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never, touch them, though they grow abundantly. 

 The bears in the Bitter Root Mountains eat the 

 shooting-star freely, while the violet and the spring- 

 beauty are favored by the bears of the Selkirks. 

 Yet, strange though it is, the bears of both locali- 

 ties pay but little attention to carcasses which they 

 find. One of the plant roots which the bears of 

 British Columbia dig out in autumn until the 

 ground is frozen, is a wild pea, the hedysarum. 



I frequently followed a grizzly whose home terri- 

 tory was close to my cabin in the Rocky Moun- 

 tains. Apparently he liked everything. One day he 

 spent hours digging out mice. On another he caught 

 a rabbit. He ate a bumblebee's nest, and, with the 

 nest, the grass, the bees, their young, their honey, 

 and their stings. In a homesteader's garden he dug 

 out and ate nearly one hundred pounds of potatoes 

 and turnips. The homesteader thought that a hog 

 had been in his garden. In places I too have 

 thought that hogs had been rooting where bears 

 had simply been digging for roots — places with 

 dug and upturned earth often many square yards 

 in extent. They dig out the roots of the wild pars- 

 nip, the shooting-star, and grass, the bulbs of lilies, 

 and sometimes the roots of willow and alder. 



68 



