CHAPTER IV 

 BATISTE, THE BEAR HUNTER 



The city man, who goes bear-hunting with a bodyguard of 

 armed guides in a field where the hunted have been on the run 

 from the hunter for a century, gets a very tame idea of the natural 

 bear in its natural state. Bears that have had the fear of man 

 inculcated with long-range repeaters lose confidence in the prowess 

 of an aggressive onset against invisible foes. The city man comes 

 back from the wilds with a legend of how harmless bears have be- 

 come. In fact, he doesn't believe a wild animal ever attacks unless 

 it is attacked. He doubts whether the bear would go on its life- 

 long career of rapine and death, if hunger did not compel it, or if 

 repeated assault and battery from other animals did not teach 

 the poor bear the art of self-defence. 



Grizzly old trappers coming down to the frontier towns of the 

 Western States once a year for provisions, or hanging round the 

 forts of the Hudson's Bay Company in Canada for the summer, 

 tell a different tale. Their hunting is done in a field where human 

 presence is still so rare that it is unknown and the bear treats man- 

 kind precisely as he treats all other living beings from the moose 

 and the musk-ox to mice and ants — as fair game for his own 

 insatiable maw. 



Old hunters may be great spinners of yarns — "liars," the city 

 man calls them — but Montagnais, who squats on his heels round 

 the fur company forts on Peace River, carries ocular evidence in 

 the artificial ridge of a deformed nose that the bear which he slew 

 was a real one with an epicurean relish for that part of Indian 



223 



