Chapter XVIII: Big Game of North America (1)

BY CLIVE PHILLIPPS-WOLLEY

Many statements to the contrary notwithstanding, I venture to assert that, in spite of the evil doings of the ‘scallawag’ and the meat-hunter, there is still quite enough big game in many parts of the American continent to amply satisfy the desires of any reasonable big game hunter, meaning by that term one who is content to work moderately hard in an exquisite climate, free from fever and other Oriental troubles, for a few good trophies every season, and enough meat to keep his camp supplied.

It is undoubtedly true that you cannot any longer kill hundreds of head of big game to your own rifle in one season; it is also true that the game laws of Canada and the United States have somewhat curtailed the liberty of the sportsman; but it is true too that amongst English sportsmen the number of those who would care to shoot down hundreds of stags, &c. in one season is limited, and that not a few of them realise that the game laws of America, though often ill-framed and always badly enforced, are still in the best interests of those whom they control. There are, of course, mistakes in every code of laws. For instance, it is a mistake I think to protect sheep absolutely in Colorado, while wapiti are not similarly protected; for sheep are now more numerous there than wapiti, are much less easily obtained by the meat-hunter, and are less profitable to him when he has obtained them.

Still, if the Americans would enforce their own laws as rigidly against the native meat-hunter who makes a profit out of shooting as against the alien who pays for his sport, I think no one could justly complain.

Of course the buffalo has disappeared, and the antelope is not as plentiful as he was, while some of the old shooting grounds dear to the memories of the fortunate hunters of twenty years ago have been very much shot out. This is true; but it is also true that if the successors of the Williamsons, Buxtons, Jamiesons, and others of an earlier day would display as much enterprise as those gentlemen did before them, they would probably find fairly good sport still.

The man who follows another to an old shooting ground, getting there by a well-cut trail, or even by railway, to find camps made and the country thoroughly surveyed, naturally does not get as good sport as the ‘first man in,’ and does not deserve it.

An old friend, whose reputation as an Indian sportsman stands as high as any man’s, told me that, though the old grounds were certainly a good deal shot out in India, he knew that close to them were other grounds unvisited which were almost as good (if not quite as good) as the old ones, and this he proved by sending a subaltern nephew off an old route for a very short distance into a country usually passed by, with the result that he got almost as good sport in the nineties as his uncle had had in the sixties.

So it is in America to-day. One man follows another, as sheep follow their leader, and if you trust to guides they will, of course, take you to the places they know from experience, an experience which has been obtained at considerable cost to the game of the district.

As I write I am reminded of an excellent example of that of which I am writing. There is in British Columbia a certain Irish baronet, a most excellent sportsman, who has probably had better sport with cariboo and grizzly than anyone else in the country. His two favourite grounds are now overrun by his followers, but in the year that _he cut the trail to his_ cariboo ground (it took him several days) he had excellent sport, and in Alaska he did so well with bear that next year a friend and myself found that all the skin-hunters in the country were on Sir Richard’s tracks. Of course we went elsewhere. So it is always. On the grounds which you find for yourself you may get excellent sport: on the grounds found for you by other people you have hardly a right to expect it.

Before dealing then with the game list of North America in detail, let me say to the intending sportsman, Don’t be discouraged by every evil report: go and see for yourself: if possible get a hint as to where game is likely to be and then look for a country yourself, not slavishly following your predecessors or entirely depending upon men whom perhaps you don’t know very well to present a stranger with an accurate chart of the best hunting grounds they are acquainted with, the way to which they have discovered by their own hard work.

As in everything else in life, so it is in sport: if you want to get anything worth having, you have got to earn it yourself in one way or another.

There is no royal road to success in the mountains, but there is the old road still for the self-reliant and adventurous who don’t stick to old trails and the railroad, and there is still plenty of game, for those who know how to seek it, in Colorado, British Columbia, Washington Territory, Ontario, Alaska, and even in parts of the province of Quebec. So much I dare personally guarantee.

I. PANTHER (_Felis concolor_)

The American Panther (_Felis concolor_) is a beast of many _aliases_ but of few virtues. He is the ‘painter,’ ‘catamount,’ ‘mountain lion,’ ‘cougar,’ ‘Californian lion,’ or ‘puma’ of early American legends; but, in spite of his many high-sounding titles, he is a mean, sneaking beast, hiding in dense timber by day, stealing or destroying more sheep in one night than he can eat in six months, affording no sport to anyone, and very little profit even to the fur dealer. Those who hunt the panther generally hunt him with dogs, and no dog is too small for the work, for the American lion will tree before a terrier and let himself be shot by a boy with ‘bird-shot.’ I am not traducing the beast, for I have myself hunted him with terriers in the States. But let an American authority be heard upon the question. A book was published in 1890 called ‘Big Game of North America,’ to which several well-known authorities contributed, such as Caton, Van Dyke, and Fannin. The authority referred to, however, is not one of these three, but a Mr. Perry, who maintains that the American lion is not a cowardly animal, and cites in support of his contention six or seven instances in which panthers attacked human beings unprovoked. In the first instance (p. 413) the ferocious animal was defeated and driven off by an heroic boy of twelve armed with an empty brandy-bottle. In the second case a blue-jacket who had deserted from Esquimault and ‘found his way through the woods until he rested under the domain of the starry flag,’ killed the panther which attacked him there by a ‘gladiatorial thrust’ with a spade (p. 415). The third and fourth of Mr. Perry’s pugnacious panthers behaved somewhat differently--one followed a gentleman, the other followed a lady, and in both cases showed the human beings somewhat marked attentions, licking their hands, gazing ‘intently’ into their eyes, and tearing off most of their clothes, but nothing more. The fifth panther was caned by a gentleman from Snohomish, and the sixth was stared out of countenance and put to flight by someone from Brownsville, whom the panther had knocked off his horse; but it was reserved for another hero from Snohomish to perform the marvellous feat of catching a panther on the wing (‘as it was passing in the air’) with ‘his left arm round its body just behind the forelegs.’ Of course, having got his grip, the gentleman from Snohomish thumped the head of that poor panther with his gun-barrels till it died. In this Homeric struggle the victor lost nothing but the tail of his night-shirt.

Now, no doubt all these stories are quite true, and they undoubtedly prove great courage in someone, but not, it seems, in the panther; so that in spite of Mr. Perry I am obliged to accept the general opinion upon this subject as the correct one, backed as it is by a statement just made to me by Mr. John Fannin, the curator of the British Columbian Museum--an accepted authority in the American press upon such matters, and an ‘old timer’ who has had many opportunities of observing this beast--that he had never come across a well-authenticated story of a panther showing fight to (much less attacking) a man. From Mr. Fannin I obtained the measurements of the largest panthers out of the twenty-five or so which have been sent to him in late years to be skinned. The longest of these was a male from the mainland of British Columbia, killed on the Frazer river, which measured 8 ft. 2 ins. from the tip of the nose to the tip of the tail. The largest killed upon the island and sent to my friend was also a male which measured 7 ft. 3 ins. One hundred and fifty pounds is the weight of a large panther as given by Mr. J. E. Harting, in some notes published by him upon American mammalia, and I have no doubt that this is about what an average male would weigh, but I am only judging by my eye, and not from any accepted record of the actual weight of any particular beast.

The panther’s food consists of small game of all kinds, deer, and more especially sheep and pigs, and other farm produce. In nine cases out of ten the panthers which are killed are found near a sheep ranch, and it is notorious that the men who get panthers are not hunters, explorers, or men on a survey party where only wild game is likely to be found, but rather farmers and others who have stock to look after near a settlement.

It may be that in Montana and Wyoming the panther grows larger and is more courageous than he is on the Pacific coast; but even there he is held in some contempt by the mountain-men who know him. He has a habit, it is said, of following a belated hunter to camp howling in the most diabolical manner, but he never proceeds to extremities.

Some idea of the number of these beasts upon Vancouver Island and in British Columbia generally may be derived from the fact that the British Columbian Government paid bounties for the scalps of seventy-two in 1892, all but two, I believe, having been killed upon the island.

II. THE GRIZZLY (_Ursus horribilis_)

Mr. Sclater, the Secretary of the Zoological Society of London, writes me that the best naturalists only recognise three species of bears in North America, namely: the Grizzly (_Ursus horribilis_), the Black Bear (_Ursus americanus_), and the Polar Bear (_Ursus maritimus_). My correspondent adds that ‘a lot of varieties and sub-species have been made, but not upon any certain characters.’ Among these varieties and sub-species may, I suppose, be reckoned _Ursus Richardsonii_, the Alaskan grizzly, as well as a whole host of bears, best known to Western trappers as cinnamon bears, silver-tips, roach-backs, bald-faces, and range bears.

Luckily for me, the question of species is one for naturalists rather than for sportsmen to decide; the claim to rank as a distinct species appearing to rest rather upon a beast’s anatomy than upon his outward appearance and manner of life.

Having studied bears with some care and under favourable circumstances in more than one portion of the globe, I incline to the belief that the different species cross almost as freely as do different breeds of dogs; and certainly it seems probable that upon the North American continent all the different varieties owe their origin to the grizzly or the black, or to a union between the two. In this view I am supported by such a practical field naturalist and sportsman as Dr. Rainsford, as well as by a number of the best hunters and trappers whom I have met, and by certain very significant facts. Dr. Rainsford alludes to the first of these facts in his admirable article upon the Grizzly Bear in ‘The Big Game of North America.’ He says: ‘I myself have shot three young bears going with one sow, one almost yellow, one almost black, and another nearly grey. I have seen ordinary black bears, with year-old grizzly cubs, shaped differently from the mother, unmistakably owing both their shape and colour to the parentage of the male grizzly.’ This is the evidence of Dr. Rainsford, and I have heard similar statements as to the occurrence of different coloured cubs in the same litter, not once but a score of times, from Indians and white men who had passed their lives in the mountains; and I have round me in my house at the present moment a number of skins of bears killed by myself, which, if colour be any criterion as to species, represent almost as many species as there are skins.

But if anyone wishes to judge of the futility of trying to ‘place’ a bear by his colour, he should visit the drying-yard of our principal merchant in furs, here in Victoria. In that yard on a sunny day, when the bear skins are laid out to air, he will see skins of every shade between black, white, and red, all collected from a comparatively limited district, and all shading so gradually into one another, that you cannot yourself decide where the smoky grey of the true grizzly has changed into the reddish brown of the cinnamon, or where that has become dark enough to be considered a rather brownish black.

As it is with the colour so it is with the shape of the beasts, and with the shape and colour of their claws. The typical grizzly should be higher at the shoulder, somewhat shorter in the back, and generally more massive than the black bear. He should be so high at the shoulder as to appear almost humpbacked, whilst his head should be heavy and massive, broad between the ears, short in proportion to its size as compared to the head of the black bear, sharp at the snout, and somewhat flat behind the eyes; the whole expression of the head being as unmistakably pugnacious and dangerous as the expression of the long shallow head of the black bear is weak and inoffensive. As most people are aware, naturalists rely for purposes of identification more upon the shape of a bear’s skull than upon any external characteristics, and for that reason I have inserted here an engraving from a photograph of two skulls placed side by side, the larger one being that of a medium-sized grizzly bitch (or sow) from Alaska, the other that of a very large black bear (male) from British Columbia.

As far as the general expression of the beast goes, it seems to me that that is no better guide than his colour, for even amongst grizzlies I have in one trip come across one specimen with a head as full of vice as a viper’s, and another as mild as a Chinese cook’s. It is true that the sexes differed; the mild face naturally belonging to the lady.

As to the claws again, the typical Californian grizzly should have extremely long flat claws of a bony whiteness--claws obviously meant for digging and not for climbing; while the genuine black bear should have claws to climb and fish with, sharply curved, small and dark coloured.

But here again the characteristics are not constant. The Alaskan grizzly (if it is a true grizzly) has claws far too arched or curved to be typical; whilst in colour, all those which I have seen were a light brown or slate colour growing white towards the tips. A bear shot by me in the Hope Mountains is a good illustration of the strange varieties which sometimes arise from crosses between black bear and grizzly. This little fellow would have weighed about 350 lbs. live weight, and was a full-grown bear when killed. His head was a typical black bear’s as far as shape went, and he had not a distinctly marked ‘lift’ or hump at the shoulder; his claws were very light coloured (almost white); his face and shoulders were a rich straw colour, fading into a very light grey towards the rump, whilst his arms, belly, cheeks and ears were a deep rich brown, almost black in places.

The Indians said he was a grizzly; the trapper who was with me called him a cinnamon; a friend who wished to belittle my bear said he was only ‘a rum-coloured black and a little one at that.’ I only venture to suggest that he was ‘very much mixed.’

But perhaps I have already said too much upon this point, and I will therefore only pause to add this significant fact. No cinnamon or other similar variety seems to be found where both black and grizzly do not exist together. For example, upon Vancouver Island, no grizzly has ever been heard of, no cinnamon has ever been reported, but black bears swarm. The same, I believe, may be said of the island of Anticosti, and elsewhere. In habits bears differ, of course, considerably, and yet even here the points in which they resemble one another are more numerous than those in which they differ.

All bears appear to be omnivorous, but the grizzly is said to be more of a flesh-eater than _Ursus americanus_. Perhaps he is. No doubt he dearly loves to gorge himself upon a carcase, and he does occasionally kill a weak beast or a young one for himself; but like his cousin he is a great vegetarian, grubbing up roots and devouring berries by the gallon. But a black bear is not by any means a total abstainer from meat diet, more especially if that meat be pork; indeed, if the pig needs killing, and the farmer neglects to play the butcher, the mild-mannered gentleman in black will not be slow to do the killing and help himself.

To furnish an exhaustive or even adequate list of the things upon which bears feed is by no means an easy task, but it is so essential to success that a man should know where to look for his game (game always being where its food is) that this must be attempted.

Let me begin at the beginning of the bear’s year. As most men know, all bears on this continent (except, perhaps, the Polar) lie dormant during the winter. The den, as a rule, is at the head of one of the hundred gulches which seem to radiate from a common source amongst the snow peaks, the grizzly and the cinnamon choosing their lairs at a higher altitude than the black bear.

The road to a grizzly’s den, as I remember it, is generally up a snow-slide, through a dense belt of noisy brush, which the weight of the winter’s snow has laid as a thunderstorm lays ripe wheat; and above this belt, under a sheer bluff, sheltered from the wind and hidden by the snow, lies the den itself.

Up here, mist and snow, a few stunted pines, and the sleeping bear have the world to themselves from November to April, the exact date of the bear’s retirement to winter quarters, as well as of his reappearance above ground, depending somewhat upon the seasons. This much, at any rate, seems to be generally admitted amongst mountain men--that, some time in November bears begin to ‘hole up,’ the black bears being first and the grizzlies following a week or two later; whilst in spring the grizzlies are up and out before their ‘softer’ cousins.

When they first come out of their dens both bears feed entirely upon vegetable matter, even the grizzly being too weak to wander round to look for the carcases of beasts which have perished during the past winter. This he becomes strong enough to do a week or so later, but at first he is every bit as sorry a spectacle as _Ursus americanus_ under similar conditions, being almost too weak to stand, and sitting down to groan and wag his old head from sheer exhaustion after every few yards he walks. If at this time the weather looks unpropitious, both bears not infrequently come to the conclusion that it is not yet time to get up, and therefore turn in for one more nap.

In early April (that is, on first leaving their dens) both _Ursus americanus_ and _Ursus horribilis_ frequent the river bottoms to feed upon the rank herbage which grows there; and a little later find food very much to their taste in the young mountain grass which springs wherever the snow leaves the hill-sides bare.

It is in April that the hunter gets some of his best chances at bear, for if he be lucky enough to find one of the earliest of these mountain pastures, and patient enough to watch it for a few days, he is almost certain of his reward.

At this time, too, a bear is worth killing, for his hide is at its very best when he leaves his winter quarters, though it deteriorates very rapidly as summer advances.

Towards the end of April (in an average year) when the bear has purged his system with a diet of mountain grasses, Nature provides him with somewhat stronger food, in the buds of the olali bushes (service berry, &c.), in the roots of the wild parsnip, and a little later in the catkins which come upon the willows. Later still (in May), when the woods begin to swarm with ticks and other insects, the bears follow the snow in its retreat to the high places, finding at its very edge great patches of golden lilies (_Erythronium giganteum_) and the small pinkish blossom of _Claytonia carolineana_ (Indian potato), both blossoms springing from bulbs of which bears are as fond as the Indians, with whose women folk the former not seldom clash in their morning operations in these wild potato fields.

But to find the bear feeding either upon bulbs or grasses, or any stronger meat, the hunter must be out early and up late, for bears are reasonable beings, rarely if ever feeding grossly at midday, but breakfasting at dawn and dining after dark.

Indeed, bears are more or less nocturnal in their habits, and this is especially true of grizzlies, who, when much hunted, become purely nocturnal in their feeding and in their wanderings.

I know a country (the name of it I prefer to keep to myself for a year or two yet) which appears to be a high tableland, densely timbered and full of caribou, and from this innumerable gullies and clefts lead down to lower levels, where, at the bottom of steep canyons, are piled rock and stone slide, and débris of dead pine wood. There are opens among the pines at the top, and here in snow-time, if you leave a caribou carcase for a couple of days, you will find plenty of bear-tracks going to and fro. Every day the number of them increases, until it seems to you that the place must be alive with grizzlies; but you will never see one of the track-makers by day. The bears here have been a good deal hunted, and have become as cunning as monkeys, coming up from the gullies at night but vanishing like spectres at the first peep of day. It was here that a friend of mine killed and left a mule deer, hanging its head up in a tree hard by, to be called for on some future occasion. When that occasion came, the head was missing, and was found a little further on, laid with the carcase and carefully covered up with moss and sticks and snow.

This, of course, is a common trick of the grizzly’s, but it was quaint of this particular beast to gather up the fragments so carefully. By the way, whilst I am on the subject of ‘carcases,’ I may as well say that it is not my own experience that grizzlies are very gluttonous feeders, upon flesh at any rate. Indeed, it seemed to me that a deer’s carcase lasted some bears whom I have known almost as long as it would have lasted an ordinary camp Indian. I knew, for instance, of a mule’s carcase in the spring of 1892 which served as an attraction to four bears (two black and two grizzlies) for at least a fortnight in the Kootenay country.

But to come back to the bear’s menu. About the same time that the _Erythronium_ is in bloom, black bears feed freely upon a plant called ‘arpa’ by our British Columbian Indians (_Heracleum lanatum_) upon skunk cabbage, and upon a plant which Professor Macoun has kindly identified for me as _Peucedanum triternatum_.

What the black bear eats from choice, the grizzly will eat from necessity; so that if there are no carcases about, and few or no bulbs in the country, the hunter may expect to find _U. horribilis_ making the best of ‘arpa’ and skunk cabbage. As the season advances, the bear changes his diet somewhat, and before his great autumn harvests of fish, fruits and nuts, we find him tearing up rotten logs for ants and beetles, turning over boulders for the larvæ which lie below them, digging up yellow jackets’(wasps, &c.) nests for the sake of the grubs inside, and occasionally burrowing in the hill-sides for marmots or ground hogs.

The bear’s season of plenty begins with the ripening of the first fruits on the flats by the river bottoms, when those who care to shoot game out of season may find some sport in killing both varieties of bear as they wander over the sand bars of Alaskan rivers, looking for fruit and a cold bath to allay the irritation of their bald and mangy-looking hides.

The berry season in British Columbia begins at midsummer, and from that time until late in the fall there is always plenty of bear food in the woods: raspberries (which bears love beyond all things), currants, gooseberries, soapberries, service, wine, salmon, bil- and black-berries, strawberries, choke-cherries, and a score of others, whose flavour I can remember but whose names I never knew.

I have never seen, except in the Caucasus, such a land for wild fruit as British Columbia. Compared with it, Colorado, for instance, is a most unfruitful country; but, to make amends, Colorado abounds in acorns and pine nuts, of which there are few, if any, in British Columbia. Where the acorns are, there will the bears be also, but acorns are an uncertain crop, failing utterly one year and abounding another.

By the way, just before the acorn crop comes in, the silver-tips of Colorado seem to devote a good deal of their time to digging in woodland bogs, but whether they dig for roots or insects I am not sure. In Alaska, in British Columbia, and all along the Pacific Coast the bear’s _bonne bouche_ is kept until nearly the end of the year. In spring the ‘tyhee’ salmon (_O. chouicha_) turns up the streams, and a few of this ‘run’ stay all through the season; later on come the humpies (_Onchorhynchus gorbuscha_), and of these, the Indians say, none return to the sea. In October, then, in Alaska and elsewhere, the glacial streams, tributary to the main rivers, are full of these misshapen salmon, crimson and purple, and patched with all manner of vivid leprous patches, their dorsal fins frayed and rotting as they swim. The streams stink of them; your paddle strikes one which is already broken up and drifting seaward; others, swollen with decay, are standing, tail upwards, on the river bottom; whilst others, driven by some strange madness, diseased and dying, still struggle up the shallows towards the glacier.

At this time of year, the dense woods of grey and mildewed pines and prickly devil’s club, which crowd down to the river’s edge, are full of bears; the mud flats between forest and stream are pitted with huge tracks (I have measured many 12 ins. by 9 ins.), and the filthy gorged American eagle sits puking and moping with ruffled feathers among cleaned back bones and rejected heads and tails of humpies, left over from the grizzlies’ last meal.

And here, at the end of their year’s feeding, it seems appropriate to say something of the weight to which grizzlies attain, and the size to which they grow. Like human beings, they seem to fatten most in a civilised or domestic state, the great grizzly of San Francisco having really attained to the enormous weight of 1,500 lbs.,[15] presumably upon hog food. It is said that the Californian grizzly grows larger than any other, but I doubt whether he much exceeds the Alaskan in size, and I am absolutely certain that all the largest grizzlies have grown to their fabulous proportions in the whisky-scented atmosphere of Western saloons. ‘If you will hear them,’ as the ‘boys’ say, 2,000-lb. grizzlies are quite common, and ‘as big as a bull’ is but a mild way of describing nine bears out of ten shot by them.

As a matter of fact, I am by no means prepared to doubt all their stories. There are unquestionably some exceptional monsters met with now and again, but too many of those instanced have been described merely from the impression made on the hunter’s mind by the sight of a gigantic track which has spread in soft snow or mud. The largest grizzly of which I have had anything like trustworthy information in my own wanderings was shot in Alaska, at English Bay, Kodak Island, by Mr. J. C. Tolman, now Customs officer at Wrangel. As Mr. Tolman allows his name to appear, and as he enjoyed an enviable reputation for veracity among men who had known him for years, I give the dimensions of his big bear as he gave them to me, extracted from notes made in his diary at the time at which he killed him. The bear was killed only a few miles from a settlement, and was actually weighed, turning the scales at 1,656 lbs. dead weight not cleaned; his hide when freshly skinned measured 13 ft. 6 ins. from nose to anus; from ear to ear he measured 13 ins.; from poll to nose, 20 ins.; the length of the hind-foot was 18 ins., and the breadth of the forefoot 12 ins. He was killed by a single shot in the head from a Winchester rifle.

The largest bear which I have myself shot was also an Alaskan, but infinitely smaller than the above; still, even this bear gave four strong men all they could do, with a rope round her neck, to drag her, when dead, down a sloping mud bank into a canoe laid over on its side to receive her. Her forearm, when skinned, measured 23 ins., fair measurement, the tape being stretched as tight as it would go. The Indians put this bear at from 1,000 to 1,500 lbs., and I dare say she really weighed nearly 800 or possibly 900 lbs., but I am no judge of an animal’s weight, and had no means of weighing her. I have myself measured skins in Mr. Boscowitz’s store at Victoria (also brought down from Alaska) which measured 9 ft. 10 ins. from end to end, but then some 6 ins. must be allowed for on all American skins, as they are skinned up the hind legs in such a way as to give quite that length of hide beyond the anus. Of course, too, a skin may be so laced and strained upon its frame in skinning as to stretch it a good deal beyond its natural dimensions.

In Colorado the bears appear to be mostly silver-tips, and if you can rely upon the verdict of the local hunters whom I met (and I have no reason to doubt their word) a Colorado silver-tip weighing 600 lbs. would be a big bear.

The stories of the ferocity of _U. horribilis_ owe something to the vivid imaginations of hunters and the sombre surroundings in which they meet their prey; but there can be no doubt that on occasion this bear will face a man (or men), and fight with intense ferocity. As a rule, like all bears, the grizzly will run rather than fight, and very rarely attacks without provocation, but when surprised near a carcase, when cornered, when wounded, or with cubs, _U. horribilis_ is apt to be dangerous. I know of a good many deaths due to bears under such circumstances, and only last year (1891) a very well-known meat-hunter in Colorado was attacked in green timber by a silver-tip and regularly worried by him, although the man had a companion with him, and had not even seen the bear until he was charged. I have myself seen the marks of this bear’s teeth in the leg and forearm of my old guide, who explained the unprovoked attack by saying that the bear had supped on a carcase poisoned for coyotes, and was ‘feelin’ pretty mean from belly-ache’ when found. The Alaskan grizzly has a peculiarly bad reputation among the Indians in that country, who upon dry land can hardly be induced to face ‘Hoots’ or ‘Noon,’ as they call the grizzly and cinnamon. Most of the skins sent to Wrangel are those of bears strangled in nooses, like big rabbit-snares, which are set in their paths, or else of bears shot down by men on snow-shoes in the deep snow of early spring, or shot on the river banks from a canoe. Here it is as well to say that I know of two instances in which grizzly bitches have, when hunted, deserted their cubs, and left them up a tree at the mercy of the hunters; but this is, of course, unusual. As a rule, grizzlies are distinctly ‘ugly’ when they have young with them, and will defend them to the last. However, _with_ cubs or without, a man with a good rifle and a steady nerve need never let a bear go in the open. In thick brush there are times when caution is better than courage. As I write, a picture comes before my eyes of a willow swamp, high up on the head-waters of a mountain stream in the States. An old guide of mine is on the edge of the timber watching, whilst the brush swings and rattles, and an unseen form shakes down the yellow leaves and fills the gulch with her growls. It is only a bitch silver-tip, who has got the man’s wind and is trying to collect her cubs; but, although it is exasperating to stand while the old lady makes her escape up the gully, there is nothing else to be done. If she does not mean to face the open, none but a greenhorn would attempt to go to her when she was ‘fighting mad,’ in bush too thick to walk through, and in places over six feet high. All the old authorities talk of grizzlies rising to an upright position on closing with a man, but I have never met a man who had seen anything of this habit, although I have known more than one man who has been struck down by a bear. I have myself come suddenly upon a grizzly, and seen him rise and face me in the position I refer to, but he did not stop in that position long enough for me to dismount and fire, and I am convinced that his only object in rising upon his hind legs was to get a better view of the intruder, not to attack him.

There is no doubt that a bear’s sight is his weak point. In bright moonlight I have had one walk past myself and another man in the open at forty yards without seeing us; but if his sight is indifferent, he has the ears of a hare and the nose of a caribou, and this is especially the case with the black bear, whose timidity has possibly somewhat sharpened his senses.

That grizzlies do not climb, except as cubs, appears to be true; not that it matters much to the hunter, as anyone will allow who gets his friend to give him 100 or 150 yards’ start and then tries to ‘tree’ in time to escape him. The right tree never grows in the right place, and climbing in a hurry sounds easier than it is. It will be found that most men can run 100 yards in less time than they can choose their tree and climb it to such a height that their _feet_ are ten feet above the ground. A bear, too, travels faster even than a frightened man on the flat. If you are charged, the best thing you can do is to stand fast and go on shooting; and if there are two of you, and both of one mind, and _not standing too close together_, there should not be much danger; but better than that is to take pains about your first shot: or go close to your bear and shoot him in the head or neck, as the natives do. If you hit him in either of these places, you can kill him at once with an ordinary Winchester (45·90); whilst if you are using a Paradox or a big English Express, a shot ranging forward from behind the shoulder or (with a solid bullet) through the shoulder is good enough.

Don’t shoot at a bear above you unless you are sure of killing him; a wounded beast will almost always come down hill and may take you on the way; and don’t shoot at a bear in the brush as if you were ‘browning’ a covey of partridges; nor follow a wounded bear into thick covert unless you are well insured, about to be married, or at the end of your ordinary resources for supporting your family.

Opinions vary as to the comparative ferocity and vitality of the different species, but perhaps individuals vary at least as much as species. I have known a black bear take a bullet from an English rifle fired by me point blank into her chest at ten paces, and then turn and _gallop_ uphill for 200 yards before dying; and I have known a two-year-old black bear take three bullets, scattered indiscriminately over his back by my friend’s Paradox (12-bore), and then turn and charge like a hero. He charged the wrong man, though, and got shot in the head for his impudence.

To finish these remarks, and convey, if possible, some idea of hunting the grizzly, let me take a leaf from my note-book, kept in Alaska in the autumn of 1891, whilst hunting with my friend Mr. Arnold Pike.

Nature has a way of always suiting her creatures to their environments, but none of her creatures are more exactly suited to their surroundings than _U. horribilis_. Savage and silent and grey as the grizzly is, the forests and waters amongst which he chooses to dwell are more grim, more savage, and more forbidding than himself. The part of Alaska in which we were hunting in 1891 appears to have escaped from that process described in Genesis by which the waters which were above the firmament were divided from the waters which were under the firmament. On the Stickeen river there is no firmament. As a rule, a damp darkness broods upon the face of the deep, and the waters which should be above touch and mingle with the waters which should be below. There is no dry belt between the bottom of the sea and the roof of heaven, at least in that district which lies between Wrangel and Telegraph Creek, in the month of October. We were out for forty days and forty nights, and I cannot swear to more than three and a half moderately fine days in that time: a fine day in Alaska being one in which you wear oilskins and gum boots, and go to bed in a dry shirt; whilst on a wet one you wear gum boots and oilskins, and go to bed to dry your shirt. The river Stickeen runs its rapid course between dank forests, grey at the top with mildew, and hung with dark mosses, in which the devil’s club forms an impenetrable undergrowth, and even the pines are thorny. The pace of the river is such that you make as much in one day, drifting down it, as you made in five pulling and poling up it; and your camping-grounds are of necessity upon barren sandspits, for nothing but a bear could force its way into this timber. In this land no gentle things live: there are no deer, no small birds, no squirrels, no sunlight--nothing but a few wolves, a stray seal, which comes whistling up on the tide in the grey of the morning, great flights of Canada geese, and dying salmon. All along the course of the main river are the mouths of its ice-fed tributaries, little streams of greenish-blue water, rising in a glacier and fringed with narrow strips of glacial mud, upon which a rank growth of _Equisetum_ (horse-tail) flourishes. These banks are the hunting grounds, and the number of huge tracks upon them, as well as the _débris_ of half-eaten salmon, proclaim that there is no scarcity of game; but if the hunter would get a shot he must haunt them at all unseasonable hours, when winds are most chill, and nature is at her gloomiest: for ‘Hoots’ only creeps out upon the creek’s edges with the first shadows of the night, and vanishes from them with the earliest rising mists of morning.

In this land it was that one evening we pitched our tents upon a sandspit, cut wet brush in the rain to make our bedding for the night, and then, tired with a hard day and dispirited by weeks of failure, stepped once more into the canoe and paddled for all we were worth up and across the stream to the mouth of a salmon creek.

Once in the green water, pipes were put out, conversation ceased, Pike and I laid down our paddles and took up our rifles, and only the Indian worked, the canoe gliding up the still waters without a sound.

At the mouth of the stream, a few flashing shadows beneath the water attracted our Indian’s attention, and a few quick thrusts with his spear provided us with enough fresh salmon to last us for a day or two. A blow or two with the axe silenced them, and again the canoe stole up stream, the men in it noting fresh tracks upon the banks, and peering into the shadowy woods, which grew darker and more impenetrable every minute.

Once or twice on our way up stream the canoe ran aground, and all hands had to get out to push their craft through the sands (quicksands as often as not) into which we sank over the tops of our waders.

But these are small matters. Pike sitting with one leg dangling over the side, always ready to jump out, seemed rather to like it--it reminded him of days among the ice near Spitzbergen--and all of us had long since become amphibious.

At last the stream ceased to be navigable even for our shallow craft, which we beached upon certain muddy shallows, among stunted bushes and dead equisetum, and our watch began. All round us stretched the swamp, and above it rose the densely timbered hills, while far above them again towered the triple peaks of snowy Sacoclè. For an hour and a half no one stirred, though our fingers were numb, and we were too cold to feel cold. A good Siwash (Indian) won’t move a muscle for hours, nor sneeze, nor cough, nor do any of the hundred and one things which no one ever wants to do except upon such a vigil as this. For an hour and a half the rain went on, the darkness deepened, and the silence became intense, broken only by the occasional splash of a ‘humpy’ who had run himself aground, and could not get off again into deep water.

At last Jim came to the conclusion that no bears would come that night, and as a glance at our sights proved to us that we should probably miss them even if they came, we signalled him to push off, and in a minute the canoe was again fleeting over the waters in breathless silence, the thin line of forest seeming to glide by us while we stood still. An Indian in the bows was looking out for ‘snags ahead’ or shallows, and for my part I had played this game so often before that I had given up hope, and was dreaming of other things. All at once the canoe was violently shaken from stem to stern. ‘D---- the fellow,’ I muttered, ‘I suppose he has run aground,’ and I went on dreaming. Again the canoe trembled under me, and this time I remembered that this was to be the signal for game ahead. At the same moment I noticed that the Siwash’s face was working, and his hands were drawing his Winchester from its case, when my friend crept up to him, and made him understand that if he fired it would hurt him more than the bears, and then at last I saw _them_. Until then the Indian’s body had been in my way, but now they were in full view, standing almost up to their shoulders in the stream, still as stone images in the dark shadow of the overhanging bank, their heads turned over their shoulders looking in our direction, and the long silvery ripples running from their legs down stream. It was lucky for me that night that I carried a Paradox, with which a man can shoot at short ranges as if he were snap-shooting at rabbits in covert, for I had to stand up to get a clean shot, I had not a second to lose, and the canoe rocked horribly under my feet. The big beast of the two fell to my first barrel, sinking where she stood, while her mate got my second barrel in the back as he scrambled up the bank, making good his escape for the moment into the dense scrub.

I don’t suppose that the whole incident, from the find until we began to fish up my bear, took a minute, and yet into that minute was crowded a third of the reward for forty days of hard work, short commons and general misery. Is the game worth the candle? I think it is, but I don’t want to persuade any man to be of my way of thinking, nor do I want to convey the impression that all bear hunting is necessarily as grim and miserable as it is in Alaska. But in places where bear hunting is easy, bears are getting scarce (at least, grizzlies are), for their hides bring a good price and there is a bounty upon their scalps as well. The result is that more bears are trapped in one year than would be shot in five under ordinary circumstances. For instance, two brothers whom I know killed thirty-five bears in 1890 within a radius of eighty miles of their cabin. Of course, this sort of thing cannot last.

It seems a pity, as, whether you hunt him among the mists and storms of an Alaskan autumn, or watch for him by a hill at the edge of some dark canyon, until even the bird _chiquetta_ stops her noisy little song, and the outlines of all objects become indistinct and moving, _Ursus horribilis_ is better worth hunting than any other beast, except perhaps the bighorn, in all America.

P.S.--Since writing this, Sir George Lampson has kindly furnished me with the length of eleven American grizzly skins in his warehouse at one time--87, 89, 90, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 101 and 103 ins. respectively. On the day these particulars were furnished I myself put the tape over a grizzly skin in Sir George Lampson’s possession which measured 9 ft. from the eyes to the tail.

III. BLACK BEAR (_Ursus americanus_)

I have said so much incidentally about the black bear while writing of his congener the grizzly, that I have very little left to say of him in the proper place. A recent American authority describes this bear’s habitat as being confined nowadays ‘to some portions of the various ranges of mountains south of the St. Lawrence river, the Great Lakes, and (east of the Mississippi river) to parts of those portions of the Mississippi river and its tributaries which are yet unsettled,’ and to ‘the dense thickets of the Colorado, Trinity, and Brayos rivers.’ Colonel G. D. Alexander should have bethought him of those countries west of the Rockies (Alaska, British Columbia, Washington Territory, Vancouver Island, and Oregon) which are at present the principal stronghold of _Ursus americanus_; and as I am informed the chief source from which the fur-traders draw their supplies of black bear skins. Unfortunately for the black bear, the price of his hide has gone up lately in the fur market. Ten years ago $15 was a long price to pay for a bear’s skin; this year a trader out here paid as much as $35 for one. Whatever the ultimate result of this rise in value may be, the immediate consequence of it has been to show the world what a vast number of bears can be killed in America if they are wanted.

Here are some statistics of recent crops of bear in America which speak for themselves.

The Hudson Bay Company, of course, draws _all_ its supply of hides from this continent, and I am assured that the same maybe said (with scarcely any allowance for Russian, Norwegian, Indian, or other skins) of the great firm of C. M. Lampson & Co. These two firms collected in 1891 and offered for sale in 1892 no fewer than 29,081 bear hides, to which enormous total the Hudson Bay Company contributed 11,027 hides.

Some idea of the proportion of black to other skins at these sales may be obtained by looking at the Hudson Bay Company’s lists for 1891, in which we find 11,414 black, 1,875 brown, 253 grey, and 130 white bear skins offered for sale.

There can be little doubt, then, that there were plenty of black bear in America in 1890 and 1891; and, in spite of the immense harvest of hides which is annually gathered in, I venture to prophesy that until Alaskan river bottoms and the dense timber districts of Vancouver Island, Oregon, and Washington Territory are cleared and ready for the plough, there will be plenty of bear left for those who care to look for them. Here on Vancouver Island and on the north-west coast of British Columbia black bears are especially plentiful, one of our great fur-dealers (Mr. Boscowitz) having taken in over 1,000 hides last year, whilst I see by a newspaper (‘Colonist,’ Dec. 6, 1892) that at Sumas in the New Westminster District (one of our best farming districts) seven bears have lately fallen to one rifle and three to another; and I am well convinced that a salmon-canning friend of mine told me the truth when he asserted that about dawn, one day during the great annual salmon run, he saw seventeen black bears at one _coup d’œil_, feeding along the bank of one of the northern rivers of British Columbia.