III. BLACK BEAR (Ursus americanus)
I have said so much incidentally about the black bear while writing of his congener the grizzly, that I have very little left to say of him in the proper place. A recent American authority describes this bear’s habitat as being confined nowadays ‘to some portions of the various ranges of mountains south of the St. Lawrence river, the Great Lakes, and (east of the Mississippi river) to parts of those portions of the Mississippi river and its tributaries which are yet unsettled,’ and to ‘the dense thickets of the Colorado, Trinity, and Brayos rivers.’ Colonel G. D. Alexander should have bethought him of those countries west of the Rockies (Alaska, British Columbia, Washington Territory, Vancouver Island, and Oregon) which are at present the principal stronghold of Ursus americanus; and as I am informed the chief source from which the fur-traders draw their supplies of black bear skins. Unfortunately for the black bear, the price of his hide has gone up lately in the fur market. Ten years ago $15 was a long price to pay for a bear’s skin; this year a trader out here paid as much as $35 for one. Whatever the ultimate result of this rise in value may be, the immediate consequence of it has been to show the world what a vast number of bears can be killed in America if they are wanted.
Here are some statistics of recent crops of bear in America which speak for themselves.
The Hudson Bay Company, of course, draws all its supply of hides from this continent, and I am assured that the same maybe said (with scarcely any allowance for Russian, Norwegian, Indian, or other skins) of the great firm of C. M. Lampson & Co. These two firms collected in 1891 and offered for sale in 1892 no fewer than 29,081 bear hides, to which enormous total the Hudson Bay Company contributed 11,027 hides.
Some idea of the proportion of black to other skins at these sales may be obtained by looking at the Hudson Bay Company’s lists for 1891, in which we find 11,414 black, 1,875 brown, 253 grey, and 130 white bear skins offered for sale.
‘When Spring in the woods’
There can be little doubt, then, that there were plenty of black bear in America in 1890 and 1891; and, in spite of the immense harvest of hides which is annually gathered in, I venture to prophesy that until Alaskan river bottoms and the dense timber districts of Vancouver Island, Oregon, and Washington Territory are cleared and ready for the plough, there will be plenty of bear left for those who care to look for them. Here on Vancouver Island and on the north-west coast of British Columbia black bears are especially plentiful, one of our great fur-dealers (Mr. Boscowitz) having taken in over 1,000 hides last year, whilst I see by a newspaper (‘Colonist,’ Dec. 6, 1892) that at Sumas in the New Westminster District (one of our best farming districts) seven bears have lately fallen to one rifle and three to another; and I am well convinced that a salmon-canning friend of mine told me the truth when he asserted that about dawn, one day during the great annual salmon run, he saw seventeen black bears at one coup d’œil, feeding along the bank of one of the northern rivers of British Columbia.
But it must not be inferred from these facts that every tenderfoot who comes along will run up against bears the first time he goes in search of them. On the contrary, an old friend of mine (every inch an English sportsman) has been out in this country for twenty-five years, travelling from time to time all over the province, and has never yet seen a bear alive in the woods. The reason is simply that my friend uses a shot-gun, and doesn’t look for bears; and if you want to see these beasts you must look for them at the right time and in the right place, and even then be thankful if you see more than their fresh tracks, for Nature has given them noses as keen as the nose of a caribou, and ears which are always on the alert, as well as an impregnable sanctuary in the dense timber and tangled woodfall of their native forests. To those who live upon the Pacific coast the black bear is an animal to be thankful for, affording as he does an excuse for carrying a rifle when spring is in the woods; when the cedar swamps smell heavy with the musk of the skunk cabbage, and are lit in their green darkness by stray beams of May sunshine; when Cormus Nuttalli is white with blooms as big as the palm of a man’s hand, and underfoot all is bright with the red and orange of columbine and ‘Indian pink,’ or white with the delicate petals of the dog violet. To me the black glossy hide beneath my feet always brings back memories of spring-time, either here on the island, or on the mainland by the Frazer, where the beautiful olalis are smothered in white blossom, and where the great yellow swallow-tails and plum-coloured Camberwell Beauties sail and sun themselves upon the stone slides round the lake.