His Fierceness 235 



meat as, many a time, their descendants have proved 

 the same fact to my inconvenience. But beyond this the 

 evidence is pure hearsay. However, six hunters having 

 approached unnoticed to within forty paces of a sleeping 

 grizzly is pretty good evidence of that animal's sense of 

 security, and another grizzly's having rushed out to in- 

 vestigate the shouts of men in a tree proves the same thing, 

 if nothing more. 



Whether they killed buffalo or not, however, they 

 were believed guilty of other acts of which we know 

 them to have been innocent. We can see from several 

 entries in the journal, the wholly natural but wholly mis- 

 taken trend of the writer's convictions. The bears, they 

 tell us, "infested their camp at night" — and many a time 

 have I been able to say the same — but the writer evidently 

 regarded the camp's immunity from "attack" as due to 

 the watchfulness of the camp dog; whereas, if the bears 

 had really been bent on slaughter, and had not been 

 merely the prowling thieves and curious investigators 

 they were, the dog would have been but an appetizer for 

 their feast. 



On one of my first hunts for grizzlies we were camped 

 beside a little stream which ran down the mountain to 

 quite a large tract of flat land in a kind of a canon. This 

 creek was lined along both its banks with the black haw, 

 wild cherry, and Sarvis berry, and we had hunted through 

 these thickets in the hope of getting a shot at the bears, 

 whose numbers could be readily inferred from the way 

 the bushes were bent, broken, and twisted, and from the 

 great number of tracks to be seen along the creek. After 

 spending two days at this kind of hunting and not having 



