VIII
BEARS
It was the next day that I made my first close acquaintance with bears. There are many bears in Glacier Park. Firearms are forbidden, of course, and the rangers kill them only in case of trouble. Naturally, so protected, they are increasing rapidly. They find good forage where horses would starve. Mr. Ralston, the park supervisor, saw a she bear with three cubs last spring. There are no tame bears, as in the Yellowstone.
There are plenty of animals. Some fifty moose graze along the Flathead. Beavers have colonies in many of the valleys and industriously build dams that deepen the fords. I remember one place along the Cutbank Trail where the first horses found themselves above the belly in water and confronting a perpendicular bank up which one or two scrambled as best they could. The rest turned and, riding in the stream for a half-mile détour, made the trail again. That was the work of beavers.
There are coyotes a-plenty. Because they kill the deer and elk, the rangers poison them in the winter with strychnine. A few mountain lions remain. As one can make a whole night hideous, a few are sufficient.
There is something particularly interesting about a bear. Perhaps it is because he can climb a tree. In other words, ordinary subterfuges do not go with him. Reports vary—he is a fighter; he is a craven; the fact being, of course, that he is, like all wild animals and most humans, a bit of each.
The trip was over, and I had seen but one bear. At Lewis's that last Sunday I voiced my disappointment. Soon after I received word quietly that Frank Higgins, guide and companion on many hunting trips to Stewart Edward White and other hunters, had offered to show me some bears.
He had horses saddled under a tree when I went back, and two men, one of them a Chicago newspaper artist, were with him. We mounted and rode up the trail back of the hotel.
I was dubious. For days I had tried to see bears and failed, and now to have them offered with certainty by Mr. Higgins made me skeptical. I had an idea that under his tall impassiveness he was having a little fun at my expense. He was not. We went out into the forest, to where the hotel dumps its garbage. That was rather a blow, at first. And there were no bears. Only a great silence and a considerable stench.