36 HUNTING THE GRISLY. 



ing his corn and melons. Its meat is good 

 and its fur often valuable ; and in its chase 

 there is much excitement, 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 diminished numbers, in the more 

 thinly settled portions of the country. One 

 of the standing riddles of American zoology 

 is the fact that the black bear, which is easier 

 killed and less prolific than the wolf, should 

 hold its own in the land better than the lat- 

 ter, this being directly the reverse of what 

 occurs in Europe, where the brown bear is 

 generally exterminated before 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 

 help of a single trailing dog. In Maine they 

 are as apt to kill moose and caribou as bear 

 and deer; but elsewhere the two last, with an 

 occasional cougar or wolf, are the beasts of 

 chase which they follow. Nowadays as these 

 old hunters die there is no one to take their 

 places, though there are still plenty of back- 

 woods settlers in all of the regions named who 

 do a great deal of hunting and trapping. Such 

 an old hunter rarely makes his appearance at 



