Indeed, at that time the Little Missouri was very dangerous country, as it was the debatable-ground between many powerful Indian tribes, and was only visited by formidable war-parties and hunting-parties. In consequence of nobody daring to live there, game swarmed—buffalo, elk, deer, antelope, mountain-sheep, and bear. The bears were then very bold, and the hunters had little difficulty in getting up to them, for they were quite as apt to attack as to run away.
But when, in 1880, the Northern Pacific Railroad reached the neighborhood of the Little Missouri, all this changed forever. The game that for untold ages had trodden out their paths over the prairies and along the river-bottoms vanished, as the Indians that had hunted it also vanished. The bold white hunters also passed away with the bears they had chased and the red foes against whom they had warred. In their places the ranchman came in with great herds of cattle and horses and flocks of sheep, and built their log cabins and tilled their scanty garden-patches, and cut down the wild hay for winter fodder. Now bears are as shy as they are scarce. No grizzly in such a settled region would dream of attacking a man unprovoked, and they pass their days in the deepest thickets, so that it is almost impossible to get at them. I never killed a bear in the neighborhood of my former ranch, though I have shot quite a number some hundreds of miles to the west in the Rocky Mountains.
Usually the bears live almost exclusively on roots, berries, insects, and the like. In fact, there is always something grotesque and incongruous in comparing the bear’s vast size, and his formidable claws and teeth, with the uses to which those claws and teeth are normally put. At the end of the season the claws, which are very long in spring, sometimes become so much blunted as to be tender, because the bear has worked on hard ground digging roots and the like.
Bears often graze on the fresh tender spring grass. Berries form their especial delight, and they eat them so greedily when in season as to become inordinately fat. Indeed, a bear in a berry-patch frequently grows so absorbed in his work as to lose his wariness, and as he makes a good deal of noise himself in breaking branches and gobbling down the fruit, he is exposed to much danger from the hunter.
Besides roots and berries, the bear will feed on any small living thing he encounters. If in plundering a squirrel’s cache he comes upon some young squirrels, down they go in company with the hoarded nuts. He is continually knocking to pieces and overturning old dead logs for the sake of devouring the insects living beneath them. If, when such a log is overturned, mice, shrews, or chipmunks are found underneath, the bear promptly scoops them into his mouth while they are still dazed by the sudden inrush of light. All this seems rather ludicrous as the life work of an animal of such huge proportions and such vast strength.
Sometimes, however, a bear will take to killing fresh meat for itself. Indeed, I think it is only its clumsiness that prevents it from becoming an habitual flesh-eater. Deer are so agile that bears can rarely get them; yet on occasions not only deer, but moose, buffalo, and elk fall victims to them. Wild game, however, are so shy, so agile, and so alert that it is only rarely they afford meals to old Ephraim—as the mountain hunters call the grizzly.