Description and Distribution 67 



healthy and vigorous. There is no reason to suppose 

 that a free animal would not live at least as long as one 

 confined under unnatural conditions. 



In the case of the grizzly I have known and watched 

 for years an individual bear in his home mountains 

 that must have been more than twenty years old and 

 that was still in full vigor the last time I saw him. But 

 I have never happened to keep similar track of any 

 individual Black Bear in the open. I have, however, 

 never seen any Black Bear that looked as old as some 

 grizzlies I have seen. 



It is a curious fact that in twenty-seven years of 

 coming and going in the joint territory of the grizzly and 

 the Black Bear I have never once come upon the bones 

 or the carcass of a grizzly that had died a natural death. 

 I have, on the other hand, in dens and elsewhere, seen 

 many Black Bear carcasses and skeletons. Once, in 

 the Selkirks, in British Columbia, for instance, we back- 

 tracked a Black Bear to the winter den that it had 

 just left, and in this den we found the skeleton of an- 

 other Black Bear. The one that had wintered there 

 had raked the bones away and had made its bed along- 

 side of them. 



