The Park is visited by thousands for whom the bears should be a source of relaxation and furnish new interests and enjoyment. But the bears are becoming unhealthy and are a menace to people. Now and then some official tries to cure the bear trouble by having a number of bears roped, tied, and whipped. Occasionally a bear is shot. There are those who advocate that the guides and officials of the Park carry guns; and still others are advocating the extermination of the grizzly. We need the grizzly. Most cures proposed are worse than his trouble. But there is a prevention in simply no garbage-piles.
In the Glacier National Park, which has been a wild-life reservation only since 1910, the grizzlies have not yet become demoralized by garbage. The grizzly bear situation in the Yellowstone is a serious and even an alarming one, and what exists here is certain to develop in other Parks. The demoralizing factors are likely to be expanded and not diminished. Then, too, in the Yellowstone this continuous eating of garbage may ere long bring on a pestilence among the grizzlies, or possibly put a check on the number of cubs born. The whole situation appears to be embraced in what I have previously said about what a grizzly is fed and how.
The grizzly has not lost all his old instincts in the Park. Around the garbage-piles he is a lazy, cross pensioner. But away from them, and especially where he ranges outside of the Park, the same bear is as alert and as energetic as ever in getting a living and watching out for his safety. They are tame near garbage-piles but a short distance away are wild. They are comparatively easy to trap near the garbage-piles, where they will enter a trap-door; but the same bear outside the Park is extremely wary and avoids going near a trap. Says William H. Wright, in “The Grizzly Bear”:—
“Altogether I did not find the grizzlies of Yellowstone Park in any degree more tame or less cunning than they are to-day, for example, in the Selkirks. Many of them, it is true, come to the garbage-piles to feed, but these very bears, fifty yards back in the timber, are again as wild as any of them anywhere. At the cañon, the garbage-pile is in a hollow at the foot of rather a steep incline that leads up to the edge of the woods. Bear after bear, coming down the trails that converge toward this point, will stop as he reaches the brink of this declivity, glance downward, turn his head from side to side, and launch himself down hill, with the same air of committing himself to a foreign element that one sees in the upward glance and deep breath of a man launching himself from a diving board. On their return, they invariably halted for a few seconds at the top of the hill, looked around, occasionally shook themselves, and with their first step up the familiar trail, resumed every sign of their habitual caution and alertness. While on the garbage-pile itself, they appear to pay scant attention to the people gathered behind the fairly distant wire fence, but even there, an eye familiar with their actions would note the constant watch they kept on what was going on and the hurried way in which they fed; and, fifty feet from the edge of the surrounding timber, they would at the least scent or sound or sight, bolt as incontinently as in the farthest hills. Grizzlies are no more plentiful around the Park to-day than they were twenty-five years ago in the Bitter Roots, and a hundred yards from the garbage-pile they are no different.”
Apparently young bears do not inherit fear of a trap, for they are easily trapped. Young bears in captivity sometimes exhibit inherited instincts; they may be pleasurably excited with the scent of food never before seen; and they will sometimes dig down for a hidden root of a kind that their parents ate but which they themselves had never seen. In these cases of digging, they either dug at the right place from scent, or from inherited memory of place. There was nothing on the surface to indicate the presence of buried roots beneath.
The young of most animals, wild or tame, make interesting pets. But of all the pets I have known, none equal grizzly cubs for energy, alertness, and individuality. They take naturally to new, unnatural environments. A grizzly cub learns speedily and from the first tries to know everything around him. So all-knowing are his senses and his instincts that the approach of anything new at once attracts him; he stops play and with rare curiosity and concentration tries to understand it. If he solve the mystery he promptly continues play at the point where he left it.
“Baby Sylvester” is a celebrated bear story by Bret Harte that characteristically and humorously describes a bear in new environments. This little bear lost none of his native energy, alertness, and versatility under changed and unexacting conditions. The way he handled every situation was a constant surprise and delight.
Pet cubs, if gently treated, quickly accept and make the best of new environment; they become intimate and loving, in fact most intensely so. If handled kindly, the cub is willing to do everything reasonable, everything he understands one wants done. But whip or scold him, and he at once becomes stubborn and unwilling, reserved and cross. The grizzly is an animal of high type and to have him develop his best he needs fine, high consideration.
The grizzly’s real character stands out when he is associated with man. He is ever true to himself. A dog will lick the hand of a cruel master or fawn on a most unworthy one. Not so the grizzly; he will not go down in the dust. Only a uniformly just man can win his loyalty or retain his friendship; he has individuality and self-respect and will not willingly serve a tyrant or even bow to him. The wearing of a hat, the holding of a pipe, the sitting up in a silly attitude, tricks which many dogs do to please a master, the grizzly will do only under compulsion. The grizzly is ever faithful and loyal to a worthy master; he will do unto you as you do unto him. Elsewhere in this book I give a number of stories which show the high character and the great possibilities of the grizzly as a companion of man if handled intelligently.
In eastern Washington, “Grizzly” Adams captured a yearling grizzly which he named Lady Washington. With her he used but little discipline, and he at all times treated her with consideration and kindness. She was constantly with him on long journeys across the mountains from State to State, in camp and on hunts. Of her Adams says:—