Watched by Wild Animals

by Enos A. Mills

One spring day while travelling in the mountains I paused in a whirl of mist and wet snow to look for the trail. I could see only a few feet ahead. As I looked closely a bear emerged from the gloom heading straight for me. Behind her were two cubs. I caught an impatient expression when she first saw me. She stopped, and with a growl of anger wheeled and boxed the cubs right and left like a worried, unpoised mother. They vanished in the direction from which they had come, the cubs being urged on with lively spanks.

Like most animals, the black bear has a local habitation. His territory is twenty miles or less in circumference. In this territory he is likely to spend his years, but in springtime he may descend to feed on the earliest wild gardens of the foothills. I have tracked black bears across mountain passes, and on one occasion I found a bear track on the summit of Long’s Peak.

The black bear eats everything that is edible, although his food is mainly that of a vegetarian. He digs out rich willow and aspen roots in the shallow and soft places, and tears up numerous plants for their roots or tubers. He eats grass and devours hundreds of juicy weeds. In summer he goes miles to berry patches and with the berries browses off a few inches of thorny bush; he bites off the end of a plum-tree limb and consumes it along with its leaves and fruit.

During summer I have seen him on the edge of snowfields and glaciers consuming thousands of unfortunate grasshoppers, flies, and other insects there accumulated. He is particularly fond of ants—tears ant hills to pieces and licks up the ants as they come storming forth to bite him. He tears hundreds of rotten logs and stumps to pieces for grubs, ants and their eggs. He freely eats honey, the bees and their nests. He often amuses himself and makes a most amusing and man-like spectacle by chasing and catching grasshoppers.

In a fish country he searches for fish and occasionally catches live ones; but he is too restless or shiftless to be a good fisherman. I have seen him catch fish by thrusting his nose in root entanglements in the edge of a brook; sometimes he captures salmon or trout that are struggling through shallow ripples.

Occasionally he catches a rabbit or a bird. But most of his meat is stale, with the killing of which he had nothing to do. He will devour carrion that has the accumulated smell of weeks of corruption. He catches more mice than a cat; and in the realm of economic biology he should be rated as useful. He consumes many other pests.

The black bear is—or was—pretty well distributed over North America. His colour and activities vary somewhat with the locality, this being due perhaps to a difference of climate and food supply.

Everywhere, however, he is very much the same. Wherever found he has the hibernating habit. This is most developed in the colder localities. Commonly he is fat at the close of autumn; and as a preliminary to his long winter rest he makes a temporary nest where for a few days he fasts and sleeps.

With his stomach completely empty he retires into hibernating quarters for the winter. This place may be dug beneath the base of a fallen tree, close to the upturned roots, or a rude cave between immense rocks, or a den beneath a brush heap. Sometimes he sleeps on the bare earth or on the rocks of a cave; but he commonly claws into his den a quantity of litter or trash, then crawls into this and goes to sleep. The time of his retiring for the winter varies with the latitude; but usually all bears of the same locality retire at about the same date, early December being the most common time.