Watched by Wild Animals

by Enos A. Mills

Hoping to learn where this mother grizzly and her cubs came from I back-tracked through the November snows in a dense forest for about twenty miles. This trail came out of a lake-dotted wooded basin lying high up between Berthoud Pass and James Peak on the western slope of the Continental Divide. The three-legged mother grizzly was leaving the basin, evidently bound for a definite, far-off place. Her tracks did not wander; there had been no waste of energy. A crippled bear with two cub children and the ever-possible hunter in mind has enough to make her serious and definite.

But the care-free cubs, judging from their tracks, had raced and romped, true to their play nature and to youth. The mother’s tracks showed that she had stopped once and looked back. Possibly she had commanded the cubs to come along, but it is more than likely that she had turned to watch them. Though ever scouting for their safety and perhaps even now seeking a new home, yet she probably enjoyed their romping and with satisfaction had awaited their coming.

I had gone along reading the story these bears had written in the snow without ever thinking to look back. The following morning I realized that this grizzly may have been following me closely.

I spent that night with a prospector from whom I learned many things of interest concerning this three-legged grizzly. Truly, she was a character. She had lived a career in the Berthoud Pass Basin.

Only a few weeks before, so the prospector told me, a trapper had captured one of her cubs and nearly got the grizzly herself. A grizzly bear is one of the most curious of animals. In old bears this constant curiosity is supplemented and almost always safeguarded by extreme caution. But during cubhood this innate curiosity often proves his misfortune before he has learned to be wary of man.

The trapper, in moving camp, had set a number of small traps in the camp rubbish. He felt certain that if a bear with cubs should be prowling near, the cubs on scenting the place would rush up to investigate before they could be restrained by the mother. There would be little to rouse her suspicion, she doubtless having smelled over many abandoned camp sites, and she, too, might be trapped.

One of this grizzly’s three cubs was caught. She and the two other cubs were waiting with the trapped one when the trapper came on his rounds, but at his appearance they made off into the woods. The trapper set a large steel trap and left the trapped cub as a decoy.

The mother bear promptly returned to rescue the trapped cub. In her excited efforts she plunged her right forefoot into the large trap. Many grizzlies appear to be right-handed, and her best hand was thus caught. An old grizzly is seldom trapped. But this bear, finding herself caught, did the unusual. She gnawed at the imprisoned foot to get away, and finally, at the reappearance of the trapper, tore herself free, leaving a foot behind her in the trap. She fled on three feet, driving the two cubs before her.

Then, though crippled, she returned that same night to the scene where the cub was trapped. Not finding it she followed the scent to the miner’s cabin, in which the cub was chained. Here she charged one of the dogs so furiously that he literally leaped through the window into the cabin. The other dogs set up a great to-do and the three-legged bear made off into the woods. As soon as her leg healed she apparently left Berthoud Pass Basin on the trail which I had discovered, and set off like a wide-awake, courageous pioneer to find a new home in a more desirable region.

A miner came to the prospector’s cabin before I had left the next morning and told the story of her attempted rescue of the cub during the preceding night. She had left her two cubs in a safe place and evidently returned to rescue her third trapped cub. She went to the miner’s cabin where the captured cub had been kept. The dogs gave alarm at her presence and the miner going out fired two shots. She escaped untouched and straightway started back to the other cubs.