Watched by Wild Animals

by Enos A. Mills

This so interested me that I decided to trail her from the basin. After following her fresh trail for about three miles this united with the trail she had made in leaving the basin—the trail which I had back-tracked the day before. Travelling about ten miles, beyond where I had first seen the trail the day before, I came to a cave-like place high up on the side of Echo Mountain. Here she had left the cubs the night before. Tracks showed that she was then in the cave with them. I did not disturb them, but I did revisit their territory again and again.

In this cave they hibernated that winter. It was a roomy, natural cave formed by enormous rock fragments that had tumbled together at the base of a time-worn cliff. The den which the grizzly and cubs used the first winter was not used again, nor were their later hibernating places discovered.

The grizzly’s new domain was about thirty miles to the northward of her former wilderness home. It was a wild, secluded region between Echo Mountain and Long’s Peak.

Grizzlies often explore afar and become acquainted with the unclaimed territory round them, and it is possible that this mother grizzly knew the character of the new home territory before emigrating. There was an abundance of food in the old home territory, but it is possible that she had lost former cubs there and it is certain that she had been shot at a number of times. However, the change may have been simply due to that wanderlust which sometimes takes possession of the ever-adventurous grizzly. In the eventful years which followed she showed tireless energy and skill. Though badly crippled, she still maintained those qualities which mean success for the survival of the species—the ability to make a living, the postponing of death, and the production of offspring.

The Echo Mountain grizzly had individuality and an adventurous career. This heroic grizzly mother might be called an emigrant or an exile, or even a refugee. Though crippled, she dared to become a pioneer. All that men learned of her eventful life was a story of struggles and triumphs—the material for the biography of a character.

The next July a camper in following the track of a snowslide came upon a three-legged mother grizzly and two cubs. They were eating the carcass of a deer that was just thawing from the snow and débris brought down by the snowslide. The grizzly was nearly white, one cub was brown, and the other dark gray.

As the camper went on with his burro he noticed the bear watching him from among trees across a little glacier meadow. He camped that night on a small stream at the foot of an enormous moraine a few miles from the place where he had seen the bear. Returning from picketing the burro he chanced to glance at the skyline summit of the moraine. Upon it the three-legged bear stood watching him. She was looking down with curious interest at his tent, his campfire, and the burro. Surely this crippled grizzly was living up to the reputation of the species for curiosity. A moment later she disappeared behind a boulder. With his field glasses he could still see her shadow. This showed her standing behind the boulder with her one forepaw resting against it and peeping from behind it.

That autumn a trapper out for pine martens saw the Echo Mountain grizzly and her cubs. He reported her a great traveller; said that she ranged all over her large and rugged Rocky Mountain territory. Her tracks were seen on the summit of the range and she occasionally visited the other side of the divide. Perhaps she felt that an intimate knowledge of the region was necessary for a crippled bear in meeting emergencies. This knowledge certainly would be valuable to her in making her living and a marked advantage if pursued.

This rugged scenic mountain wilderness now is a part of the Rocky Mountain National Park. It must have been a wonderland for the childlike cubs. In the lower part of this territory are a number of moraines, great hills, and ridges covered with grass and dotted with pines. There are many poetic beaver ponds. The middle slopes are black with a spruce forest and cut with a number of cañons in which clear streams roar. Up at eleven thousand feet the forest frays out with dwarfed and storm-battered trees. Above this the summit of the Rockies spreads out under the very sky into a moorland—a grassy Arctic prairie. Here, in places, big snowdrifts lie throughout the summer. To these timberline drifts, when fringed with flowers, the mother and the cubs sometimes came. The stains of their tracks upon the snow showed that the cubs sometimes rolled and scampered over the wasting drifts. They often waded in beaver ponds, swam in the clear lakes, played along the summit of ridges while the mother was making a living; and they often paused, too, listening to the sounds of the winds and waters in the cañons or looking down into the open meadows far below.

Stories of this large, handsome, nearly white Echo Mountain grizzly reached trappers more than one hundred miles away. During the several years through which I kept track of her a number of trappers tried for the bear, each with his own peculiar devices. They quickly gave it up, for in each case the bear early discovered the trap—came close to it and then avoided it.