The Grizzly, Our Greatest Wild Animal

by Enos A. Mills

As it was nearly dark and I should not be able to see or follow the bear much longer, I concluded to roll a rock from the ledge down near him. Twice I had noticed that he had paid no attention to rocks that broke loose above and rolled near him. But he heard this rock start and rose up to look at it. It stopped a few yards from him. He sniffed the air with nose pointing toward it and then went up and smelled it. Rearing up instantly, he looked intently toward the mountain-top where I was hidden. After two or three seconds of thought he turned and ran. Evidently the stone had carried my scent to him. It was useless to follow him in the night.

The next morning I left camp and followed Old Timberline’s trail through the woods. He had run for nearly ten miles almost straight south until coming to a small stream. Then for some distance he concealed, involved, and confused his trail with a cleverness that I have never seen equaled. Most animals realize that they leave a scent which enables other animals to follow them, but the grizzly is the only animal that I know who appears to be fully aware that he is leaving telltale tracks. He will make unthought-of turns and doublings to walk where his tracks will not show, and also tramples about to leave a confusion of tracks where they do show.

Arriving at the stream, the bear crossed on a fallen log and from the end of this leaped into a bushy growth beyond. I made a détour, thinking to find his tracks on the other side of the bushes, and I threw stones into the bushes, not caring to go into them. Both tracks and grizzly seemed to have vanished. I went down stream just outside the bushes bordering it, expecting every instant to find the grizzly’s tracks, but not finding them. Then I returned to the log on which he had crossed the stream, and from which he had leaped into the bushes.

Examining the tracks carefully, I now discovered what I had before overlooked. After leaping into the bushes the bear had faced about and leaped back to the log, stepping carefully into his former tracks. From the log he had entered the water and waded up stream for a quarter of a mile. Of course not a track showed. At a good place for concealing his trail he had leaped out of the water into a clump of willows on the north bank. From the willows he made another long leap into the snow and then started back northward, alongside his ten-mile trail and one hundred feet from it, as though intending to return to the place where I had rolled the stone down the slope near him.

I did not discover all this at once, however. In my search for his trail I went up stream on the north side and passed, without noticing, the crushed willows into which he had leaped. Crossing to where the bank was higher, I started back down stream on the other side, and in doing so chanced to look across and see the crushed clump of willows. But it took me hours to untangle this involved trail.

When I had followed the tracks northward for more than a mile, the trail vanished in a snowless place. Apparently the grizzly had planned in advance to use this bare place, because the moves he made in it were those most likely to bewilder the pursuer. He did three things which are always more or less confusing and even bewildering to the pursuer, be he man or dog. He changed his direction, he left no tracks, and he crossed his former trail, thereby mixing the scents of the two. He confused the nose, left no record for the eye, and broke the general direction.

Unable to determine the course the bear had taken across this trackless place, I walked round it, keeping all the time in the snow. When more than halfway round I came upon his tracks leaving the bare place. Here he had changed his direction of travel abruptly from north to east, crossed his former trail, gone on a few yards farther, and then abruptly changed from east to north.

I hurried along his tracks. After a few miles I saw where perhaps the night before he had eaten part of the carcass of a bighorn. To judge from tooth marks, the sheep had been killed by wolves. The trail continued in general northward, parallel to the summit and a little below it. As I followed, the tracks approached timber-line, the trees being scattered and the country quite open.

Suddenly the trail broke off to the right for five or six hundred feet into the woods, as though Old Timberline had remembered an acquaintance whom he must see again. He had hustled along straight for a much-clawed Engelmann spruce, a tree with bear-claw and tooth marks of many dates, though none were recent. Old Timberline, apparently, had smelled the base of the tree and then risen up and sniffed the bark as high as his nose could reach. He had neither bitten nor clawed. Then he had gone to two near-by trees, each of which had had chunks bitten or torn out, and here smelled about.

Retracing his tracks to where the trail had turned off abruptly, the bear resumed his general direction northward. When he stopped on a ridge and began digging, I hurried across a narrow neck of woods and crept up as close as I dared. A wagon- load of dirt and stones had been piled up. While I watched the digging, a woodchuck rushed out, only to be overtaken and seized by the bear, who, having finished his meal, shuffled on out of sight.