124 The Black Bear 



we left these strings in position so as to save ourselves 

 the considerable trouble of running them a second time. 

 But the next night when we came to set up our cam- 

 eras we could not find the ends of the strings. There 

 had been two of them running to widely separated 

 points, each one hundred feet or so distant from 

 our look-out. And we could find neither of them. 

 Finally, I climbed to the seat in the tree to see if I 

 could find the other ends of the string, and discovered 

 that a Black Bear during our absence had been trying 

 our seat, and had pulled both strings in and left them 

 hopelessly snarled up among the branches. He had, 

 I suppose, found our scent on the tree, followed it up 

 to investigate, found the seat (a piece of board nailed 

 across two limbs), and having his curiosity aroused by 

 the strings, had pulled them in to see what was at the 

 other end. 



There was a fairly well-trodden bear trail that led 

 under this same tree, and that night, after we had 

 got things shipshape again, we had another amusing 

 object lesson in the ways of the Black Bear. We had 

 little more than got settled for our long wait for dusk 

 and the coming of the grizzlies, when we saw a lean 

 old Black Bear with one cub coming down the trail 

 toward our tree. When they got within thirty feet or 

 so of us the mother stopped, evidently seeing us. But 

 the cub kept on. Whereupon the mother called it 

 back and it sat down beside her. Then began one of 



