejected heads and tails of humpies, left over from the grizzlies’ last meal.
And here, at the end of their year’s feeding, it seems appropriate to say something of the weight to which grizzlies attain, and the size to which they grow. Like human beings, they seem to fatten most in a civilised or domestic state, the great grizzly of San Francisco having really attained to the enormous weight of 1,500 lbs.,[15] presumably upon hog food. It is said that the Californian grizzly grows larger than any other, but I doubt whether he much exceeds the Alaskan in size, and I am absolutely certain that all the largest grizzlies have grown to their fabulous proportions in the whisky-scented atmosphere of Western saloons. ‘If you will hear them,’ as the ‘boys’ say, 2,000-lb. grizzlies are quite common, and ‘as big as a bull’ is but a mild way of describing nine bears out of ten shot by them.
As a matter of fact, I am by no means prepared to doubt all their stories. There are unquestionably some exceptional monsters met with now and again, but too many of those instanced have been described merely from the impression made on the hunter’s mind by the sight of a gigantic track which has spread in soft snow or mud. The largest grizzly of which I have had anything like trustworthy information in my own wanderings was shot in Alaska, at English Bay, Kodak Island, by Mr. J. C. Tolman, now Customs officer at Wrangel. As Mr. Tolman allows his name to appear, and as he enjoyed an enviable reputation for veracity among men who had known him for years, I give the dimensions of his big bear as he gave them to me, extracted from notes made in his diary at the time at which he killed him. The bear was killed only a few miles from a settlement, and was actually weighed, turning the scales at 1,656 lbs. dead weight not cleaned; his hide when freshly skinned measured 13 ft. 6 ins. from nose to anus; from ear to ear he measured 13 ins.; from poll to nose, 20 ins.; the length of the hind-foot was 18 ins., and the breadth of the forefoot 12 ins. He was killed by a single shot in the head from a Winchester rifle.
The largest bear which I have myself shot was also an Alaskan, but infinitely smaller than the above; still, even this bear gave four strong men all they could do, with a rope round her neck, to drag her, when dead, down a sloping mud bank into a canoe laid over on its side to receive her. Her forearm, when skinned, measured 23 ins., fair measurement, the tape being stretched as tight as it would go. The Indians put this bear at from 1,000 to 1,500 lbs., and I dare say she really weighed nearly 800 or possibly 900 lbs., but I am no judge of an animal’s weight, and had no means of weighing her. I have myself measured skins in Mr. Boscowitz’s store at Victoria (also brought down from Alaska) which measured 9 ft. 10 ins. from end to end, but then some 6 ins. must be allowed for on all American skins, as they are skinned up the hind legs in such a way as to give quite that length of hide beyond the anus. Of course, too, a skin may be so laced and strained upon its frame in skinning as to stretch it a good deal beyond its natural dimensions.
In Colorado the bears appear to be mostly silver-tips, and if you can rely upon the verdict of the local hunters whom I met (and I have no reason to doubt their word) a Colorado silver-tip weighing 600 lbs. would be a big bear.