40 



'Oh, Ranger!" 



as the male. Another human attribute, poets to the contrary! When 

 a bear is hungry he is cross. When he is full of "salad" he is sleepy ; 

 when he is eating he doesn't want to be bothered. So there you are ! 



One of the funniest things in the 

 world is a bear with a bottle of syrup. He 

 will act for all the world like a drunken 

 sailor, in full sail, as he wobbles about 

 trying to get the syrup out of the bottle 

 and into his mouth. The rangers at Se 

 quoia Park tell of a bear that stole a bottle 

 of vanilla from a camp and actually found 



^H^HHfe tne flavoring so potent that it interfered 

 6 in with his faculties. Trying to find his way 



home, this bear walked head on into a 

 two-thousand-year-old sequoia tree. Un 

 abashed, he tried to push the tree out of 

 the way. The sequoia stood pat, and it required some assistance from 

 the rangers to get the hilarious bear back on the trail again. 



Sagebrushers at Mammoth Auto Camp in Yellowstone awoke one 

 morning to find a bear sitting on the limb of a tree with his head caught 

 fast in a hole in the tree. He had attempted to steal the squirrels' winter 

 supply of nuts and bread crumbs, and in working his head around in 

 the hole probably caused his head to swell a little. Anyway he could 

 not get it out, and there he was on the limb of the tree with no chance 

 of extrication except with human help. A ranger climbed the tree and 

 got above the bear's head, and carefully chopped the hole larger, until 

 bruin toppled from the limb with a resounding bump. With a "woof, 

 woof," he was off through the timber. 



Occasionally tame bears are given to the rangers by people outside 

 the park who have raised them from tiny cubs. They either grow too 

 big for family pets or the people owning them wish to move and cannot 

 take their bears with them. About two years ago, a lady brought two 

 bears over to Yellowstone. They were four years old and big fellows, 

 one black, the other brown. She wanted them liberated in the park to 

 live happily until the natural end of their lives. We found, however, 

 that she had been too successful in taming them. They did not want to 

 be wild bears again. They were just like dogs. We had to build a pen 

 for them to keep them out of the lobby of the hotel, or from eating off 

 the dining-room tables. When winter came, the chief ranger built a 

 little log cabin in the pen for them to use for hibernation. It had one 

 small door in the end. One day while he was inside the cabin chinking 

 it to keep out wind and snow, one of the bears walked in, thus blocking 

 the door. It took the chief about half an hour to coax the bear to go 



