The Grizzly, Our Greatest Wild Animal

by Enos A. Mills

I followed the trail through woods, groves, and openings. After an hour or more without seeing the grizzly, I climbed a cliff, hoping to get a glimpse of him on some ridge ahead. I could see his line of tracks crossing a low ridge beyond and felt that he might still be an hour or so in the lead. But, in descending from the cliff, I chanced to look back along my trail. Just at that moment the bear came out of the woods behind me. He was trailing me!

I do not know how he discovered that I was following him. He may have seen or scented me. Anyway, instead of coming directly back and thus exposing himself, he had very nearly carried out his well-planned surprise when I discovered him. I found out afterwards that he had left his trail far ahead, turning and walking back in his own footprints for a distance, and trampling this stretch a number of times, and that he had then leaped into scrubby timber and made off on the side where his tracks did not show in passing along the trampled trail. He had confused his trail where he started to circle back, so as not to be noticed, and slipped in around behind me.

But after discovering the grizzly on my trail I went slowly along as though I was unaware of his near presence, turning in screened places to look back. He followed within three hundred feet of me. When I stopped he stopped. He occasionally watched me from behind bushes, a tree, or a bowlder. It gave me a strange feeling to have this big beast following and watching me so closely and cautiously. But I was not alarmed.

I concluded to turn tables on him. On crossing a ridge where I was out of sight, I turned to the right and ran for nearly a mile. Then, circling back into our old trail behind the bear, I traveled serenely along, imagining that he was far ahead. I was suddenly startled to see a movement of the grizzly’s shadow from behind a bowlder near the trail, only three hundred feet ahead. He was in ambush, waiting for me! At the place where I left the trail to circle behind him, he had stopped and evidently surmised my movements. Turning in his tracks, he had come a short distance back on the trail and lain down behind the bowlder to wait for me.

I went on a few steps after discovering the grizzly, and he moved to keep out of sight. I edged toward a tall spruce, which I planned to climb if he charged, feeling safe in the knowledge that grizzlies cannot climb trees. Pausing by the spruce, I could see his silver-gray fur as he peered at me from behind the bowlder, and as I moved farther away I heard him snapping his jaws and snarling as though in anger at being outwitted.

Just what he would have done had I walked into his ambush can only be guessed. Hunters trailing a wounded grizzly have been ambushed and killed. But this grizzly had not even been shot at nor harassed.

Generally, when a grizzly discovers that he is followed, or even if he only thinks himself followed, he at once hurries off to some other part of his territory, as this one did after I rolled the stone. But Old Timberline on finding himself followed slipped round to follow me. Often a grizzly, if he feels he is not yet seen,—that his move is unsuspected,—will slip round to follow those who are trailing him. But in no other case that I know of has a bear lingered after he realized that he was seen. After Old Timberline discovered that I had circled behind him, he knew that I knew where he was and what he was doing.

But instead of running away he came back along the trail to await my coming. What were his intentions? Did he intend to assault me, or was he overcome with curiosity because of my unusual actions and trying to discover what they were all about? I do not know. I concluded it best not to follow him farther, nor did I wish to travel that night with this crafty, soft-footed fellow in the woods. Going a short distance down among the trees, I built a rousing fire. Between it and a cliff I spent the night, satisfied that I had had adventure enough for one outing.

Trailing is adventurous. Many of the best lessons of woodcraft that I have learned, several of the greatest and most beneficial outings that I have had, were those during which I followed, sometimes day and night, that master of strategy, the grizzly bear. A few times in trailing the grizzly I have outwitted him, but more frequently he has outwitted me. Every grizzly has speed, skill, and endurance. He has mental capacity and often shows astounding plan, caution, courage, and audacity.

Trailing without a gun is red-blooded life, scouting of the most exacting and manly order. The trailer loses himself in his part in the primeval play of the wilderness. It is doubtful if any other experience is as educational as the trailing of the grizzly bear.