BATISTE THE BEAR HUNTER 235 



have not put the fear of man in the animal heart, the bear is the 

 aggressor. Even as I write comes word from a little frontier fur 

 post which I visited in 1901, of a seven-year-old boy being waylaid 

 and devoured by a grizzly only four miles back from a transconti- 

 nental railway. This is the second death from the unprovoked 

 attacks of bears within a month in that country — and that month, 

 the month of August, 1902, when sentimental ladies and gentle- 

 men many miles away from danger were sagely discussing whether 

 the bear is naturally ferocious or not — whether, in a word, it is 

 altogether humane to hunt bears} 



1 Since writing the above, I have just come back from eighteen weeks in the North 

 Country. In one camp, our cook-tent was cleaned out six nights out of seven by a bear. 

 On a fourteen-mile tramp down a mountain, on the peak of which we had slept for the night, 

 we met a black bear. I am not sure which of us retired the more quickly; for we had no 

 firearms; but the bear lay in the underbrush till we passed. That night he came down and 

 refused to be driven from the cook-tent. Firearms were forbidden in that National Park; 

 so we did the retiring — all of which does not seem to prove that bear life is becoming rapidly 

 extinct, certainly not in Jasper Park, where the intruder boldly posed for a flashlight photo- 

 graph. It gave me great satisfaction later to buy two black bear pelts. 



