OLD EPHRAIM, THE GRISLY BEAR. 71 



for she knocked it over with a hearty cuff, 

 either out of mere temper, or because she 

 thought her pain must be due to an unpro- 

 voked assault from one of her offspring. 

 The hunter then killed one of the cubs, and 

 the other two escaped. When bears are to- 

 gether and one is wounded by a bullet, but 

 does not see the real assailant, it often .alls 

 tooth and nail upon its comrade, apparently 

 attributing its injury to the latter. 



Bears are hunted in many ways. Some are 

 killed by poison ; but this plan is only prac- 

 tised by the owners of cattle or sheep who have 

 suffered from their ravages. Moreover, they 

 are harder to poison than wolves. Most often 

 they are killed in traps, which are sometimes 

 dead-falls, on the principle of the little figure- 

 4 trap familiar to every American country 

 boy, sometimes log-pens in which the animal 

 is taken alive, but generally huge steel gins. 

 In some states there is a bounty for the de- 

 struction of grislies ; and in many places their 

 skins have a market price, although much 

 less valuable than those of the black bear. 

 The men who pursue them for the bounty, or 

 for their fur, as well as the ranchmen who 

 regard them as foes to stock, ordinarily use 

 steel traps. The trap is very massive, need- 

 ing no small strength to set, and it is usually 

 chained to a bar or log of wood, which does 

 not stop the bear's progress outright, but 

 hampers and interferes with it, continually 

 catching in tree stumps and the like. The 

 animal when trapped makes off at once, bit- 



