For years I have watched, studied, and enjoyed the grizzly, have seen his actions under a variety of influences—fighting and playing, sleeping and food-getting. I have watched him when he was under normal influences and abnormal ones; when pursuer and when pursued; have kept him within the focus of my field-glasses for hours at a time, and have trailed for days with a camera this master animal.
The grizzly is so dignified and so strangely human-like that I have felt degraded every time I have seen him pursued with dogs. A few times I have outwitted him; more often he has outwitted me. We have occasionally met unexpectedly; sometimes each stared without alarm, and at other times each fled in an opposite direction. Sometimes the grizzly is guided by instinct, but more often his actions are triumphantly directed by reason.
Cubs and Mother
The life-story of every bear is a story of adventure. A hunter with whom I was camping in the No-Summer Mountains of Colorado came in one June evening with the report that he had killed a mother grizzly. He had searched for her cubs, which he thought must be near by, but had failed to discover them. The hunter said he had come upon her unexpectedly in a thicket and she had at once charged, probably thinking herself cornered. One well-aimed shot in the head had dropped her.
The following morning I went with the hunter to bring in the grizzly. She was a beautiful silver-tip of about four hundred pounds. We made another thorough search for the cubs without finding them. Just as the hunter was about to start skinning the bear I caught sight of a cub peeping from beneath large slide rocks not thirty feet away. Then another frightened cub face appeared.
After hesitating for a moment both cubs came out and stood looking intently toward us and their dead mother. After a stare, as we did not move, they took a few steps toward us. Hesitating again, they stopped, rose up and looked around, and then hastily retreated to the rocks. Evidently their mother had trained them to stay wherever she left them until she returned.
But they had waited long. For a while they stood and whimpered very much like hungry, forsaken children. They could scent their mother, and see her, too, and were too hungry and lonesome to endure without her longer. Again they started slowly toward us, walking closely side by side. When very near they paused, rose on hind legs, and looked intently at us and in wonder and longing at their lifeless mother. Then they went to her. One little cub sniffed in a bewildered, puzzled way over her cold, still body. He gently stroked her fur with his paw and then sat down and began to whimper and cry.