112 The Black Bear 



eyes but do not use them, I will give another little ad- 

 venture that we had toward the end of our stay in the 

 mountain. We had with us as camp keeper a man who 

 has lived most of his life in the Rockies, has hunted 

 bears all over that part of the country, and ought to 

 have been pretty well acquainted with the real nature 

 of them. I do not believe that with a gun in his hand 

 he would be afraid of anything that walks, but he had 

 evidently never investigated very closely into what 

 would happen to him when he had left his gun at home. 

 We had stopped over night at a public camp at a place 

 called Tower Falls, and after supper in the evening 

 Kerfoot and I, having seen a Black Bear at the edge 

 of a clearing, walked over to look at her. She was a 

 large animal and lay on the ground near the foot of a, 

 big pine tree, and a single cub sat on one of the low- 

 hanging branches above her head. We were talking 

 about our plans for the morrow and walked toward 

 the bear without thinking much about her one way or 

 the other. When we got within fifty feet or so of her 

 she backed up against the tree, and as we continued 

 to advance without noticing her especially, she first 

 stood up with her feet against the trunk and then 

 climbed up ten or fifteen feet from the ground, driving 

 her cub ahead of her. We walked up to the foot of the 

 tree and looked at her for a few minutes, and though 

 she stuck her upper lip out at us in the peculiar fashion 

 of her kind, she made no other demonstration, and 



