38 Hunting the Grisly 



black bear is a timid, cowardly animal, and 

 usually a vegetarian, though it sometimes 

 preys on the sheep, hogs, and even cattle of 

 the settler, and is very fond of raiding his corn 

 and melons. Its meat is good and its fur often 

 valuable; and in its chase there is much ex- 

 citement, and occasionally a slight spice of 

 danger, just enough to render it attractive; so 

 it has always been eagerly followed. Yet it 

 still holds its own, though in greatly dimin- 

 ished numbers, in the more thinly settled por- 

 tions of the country. One of the standing rid- 

 dles of American zoology is the fact that the 

 black bear, which is easier killed and less pro- 

 lific than the wolf, should hold its own in the 

 land better than the latter, this being directly 

 the reverse of what occurs in Europe, where 

 the brown bear is generally exterminated be- 

 fore the wolf. 



In a few wild spots in the East, in northern 

 Maine, for instance, here and there in the 

 neighborhood of the upper Great Lakes, in 

 the east Tennessee and Kentucky mountains 

 and the swamps of Florida and Mississippi, 

 there still lingers an occasional representative 

 of the old wilderness hunters. These men 

 live in log-cabins in the wilderness. They do 

 their hunting on foot, occasionally with the 



