170 The Grizzly Bear 



ever seen, he rounded a bend in the trail and his mighty 

 strides brought him directly in front of my first camera. 

 He did not stop, and I could not bring myself, for the 

 chance of getting two shots at him, to wait until he 

 reached the second camera. As I pulled the string, the 

 enormous beast seemed actually to go up in the air with 

 the flash. Then he bolted sideways, keeping his eyes on 

 the point from which the flash had come, and, paying no 

 attention to where he was going, he crashed into a tree 

 with low-hanging branches, and the noise of the impact 

 filled the forest. Then, like the rest, he stood up and 

 looked back, and then, still with many backward glances, 

 moved silently away. 



For a couple of nights now I had no luck. The bears 

 seemed to have taken to other trails, and, wishing to find 

 out in what part of the woods they were working, I per- 

 suaded a young doctor who was in the party to come out 

 with me and tend one of the cameras. I placed him and 

 his camera on a likely looking trail and stationed myself 

 some hundreds of yards away. I stretched the wire across 

 the trail at his post and also ran a string from the switch 

 to him, and I instructed him to watch in silence until a 

 bear should stop to examine the wire, and then to whistle 

 sharply, and, when the bear stood up at the sound, to pull 

 the string. In the meantime I asked him to keep a sharp 

 lookout that he might let me know later by what trails and 

 from what directions the bears had come up. 



The doctor had assured me that he was not in the 

 least afraid of bears, and for the first two hours he was as 

 good as his boast. I could watch him from my station. 

 Later on, however, as the sun neared the horizon and the 



