The Black Bear

by William H. Wright

For the rest most of our information about them comes from self-appointed vigilantes who, rifle in hand, knock unexpectedly at the doors of their summer residences and do not even offer them the customary five minutes in which to say their prayers. In their reports, as in accounts of other executions, the chief emphasis is laid upon the attitude of the victim in the face of death. “The condemned mounted the steps of the scaffold with a firm tread.” Or, if the animal happened to be gnawing a bone when discovered, “At the conclusion of a hearty breakfast consisting of ham and eggs and coffee, the sheriff came in and read the death-warrant.” Or, best of all, if the unhappy brute ventured to show its teeth as the firing squad sighted down the rifle barrel, we are informed that, “the savage and bloodthirsty monster died game.”

She began to swing her head from side to side

This may be good journalism, but it is mighty poor natural history. It gives us some insight into the nature of the man behind the gun, but very little idea of the real nature of the bear in front of it. We never find out what the bear would have done if the trigger had not been pulled. A man once stopped before a plant in my garden and asked me what under the shining sun it was. He had never, he said, seen anything like it. As a matter of fact it happened to be a cabbage that had gone to seed; but the man, who had always killed his cabbages as soon as their hides were prime, did not even know they bore seed. And he rather fancied himself as an amateur gardener, too. It is much the same in the woods. If you kill your bear just as soon as it begins to act natural, you may get to be an authority on hides, but there will be a lot of things that you don’t know.

We are not here discussing the ethics of killing. That is a question quite apart. Goodness knows that there is little enough glory—since there is little or no risk—in killing a Black Bear. To chase a timorous and inoffensive animal up a tree and then to stand underneath and shoot it is no very great achievement. The sport is altogether in the mind of the sportsman. It is a good deal like dressing up in a brown cotton imitation of a fringed buckskin hunting shirt and stalking the spring calf in the east pasture with an air-gun. It’s exciting—until you find out what it really amounts to. But you have to manufacture your own excitement. The point I wish to make is simply this: that if you want to find out how an animal lives, you must watch it live and not watch it die. When you start out to study the habits of a wild animal the place for your gun, if you have one, is in the rack at home.

For one thing, if you undertake to watch a man through a transom with a gun in your hand and murder in your mind, the chances are a hundred to one that he’ll feel something queer “in the air.” The thing has not been explained yet, but we can feel a scowl behind our backs much more readily than a smile. And in the woods the animals soon distinguish between a desire to kill and a desire to look on. I have tried both and I know.

All animals are quick to understand when we are afraid of them; and many of them seem to enjoy taking advantage of the fact. We can see this in cows and in dogs and even in turkey gobblers. And we would see it often in the woods, too, if we were not so much given to either running or shooting before we had time to see it. The Black Bear makes the most of his ability to inspire terror. He trades on it. He makes capital out of it. And he has come to be one of the most accomplished bluffers on earth.

In the summer of 1908 I spent some weeks in the mountains of the Yellowstone National Park getting a series of flash-light pictures of grizzly bears, and early in my stay I was joined by Mr. J. B. Kerfoot, of New York, who, although he had had no experience with bears, had done a good deal of amateur photography and was anxious to help me with the work in hand. The day after we reached camp we went out to look over the ground where we proposed to work that night, and on our way back we ran across an old Black Bear with two cubs and determined to take her picture. As soon as she saw us she ordered her cubs up a tree but, by a quick movement, I managed to get to them in time to intercept the second cub before it had a chance to obey. It then rejoined its mother and I placed myself between them and the treed cub and thus had things just as I wanted them, knowing that the old bear would not go far away and leave her youngster (who was bawling lustily from the branches) to its possible fate.

But when I called Kerfoot, who had the camera, to come forward and get some pictures, he was rather shy about it. He explained that he had come out to photograph bears, and that if this one had been by herself, he would not have minded her; but that he had always understood that an old bear with cubs was about the most dangerous thing on four legs, and that to interpose himself between her and her bawling offspring looked to him a good deal like suicide. I finally persuaded him that there was no danger, however, and he moved up to within fifty feet or so of the old bear. But he had no more than taken a step or two when she turned toward him with a coughing snarl that made him think his last hour had come. I could not help laughing at the old bluffer, for she had never so much as shown me a tooth, but had rather assumed toward me what you might call a “put upon” expression—whining and walking nervously back and forth and showing quite plainly that she thought herself badly used by a superior force. But Kerfoot was hard to convince in regard to her bluffing qualities, and while we were all maneuvering for a suitable position the cub came down from the tree, joined its mother and the other cub, and all three made off into the woods.

We followed helter-skelter, and as the cubs could not run very fast we finally succeeded in treeing one of them again and resumed operations. This time I picked up a club and by brandishing it valiantly every time the bear snarled at Kerfoot, managed to reassure him sufficiently to coax him up within about thirty feet of her. He had a Graflex natural-history camera that took a 4 × 5 plate, but had sufficient bellows to accommodate a twenty-inch lens, thus giving a very large image at a comparatively considerable distance from the object. In these cameras an inclined mirror, that flies out of the way at the moment of exposure, enables one to see the full-sized picture on the ground glass, and to focus on a moving subject up to the second of pressing the button. And when Kerfoot had looked at the picture at a distance of thirty feet he said that he thought he could get a fine head by going a bit closer yet, and moved ten feet nearer. He had just gotten things to his liking and was standing with the long camera held at the level of his eye and his head bent over the focussing hood when the bear gave a vicious snort, and executed the peculiar combination of broken coughs and gnashing teeth that is the trump card in the Black Bear’s game of bluff; and the photographer literally went straight up into the air. Of course the whole effect was reproduced on the ground glass within two inches of his eyes and he said afterward that he had thought his nose was scratched. But the sight was too much for me. I threw away my club, and throwing myself on the ground roared with laughter, and as soon as he understood what had happened, Kerfoot put the camera down and joined me.