go The Black Bear 



grizzly, where the mother sometimes weighs twice as 

 much as the Black Bear mother, the cubs are, if any- 

 thing, a trifle smaller at birth on the average. I have 

 never heard the matter explained, but it seems to me 

 that when we consider the yearly habits of the bear 

 they tend to suggest how this peculiar race-habit was 

 developed. A dog mother with three or four puppies, 

 weighing six or eight ounces apiece at birth, will eat 

 three huge meals a day and grow thin as a rail nursing 

 her hungry youngsters. What, then, would become of 

 a bear mother who had to nurse three or four cubs for 

 six weeks or two months, with never a meal at all, if 

 the cubs were born weighing five or six pounds? It 

 looks very much as though Nature, with her usual 

 skill at making both ends meet, had so arranged mat- 

 ters in the bear family that, as these animals devel- 

 oped the hibernating habit, the size of the cubs was 

 reduced in proportion to the reduced ability of the 

 mother to nourish them. And that three or four eight- 

 ounce cubs do not make any undue demands on the 

 resources of a three-hundred or four-hundred-pound 

 mother is proved by the fact that both she and they 

 are normally in excellent condition when they first 

 come out in the spring. 



