The Story of Ben 27 



sides of the hills, or the juices and soft slimy substances 

 to be found beneath the bark of the mountain spruce 

 trees in the spring and early summer. 



But now, while camped near this mountain meadow, 

 Ben would pull at his leash and even bawl to get loose, 

 and I soon took to letting him go and to following him 

 about to learn what it was that he wished to do. I 

 was amazed to find that he knew every root and plant 

 that the oldest bears knew of and fed upon in that 

 particular range of mountains. He would work around 

 by the hour, paying not the least attention to my 

 presence; eat a bit of grass here, dig for a root there, 

 and never once make a mistake. When he got some- 

 thing that I did not recognize, I would take it away 

 from him and examine it to see what it was, and in 

 this way I learned many kinds of roots that the bears 

 feed on in their wild state. I have seen Ben dig a foot 

 down into the ground and unearth a bulb that had not 

 yet started to send out its shoot. Later, when the time 

 came for the sarvis berries and huckleberries to ripen, 

 he would go about pulling down bushes, searching for 

 berries. And not once in the whole summer did I ever 

 see him pull down a bush that was not a berry bush. 

 This was the more remarkable because he would oc- 

 casionally examine berry bushes on which there hap- 

 pened to be no berries at the time. 



At our next camp we killed a small moose for meat, 

 and the hide was used during the remainder of the trip 



