THE GRIZZLY BEAR 267 



game animals with the first ball. Army friends have 

 thus stopped grizzlies with this weapon, and I recall at 

 least five buffaloes which were dead when they struck 

 the ground or died instantly thereafter, having been 

 struck by my first bullet. The buffalo-bull which we 

 were taking into camp, as described in the chapter on 

 that animal, was killed with one shot from one of these 

 Springfield rifles. Here, as elsewhere, the man behind 

 the gun has much to do with the results; for my part, 

 however, I would much prefer to face a charging 

 grizzly with a double shotgun than with a very small- 

 gauge rifle. 



Mr. T. S. Van Dyke, who has had as much experience 

 in still-hunting deer as any sportsman in America, says 

 in an article on "Handling the Rifle on Game" that 

 " the old dispute between big-bores and small-bores is 

 meaningless now, because the most killing guns are the 

 high-velocity nitro-guns, which are all small-bore com- 

 pared with the black-powder guns. The best all-around 

 rifle is now the .30-calibre nitro, not because it will do 

 all that is claimed for it, but because it makes so much 

 flatter a line to everything within reasonable distance 

 than any black-powder gun can do." This article by 

 Mr. Van Dyke appeared in the same magazine* which 

 published the article by Mr. Kidder, who based what 

 he had to say upon experiments made with rifles of 

 different calibre on fourteen bears. Mr. Kidder evi- 

 dently does not regard the "dispute between big-bores 

 and small-bores" as "meaningless" when bears are 

 the game. 



Use smokeless powder, of course, on all game. It is 



* Outing. 



