And when we had laughed ourselves almost into tears we found the old bear sitting on her haunches and looking at us as serious as an owl. That ended her bluffing and we got several pictures of her, one of which, taken just before we left her, is reproduced here. By that time the poor old soul had so worried herself over the other cub that she was literally drenched in sweat, and she finally sat down and began to swing her head dejectedly from side to side, uttering a sort of moan at each swing, for all the world like a mourner at a wake, while the cub that was with her sat back and looked on. It was at this moment that the picture was taken, and when we had secured it we were so sorry for her that we packed up and left her alone.
This experience gave Mr. Kerfoot a pretty good insight into the real meaning of Black Bear ferocity, and later on we had many amusing experiences with the beasts. To show, however, that some people have eyes but do not use them, I will give another little adventure that we had toward the end of our stay in the mountain. We had with us as camp keeper a man who has lived most of his life in the Rockies, has hunted bears all over that part of the country, and ought to have been pretty well acquainted with the real nature of them. I do not believe that with a gun in his hand he would be afraid of anything that walks, but he had evidently never investigated very closely into what would happen to him when he had left his gun at home. We had stopped over night at a public camp at a place called Tower Falls, and after supper in the evening Kerfoot and I, having seen a Black Bear at the edge of a clearing, walked over to look at her. She was a large animal and lay on the ground near the foot of a big pine tree, and a single cub sat on one of the low-hanging branches above her head. We were talking about our plans for the morrow and walked toward the bear without thinking much about her one way or the other. When we got within fifty feet or so of her she backed up against the tree, and as we continued to advance without noticing her especially, she first stood up with her feet against the trunk and then climbed up ten or fifteen feet from the ground, driving her cub ahead of her. We walked up to the foot of the tree and looked at her for a few minutes, and though she stuck her upper lip out at us in the peculiar fashion of her kind, she made no other demonstration, and after we had stood there and talked for a little while, we turned back toward camp.
About half-way back we met our man Frank coming down to see the bear, and just behind him came a party of eight or ten people who had stopped for the night at the camp. We paid no attention to this crowd until, hearing a noise behind us, we turned around and found the whole lot running back up the hill very much frightened, and as Frank was bringing up the rear we asked him, rather jokingly, what was the matter. “Gee,” he answered, “I tell you, that’s a fierce old bear.” And we have not finished teasing him about it yet. That old bear certainly knew whom to bluff, and I have no doubt that the majority of the schoolteachers in the crowd thought themselves lucky to have escaped with their heads.
I do not mean to say that a Black Bear will not fight if it is forced to. But, personally, I have never seen one’s patience tried to the breaking point. If you chase one too closely it will take to a tree. If you follow it up the trunk, it will retreat toward the top. I imagine that if you kept on following it until it could go no farther you would end up by getting a pretty bad mauling, for it has sharp claws and tremendous muscles to back them up with; but it is perfectly safe to say that if you were at the top of the tree and it was half-way down, you would have a hard time getting at close enough quarters with it to get hurt.
A black bear at home
These conclusions, like all the others scattered through the pages of this book, are founded upon many observations made during many years, not upon any single experience or upon the actions of any one animal; and I want to lay especial emphasis upon the fact that when I give, as an illustration, the account of any particular happening, it is only cited as an example of the things that, taken together, have gone to the forming of my belief. For instance, in the summer of 1906 I was camped high up on the continental divide in the mountains of Wyoming with two boys, Tommy and Bill Richards. One day when we were out in the hills we saw a Black Bear go into a thick tangle of underbrush surrounding a big pine tree and lying at the foot of a perpendicular cliff; and we determined for the fun of the thing to drive it out so as to get a good look at it. I accordingly made my way to the extreme right of the thicket, Bill stationed himself in front, and Tommy stayed where we were when we first saw the bear. Then at a given signal we all rushed in with loud yells. But instead of trying to escape, the bear went up the pine tree and lodged thirty feet or so from the ground in a clump of foliage. One of the boys had a camera and now wanted to get the bear’s picture, so I suggested that he could do this by driving the bear further up the tree, and as Tommy said he was not afraid of the animal I cut him a long pole and he climbed up to where he could reach up and poke the bear with it. He punched it in the belly and the bear was furious, slashed at the stick, gnashed its teeth, and made a most terrifying fuss, but refused to move. Tommy, however, kept on poking and in a few minutes the bear got over its anger, appeared to grow interested in the game, and before they got through, it was actually playing. Tommy took to tickling its feet, and it would raise first one and then the other and try to catch the pole with its teeth and claws, all in a high good humor. Tommy finally dislodged him by climbing higher yet and fairly threshing the branches with his pole, and they got an excellent photograph that they subsequently published in the St. Nicholas magazine.
The Black Bear is very fond of water, and seldom stays for any length of time where it cannot get its daily bath. The grizzly also bathes, especially in hot weather or to rid itself of vermin, but the Black Bear loves water for its own sake. They have regular bathing holes and after taking a swim either stretch themselves out on a grassy bed near by, or climb up into a convenient tree, where the sun and wind soon dries them off. We found one such bear’s bath tub in a beautifully situated glade among the mountains and spent a good deal of time concealed in some nearby shrubbery, hoping to get a picture of Ursus emerging from the bath. During one of these waits a small Black Bear sauntered up to the edge of the pool, looked carefully around as though to make sure he was alone, and then slipped into the water and swam twice the length of the plunge. Just as he was crawling out on to the bank again, Kerfoot snapped his camera at him and, frightened by the sound, the bear took to his heels and climbed up a near-by tree. He settled himself about forty feet from the ground in the sunlight, and having apparently made up his mind that he had been scared over nothing settled down for a comfortable snooze. We now made up our minds that we would like a second picture to complete our record of the performance, and walked over to the bottom of the tree where the bear was ensconced, but, as is usually the case with these black animals, we found that the position in which he sat did not lend itself to a picture, so we sat down under the tree determined to wait till he changed his position. Nothing happened for fifteen or twenty minutes, when, quite unexpectedly, the bear made up his mind that he was not going to be held prisoner any longer, and with a great puffing and snorting, started stern first down the tree. Kerfoot, who by this time had gotten over his initial ideas about Black Bear, picked up a stick and hammered on the trunk to scare him back again. But this was one of the bears who, when he bluffed, bluffed to the limit, and, instead of retreating, he redoubled his growls and snarls and continued to come steadily down the tree. By this time I was becoming interested and was making bets with myself as to which of the two bluffers (for I knew that they were both bluffing) would eventually take the trick. Kerfoot finally settled the matter by actually hitting the bear a whack over the rump with his club, and the latter scurried back up the tree, twice as fast as he had come down.
One of the most characteristic features of the Black Bear’s game of bluff is its utter failure to show any concern when the bluff is called. A dog, for instance, when he indulges in a bluff that fails to work, very frequently shows plainly that he feels himself a fool. He’ll rush out with every evidence of intending to attack; growling, snarling, and coming headlong toward you; and when (if you know dogs and are not impressed by his fine acting) he gets quite up to you without frightening you, he will cringe, lick your boots, sometimes roll over and put all four feet up—which is the dog sign of complete discomfiture or complete surrender. Of course it is not possible for us to really know how any animal’s mind works. We are almost certain to credit them with some of our own psychology in trying to follow theirs. And so I do not mean to imply that a dog under these circumstances “thinks he is a fool.” But we know that he acts very much as we would feel if we thought we had been shown up. The nearest that we can come to interpreting his actions is to say that they seem to mean, “I did not know that it was you, or I never would have tried to frighten you.”
But a Black Bear does not, as the boys say, give a continental whether his bluff works or not. If he scares you, well and good. He’s gained his point. If he doesn’t scare you, well and good again. Nothing has been lost by the attempt. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred he’ll sit and look at you exactly as though nothing had happened, and the inference is, “Well, I’ve made my suggestion. Now it’s your move.” It was thoroughly typical of the animal that the old bear that so scared Kerfoot when he was focussing his camera upon her should have simply sat down on her haunches and stared open-eyed at us when we rolled on the ground in laughter.