118 THE LAND OF THE LION 
has been in the past, and still in the future, is likely to be 
much overstated. 
When we tell our tales of adventure by flood and field, 
if one has any gift of speech at all, the story is not likely 
to lose in the telling. No one can question facts or measure 
distances on the smoking-room floor. The length of 
shots is apt to increase with the years. The aspect of 
the charging heads to grow more, not less, formidable. 
To say as much is but to confess to one of the limitations 
of our common humanity. 
But apart from such perhaps excusable licence, multi- 
tudes of stories told in good faith by the actors in them 
are actually unreliable to the last degree, because these 
gentlemen have not known, or cared to know, the habits 
of the beasts in whose slaying they have won renown. 
Take our American grizzly bear, for instance: 
seems a point of honour, with everyone who has shot a 
grizzly, be he Western ranchman or sportsman who spends 
his occasional holiday in the Rockies, to help our one 
savage (so-called) animal to live up to, or rather, die up 
to, such a reputation that shall not lose by comparison 
with the king of beasts himself. 
This is ridiculous. When Lewis and Clark first 
saw and named our great gray bear, he had the country 
pretty much to himself. His only opponent was the ill- 
armed Indian, whose flint arrows could scarcely pierce 
the bear’s thick hide. “The bear was no use to the Indian, 
who naturally kept clear of him. Lewis and Clark, there- 
fore, found him a formidable animal enough, especially 
when compared with his smaller black cousin, who could 
be killed with a well-wielded axe. The men accompany- 
ing Lewis and Clark’s expedition were armed with the 
musket, a very inferior weapon, or the small bore rifle. 
These were not likely to kill, at one shot, the fine beasts 
which weighed eight hundred pounds or even more. 
