Nor is this kind of bluff and this attitude toward failure to make good on the part of the Black Bear, confined to intercourse with strangers. I have seen one of them go through exactly similar actions with another bear. One of the most amusing little incidents I ever watched—because it so laughably illustrated the happy-go-lucky, anything-to-keep-one’s-self-amused attitude of these beasts—will serve as an example. I had been watching a Black Bear that was feeding in ignorance of my presence, and after some time it had sat down at the foot of a small pine tree on a side hill and was leaning lazily against the trunk, turning its head now and then as though watching for something to turn up. It was a pretty good-sized bear—three hundred pounds or so perhaps—and when another animal of about its own size appeared some distance along the side hill and, somewhat to my surprise, began to walk threateningly toward it, I became very much interested. The first bear, however, did not seem to share my interest. He paid, or pretended to pay, no attention whatever to the newcomer. And the latter, very deliberate but very determined, came straight toward him. When he arrived at the other side of the small tree (it was not more than six inches thick) he half drew back on his haunches, half raised his fore-quarters from the ground, lifted one paw as if to strike, and uttered the coughing snarl ending in a rapid champing of the jaws that is the Black Bear’s ultimate expression of wrath. I thought that I was going to have a reserved seat at a prize fight. But my original bear continued to lean against his tree and look about lazily as though waiting for something interesting to turn up. He did not seem to so much as suspect that there was another bear in that neck of the woods. And the challenger turned round and walked away as deliberate, as dignified, and as unconcerned as though nothing whatever had happened.
The actions of these two bears, moreover, illustrate another characteristic of the tribe. You never watch Black Bear when they are quite at home and undisturbed without being made to feel that they are hard put to it to know what to do with themselves. A grizzly “knows his business” in every sense of the expression. When he starts out, he knows where he is going and goes there. When he starts a job, he finishes it and goes on to the next. I have followed one along and over the high ridges of the Rockies for two days on end when the light snow of early fall showed every step he took. I have tracked one from ground-squirrel burrow to marmot hole; seen where two hours of incredibly laborious digging had yielded him a mouthful of breakfast; followed his careful search for more provender, to be got by more digging, and seen where, the possibilities of that particular ridge having been exhausted, he had started on a predetermined journey across country for another feeding ground. The grizzly is working for his living and knows it.
But Black Bear act for all the world like boys on a rainy Saturday. They’ve got nothing but time, and the one problem in life is how to kill it. Watch one for a couple of hours and you’ll see him start forty different things, finish none of them, and then sit down and swing his head hopelessly from side to side as though to say, “Now what shall I do next?”
If you have only seen these animals in captivity you are apt to think that their air of restless boredom is due to their confinement; that they don’t know what to do with themselves because they are unable, in a bear pit, to follow their natural vocations. I am always sorry for wild animals in captivity, but I am, I think, less sorry for the Black Bear than for most others. For they act just about as bored to death in the woods as they do in the Zoo. I have seen one come along, rip a piece off an old stump, sniff for bugs, find none, stand undecided for a few minutes, and then walk up to a tree and draw itself upright against the trunk, stretching like a cat. It then sat down at the foot of the tree and scratched its ear. It then got up and started off aimlessly, but, happening to straddle a low bush in its path and liking the feeling of the branches against its belly, it walked backward and forward half a dozen times to repeat the sensation. Then it started back the way it had come and smelling a mouse under a log, suddenly woke up and became all attention. It tried to move the log and failed. It dug a bit at one end but gave that up. It then tried again, very hard this time, to turn the log over, and the log giving away suddenly, the bear turned a complete somersault backward, but instantly recovered itself and rushed around with the most ludicrous haste to see if the mouse had gotten away. It hadn’t. It hadn’t had time. Which may give you a faint notion of how quick that clumsy-looking bear was when he really got awake. After he had eaten the mouse he was up against it again. He didn’t know what to do next. There was a fallen tree near by and he got up on the trunk and walked the length of it. Then he turned around (quite hard to do without touching the ground, but he was very careful) and walked back again to the butt. Here he stood and looked straight ahead of him—stood at gaze, as the old romancers used to say. Then (the log was perhaps eighteen inches high) he climbed down backward very slowly and carefully as if he were afraid of falling, and walked around to examine a place where the upturned roots had left a hole in the earth. Finally he sat down and began “weaving.” That is to say, he began swinging his head from side to side, making a figure ∞ with his nose, as one often sees them do behind the bars of the Zoo. There is nothing in the world more expressive of hopeless ennui.
But although one is constantly tempted to call the Black Bear names; to refer to him as an idle, pottering, purposeless, “footless,” lazy, loafing tramp; he can upon occasion be the most persistent thing on four feet (always excepting a porcupine), and the fact that he has no business of his own to attend to by no means deters him from poking his sharp nose into any and everything that doesn’t concern him. There never was a more convincing example of the fact that idle hands (and paws) are supplied by Satan with mischievous occupation. He is chock-full of inquisitiveness and eaten up with curiosity. And if you imagine that because he’s clumsy he can’t be quick, or that because he acts foolish he is anybody’s fool, you will be very far out of the right reckoning.
One Black Bear in one-half hour can do more to make an unguarded camp look like a hurrah’s nest than any other known agency; and I have had one come back half a dozen times from half a dozen different directions, to try to get at my camera to paw it over and find out what it was. One day when I was photographing grizzlies I buried the tin case that held my electric battery while I went back to camp for something. I did this because I knew that there were Black Bear in the neighborhood, and I hoped by this trick to keep them from tampering with my effects. But when I got back a Black Bear had been there, had dug up the case, pulled the cover off, chewed the tin all out of shape, and had bitten holes in each of the dry batteries. Another time I found one sitting under a canvas shoulder bag that I had hung on the branch of a tree, hitting it first with one paw and then with another as it swung. He made so comical a picture that I watched him for a while, but when he reached out his snout and grasped the bag with his teeth I hurriedly drove him away, for the bag had some wooden cylinders of flash powder in it.
On the trip when Mr. Kerfoot and I were working together we frequently built ourselves seats in convenient trees from which to watch for grizzlies, and operated the electric mechanisms of our cameras by strings stretched from the apparatus to our crannies among the branches. On one occasion, when we determined to work a second night from the same location, we left these strings in position so as to save ourselves the considerable trouble of running them a second time. But the next night when we came to set up our cameras we could not find the ends of the strings. There had been two of them running to widely separated points, each one hundred feet or so distant from our look-out. And we could find neither of them. Finally, I climbed to the seat in the tree to see if I could find the other ends of the string, and discovered that a Black Bear during our absence had been trying our seat, and had pulled both strings in and left them hopelessly snarled up among the branches. He had, I suppose, found our scent on the tree, followed it up to investigate, found the seat (a piece of board nailed across two limbs), and having his curiosity aroused by the strings, had pulled them in to see what was at the other end.
There was a fairly well-trodden bear trail that led under this same tree, and that night, after we had got things shipshape again, we had another amusing object lesson in the ways of the Black Bear. We had little more than got settled for our long wait for dusk and the coming of the grizzlies, when we saw a lean old Black Bear with one cub coming down the trail toward our tree. When they got within thirty feet or so of us the mother stopped, evidently seeing us. But the cub kept on. Whereupon the mother called it back and it sat down beside her. Then began one of the most farcical exhibitions I ever saw. This old bear (Kerfoot declared her to be an old maid that had married late in life) was evidently used to going down that particular trail and wasn’t going to change her habits on account of any interlopers. But at the same time she was afraid to pass the tree with us in it. She would come on a few steps and then back off again. Then she would wander up and down in the most undecided and worried way, grumbling and growling to herself. Finally she sat down and fairly cried—moaning and whining like a spoiled child. All the while the cub kept running ahead and then turning round to look back, as much as to say, “Come on, it’s all right. What’s the matter with you to-night?” And, of course, all the time the whole Rocky Mountains was open to her to go round by. Once she went back the way she came and we thought we were rid of her. But she came back again and recommenced the performance. Then I got down and drove her off.
Black Bear are found pretty generally in grizzly countries except in places where the grizzlies are very plenty, and now that they are all scarce they cover the same ranges almost everywhere. In the early nineties, in the Selkirks in British Columbia, I never saw a Black Bear. Now, however, although the grizzlies are still as plentiful there as anywhere, the Black Bear are numerous. But the Black fellows are mighty careful never to get in the grizzlies’ way. I have seen one stand up on his hind legs behind the trunk of a good-sized tree and sidle round it, peeking out as he went to watch a grizzly bear go by; and I have already told how the two Black Bear took to the trees when they heard a grizzly coming. I know of nothing that better illustrates the keen senses of these animals than the way in which they will detect the approach of a grizzly long before a man’s senses can make him aware of the fact. In the Yellowstone National Park, where there are many animals of both species occupying the same ranges, I found that I could always get warning of the approach of the grizzlies when their twilight feeding time approached by the sudden and complete disappearance of the Black Bear; and on several occasions, in different parts of the mountains, when the frequent flashes of our electric cameras had scared the grizzlies away from that part of the wood, the Black Bear seemed, strangely enough, to be aware of the fact and made no attempt to retire at their usual hour. This was so interesting an exhibition of keen senses or quick intuition that I watched very carefully during the whole period of my stay to try to satisfy myself as to the source of their knowledge. The fact that they began to be uneasy as the usual hour for the grizzlies’ arrival came near, sometimes led me to think that they merely judged from past experience as to how long it was safe for them to stay out. But, on the other hand, I saw so many cases where a sudden suspicion of unexpected danger led them to make themselves scarce, and this, too, when the suspicion turned out to have been right, that I was forced to conclude that they either heard or smelled their enemies. But I could never find out which it was that they did. Several times I have seen them suddenly rush with snorts of apprehension to the nearest tree, and had their actions explained a few minutes later by the silent appearance of a huge grizzly.
The grandest wild animal of the United States is the grizzly bear. But the most amusing, the most ludicrous, the most human and understandable of our wild animals, is our friend Ursus americanus (Pallas). I have called him the Happy Hooligan of the woods, and I can think of no more descriptive phrase for him. He is neither evil-intentioned nor bad-natured. Yet he has probably terrified more innocent wayfarers than any other denizen of our forests.